Breakdowns : Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (Hardcover - Revised Ed.)
by Art Spiegelman
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Overview
The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus" explores the comics form...and how it formed him
This book opens with "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&* ," creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son.
The second part presents a facsimile of "Breakdowns," the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. "Breakdowns" established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of "Maus," cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective."
Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, "Breakdowns" alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.
Used Book Partners offer 36 copies
Related Categories:
Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Literary
- ISBN-13: 9780375423956
- ISBN-10: 0375423958
- Publisher: Pantheon Books
- Date: October 2008
- Page Count: 72
Customer Reviews
Publishers Weekly® Reviews
- Reviewed in: Publishers Weekly, page 51.
- Review Date: 2008-09-15
- Reviewer: Staff
This reprint of Spiegelman’s 1978 collection of comics is a must-have for any comics aficionado, art-house dude, hipster or anyone who ever thought to himself, “Hmm, comics are kinda cool.” It will also be liked by anyone who ever enjoyed Kafka or anything postmodern enough to be in McSweeney’s. There’s still enough here for regular people to enjoy, too. The 30-page memoirish introduction, all done in comics (in which we get to see Spiegelman mess up his son’s mind the way his was messed up) explains how comics came to be the shining light for so many messed-up adolescent boys: “Mad warped a generation in the bland American 1950s—something that’s been done before, but possibly not so well.” The early comics are a revelation. Spiegelman gives us the story that led to Maus, and we see how he evolved from an R. Crumb–loving artist with neuroses pertaining to The Dick Van Dyke Show to a tight storyteller of anxious, modern folktales. One of the functions of the artist is to take us to hell and get us out in one piece. Spiegelman’s early trips into hallucinatory darkness do this. We come out in one piece; it’s not clear he did. (Oct.)
- ISBN-13: 9780375423956
- ISBN-10: 0375423958
- Publisher: Pantheon Books
- Date: October 2008
- Page Count: 72