Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
Amazing artist Art Spiegelman is. He is a guilt-ravaged artist who is likewise tormented, but his creativity still comes through in his creations. The main themes and motions in his life are celebrated in this book, as is abundantly obvious in “Breakdowns.” The art and writing all reference his mother’s suicide in 1968, his father’s memories of Auschwitz, his encounters with Robert Crumb, and the underground movement. The pre-and post-breakdown material adds more substantial peeks into his psyche. Breakdowns, his poorly received collection from 1978, was the main focus of this book, which was primarily intended to reproduce it.
Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
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- 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.
All of Art’s work from the 1970s, when he began seriously challenging preconceived conceptions about what comics as a narrative genre might accomplish, is collected in one collection. The majority of the comics in Breakdowns are modernist or avant-garde in style. They challenge the rules of time, space, and causality, very early on raising the standard for comics. But until recently, when the Pantheon edition was released, many people were unaware of Breakdowns. It is a compilation of various tales, one of which is a three-page adaptation of “Maus.”
In this 2008 autobiographical update, Art Spiegelman uses his 1978 deluxe large-format album “Breakdowns” as the focal point to simultaneously expand and contract his worldview through the medium that both affected him and the generation of his fans he influenced. As a result, the shape and meaning are kaleidoscopic.
