Everything in Breakdowns—the style, the tone, the narration, and the content—is unsettled and uncertain. There is blood. There is porn. There is pastiche. There is fiction. There is fact. There is low art chasing after high. There is Rex Morgan's head mixing it up with assorted comic bottoms, and a Bambi-esque deer perilously close to Picasso's bulls. The only constant is the figure of Spiegelman—depressed, mustachioed, and tormented in turn by the ghosts of Freud, Goya, Kafka, Picasso, Lewis Carroll, Henny Youngman, Little Nemo, Dick Tracy, and his own mother. In this uncombed mess of artistic ambition you can see strands of Spiegelman's grand story sticking out awkwardly.

For instance, in 1973 Spiegelman drew a Rube Goldberg-like cartoon called "Auto-Destructo: Suicide Device," involving a cat, a mouse, a man, and a copy of Munch's "The Scream." The suicide machine is set in motion when the man realizes the futility of the device he's part of and so the futility of all existence ("Oy Veh!" he cries).