The figure of a spiral line leaps into Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (2008). I propose Spiegelman’s spiral as an emblem for the comics form, which underlines its plastic “being” or ontology as continuous transformation and co-mixing. I then move to situate Spiegelman’s comics form in relation to larger, longer histories of modernist aesthetics. Reading the resonances of Spiegelman’s spiral backward through twentieth-century literature and the visual arts suggests his pages as cells of modernist formal experiment after modernism. Finally, I switch back to (re)examine Spiegelman’s spiral as a ploy for his Mom’s attention, not MoMA’s. The form of Spiegelman’s spiral may be an abstract line, but it cannot be purified of the context of its autobiographical origins in a scene of mother–child play. Here the spiral’s dynamic form morphs to embody the continual oscillation in Spiegelman’s work between filiation and affiliation. In this dialectical spiral of filiation–affiliation–filiation, Spiegelman’s work recalls Edward Said’s account of modernism, which offers us new grounds for situating the cartoonist in a modernist lineage.