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alivemagdolene) wrote2009-03-03 07:45 am
alivemagdolene) wrote2009-03-03 07:45 am
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Book-It 'o9! Book #6
More of the Fifty Books Challenge! This is another library request; brand new from Art Spiegelman.
Title: Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman.
Details: Copyright 2008, Pantheon
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): BREAKDOWNS, the legendary and long out-of-print 1978 collection of comics by art spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of MAUS, presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Innovative, serious, funny, and many decades ahead of its time, the book is presented here in its entirety... along with an introduction almost as long as the book it introduces that's as autobiographically intimate and experimentally daring as everything else in Breakdowns.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I saw "graphic novel" and "Art Spiegelman" and that was enough for me.
How I Liked It: This is as close as Spiegelman is going to get to a memoir/autobiography. The book is hailed as a "reprint" of, as it states, a fairly underground 1978 collection of his work. But the real meat of it is in the introduction and the afterword. Told through illustration, family photos, and early sketches of pieces that appear in the reprinted collection in the center of the book (including the absolutely brilliant Prisoner on Hell Planet that's referenced in Maus), Spiegelman takes us through his life in art from his father unwittingly giving him banned comics (only because they were far cheaper than the ones he was spending his allowance on) to a teenaged Spiegelman desperately pleading for a local newspaper to publish his works (only to get the humiliating headline Budding Artist Wants Attention) to his years in college where he met arguably the heaviest influence on his work, Ken Jacobs (experimental filmmaker and founder of the Cinema dept. at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton, where he later became a professor and then a distinguished professor) who encourages him not to be such a "slob-snob" and to "just see the paintings as giant comics panels!" therefore suggesting to young Spiegelman he "see myself as some sort of an artist!"
Spiegelman opens his "introduction" with a vignette of his childhood, making art from scribbles with his mother. If Maus was veined with Spiegelman's relationship with his father, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is Spiegelman's remembrance of his mother: stories of her (as well as to a much lesser degree his father) and her impact on his art from buying him seminal MADD Magazine to the chilling inspiration to purge himself somehow after blocking out her suicide for four years after the fact (which lead to Prisoner on Hell Planet). Most poignant is possibly his recollection of her noting "You know, Artie... Maybe it's better to not be a genius... After all, geniuses lead such troubled lives!"
Onto the reprinted comic book!
I'm not generally a fan of "art" comics. Notice I say "comics". And Speigelman proclaims R. Crumb (someone who while I appreciate as a founder of the underground comics movement, I still think is a misogynist shithead) an influence, trying to imitate him and others with "the most disturbing images I can think up, and they at least disturbed Crumb's then wife, Dana, enough to bar me from ever again visiting her home."
The comics within are bizarre, surreal (his mission was accomplished), very dated, and obvious of his use of LSD that he admits was a frequent inspiration at the time.
I didn't read this book for the touted rare, out-of-print collection of his early work located within, I read it for the introduction (almost as long as the book it introduces, as promised by the back cover) and the afterword which is basically an extension of sorts of the introduction. The book within a book was really as relevant to me as any of his old work that he scatters throughout the introduction and afterword with: a look into his early work. I think that the book within a book really can only be evaluated today as just an example of Speigelman's early work; it's far too dated (and he's too famous in the genre) for it to stand alone.
An amazing, touching (ew, but true) autobiography and further look into the mind of one of the most influential artists of our time.
Notable: Spiegelman reveals he came up with the concept for Maus (which started as a three page strip), the idea of cats as the oppressors (and eventual Nazis) and mice as the oppressed (and eventual Jews) by sitting in on a film class of Ken Jacobs's, wherein Jacobs proclaims that the "Jazz-age Mickey Mouse is just Al Jolson with big ears!" and other cartoon anthropomorphic animals of the period bear many similarities to minstrel show caricatures.
Speigelman is struck suddenly with an idea for a comic: race in America. He envisions cats with burning crosses and lynched mice. "Ku Klux Kats!" he exclaims, following his train of thought aloud. A black student hears him and turns with an angry/confused look which Speigelman responds to with an embarrassed smile and a nervous peace sign. Speigelman then realizes he knows "bupkis about being black in America" and then "Hitler's notion of Jews as vermin offered a metaphor closer to home."
Why I find this notable is Jacobs's theory which spawns Maus. The Mickey Mouse of the '20s and 30's and his ilk certainly do resemble minstrel characters. Walt Disney is surrounded by notorious (and well-founded) rumors of racism. Did he deliberately try to turn an insidious racial caricature into a beloved cartoon icon, therefore helping establish some sort of Aryan brotherhood to an unsuspecting American public? I don't think so. However, well known racist stereotypes (even for their respective periods) abound in his films/cartoons/franchise (an interesting article, although not particularly relevant to the question at hand, is Cracked's collection of The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters, and no, they don't all occur in a pre-civil rights era). Of course, Disney wasn't the only one producing cartoons with animal characters that looked just a little too much like minstrel show performers. So... is this yet another instance of something from childhood souring to find it has a different meaning? Were the anthropomorphic creatures that populated early cartoons in film really just slight variations on racist caricatures? It's certainly food for thought.
"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filthy-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!"
---newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930s
Title: Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman.
Details: Copyright 2008, Pantheon
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): BREAKDOWNS, the legendary and long out-of-print 1978 collection of comics by art spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of MAUS, presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Innovative, serious, funny, and many decades ahead of its time, the book is presented here in its entirety... along with an introduction almost as long as the book it introduces that's as autobiographically intimate and experimentally daring as everything else in Breakdowns.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I saw "graphic novel" and "Art Spiegelman" and that was enough for me.
How I Liked It: This is as close as Spiegelman is going to get to a memoir/autobiography. The book is hailed as a "reprint" of, as it states, a fairly underground 1978 collection of his work. But the real meat of it is in the introduction and the afterword. Told through illustration, family photos, and early sketches of pieces that appear in the reprinted collection in the center of the book (including the absolutely brilliant Prisoner on Hell Planet that's referenced in Maus), Spiegelman takes us through his life in art from his father unwittingly giving him banned comics (only because they were far cheaper than the ones he was spending his allowance on) to a teenaged Spiegelman desperately pleading for a local newspaper to publish his works (only to get the humiliating headline Budding Artist Wants Attention) to his years in college where he met arguably the heaviest influence on his work, Ken Jacobs (experimental filmmaker and founder of the Cinema dept. at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton, where he later became a professor and then a distinguished professor) who encourages him not to be such a "slob-snob" and to "just see the paintings as giant comics panels!" therefore suggesting to young Spiegelman he "see myself as some sort of an artist!"
Spiegelman opens his "introduction" with a vignette of his childhood, making art from scribbles with his mother. If Maus was veined with Spiegelman's relationship with his father, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is Spiegelman's remembrance of his mother: stories of her (as well as to a much lesser degree his father) and her impact on his art from buying him seminal MADD Magazine to the chilling inspiration to purge himself somehow after blocking out her suicide for four years after the fact (which lead to Prisoner on Hell Planet). Most poignant is possibly his recollection of her noting "You know, Artie... Maybe it's better to not be a genius... After all, geniuses lead such troubled lives!"
Onto the reprinted comic book!
I'm not generally a fan of "art" comics. Notice I say "comics". And Speigelman proclaims R. Crumb (someone who while I appreciate as a founder of the underground comics movement, I still think is a misogynist shithead) an influence, trying to imitate him and others with "the most disturbing images I can think up, and they at least disturbed Crumb's then wife, Dana, enough to bar me from ever again visiting her home."
The comics within are bizarre, surreal (his mission was accomplished), very dated, and obvious of his use of LSD that he admits was a frequent inspiration at the time.
I didn't read this book for the touted rare, out-of-print collection of his early work located within, I read it for the introduction (almost as long as the book it introduces, as promised by the back cover) and the afterword which is basically an extension of sorts of the introduction. The book within a book was really as relevant to me as any of his old work that he scatters throughout the introduction and afterword with: a look into his early work. I think that the book within a book really can only be evaluated today as just an example of Speigelman's early work; it's far too dated (and he's too famous in the genre) for it to stand alone.
An amazing, touching (ew, but true) autobiography and further look into the mind of one of the most influential artists of our time.
Notable: Spiegelman reveals he came up with the concept for Maus (which started as a three page strip), the idea of cats as the oppressors (and eventual Nazis) and mice as the oppressed (and eventual Jews) by sitting in on a film class of Ken Jacobs's, wherein Jacobs proclaims that the "Jazz-age Mickey Mouse is just Al Jolson with big ears!" and other cartoon anthropomorphic animals of the period bear many similarities to minstrel show caricatures.
Speigelman is struck suddenly with an idea for a comic: race in America. He envisions cats with burning crosses and lynched mice. "Ku Klux Kats!" he exclaims, following his train of thought aloud. A black student hears him and turns with an angry/confused look which Speigelman responds to with an embarrassed smile and a nervous peace sign. Speigelman then realizes he knows "bupkis about being black in America" and then "Hitler's notion of Jews as vermin offered a metaphor closer to home."
Why I find this notable is Jacobs's theory which spawns Maus. The Mickey Mouse of the '20s and 30's and his ilk certainly do resemble minstrel characters. Walt Disney is surrounded by notorious (and well-founded) rumors of racism. Did he deliberately try to turn an insidious racial caricature into a beloved cartoon icon, therefore helping establish some sort of Aryan brotherhood to an unsuspecting American public? I don't think so. However, well known racist stereotypes (even for their respective periods) abound in his films/cartoons/franchise (an interesting article, although not particularly relevant to the question at hand, is Cracked's collection of The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters, and no, they don't all occur in a pre-civil rights era). Of course, Disney wasn't the only one producing cartoons with animal characters that looked just a little too much like minstrel show performers. So... is this yet another instance of something from childhood souring to find it has a different meaning? Were the anthropomorphic creatures that populated early cartoons in film really just slight variations on racist caricatures? It's certainly food for thought.
"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filthy-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!"
---newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930s