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  • Published: 4 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241463925
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 72
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Breakdowns




From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, a candid glimpse into the dark recesses of an artist's troubled mind.

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.

  • Published: 4 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241463925
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 72
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

About the author

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker, and co-founder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honours he has received for Maus include the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City.

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Praise for Breakdowns

Close students and fans of Spiegelman's work view Breakdowns as a sort of Rosetta Stone that offers a master key to his intricate and varied visual idiom, revealing his enormous and often overlooked range as an artist

New York Times