That strip broke up space in a similar way to how the cubists did. I think with Breakdowns, I created a fruitful dialogue. If you don’t understand a comic, you assume the artist is stupid.

Why is it that, if you go into a museum and you don’t understand a painting, you assume you’re stupid. And the particular things that make the reader work. I’m talking about something rarified: the grammar of comics. In that way, I think that In the Shadow has more in common, stylistically, with Breakdowns than with Maus. And when I did Maus, I started to think, “Well, maybe you do need a story.” Then came September 11, and when I started writing In the Shadow, it’s narrative what was going through my own head, and it wasn’t neat and orderly. When I first did Breakdowns, no one had a clue that comics could be anything more than something silly you gulp down with your morning coffee, or at best, contemplate with your morning joint, and throw out. When I was drawing it, I found myself often referring to Breakdowns, the collection of my early comics that I first released in 1978.

That was really a practice in disorientation, making the reader run around, intentionally making the narrative for difficult in order to slow down perception. Riptide: With that, tell me how you came to re-release Breakdowns.ĪS: It was when I was working on In the Shadow of no Towers, my comic on living in New York after 9/11. But I should be grateful: when Breakdowns first came out, I couldn’t get a wino to read it if I bribed him with a bottle of brandy. I think that’s why women have more than one baby-they always forget what going through labor is really like. But it always takes long enough between books that I forget what the publicity tours are like. After the jump, the artist tells how the publicity game is like giving birth, how is career is like that of a one-hit blues musician, and three questions we're glad we didn't ask him.Īrt Spiegelman: Whenever I have a new book out, I feel like Willy Lohman, packing all my wares into a leather suitcase and going out on the road. Riptide caught Spiegelman at a Boston hotel in between university talks. He'll be speaking on Saturday, November 15th, at 11:45 AM at Miami-Dade College's Chapman Conference Center, and 2:45 that same day at PEN, and on November 16th at 1 PM at the Target Children's Stage. So don't try to say Spiegelman isn't eclectic. The second is Jack and the Box, an early-reader comic book for his wife, Francoise Mouly's, publishing imprint, Toon Books. The first is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young a re-release of a collection of his early comics. The artist who created the hugely popular Holocaust comic tome Maus is here touting two new works. Art Spiegelman- the Michael Jordan of literary comics- headlines this year's book fair.

Jack in the box art spiegelman