DESPITE THE LACK of whiskers, upright ears and fleshy tail, the real-life Art
Spiegelman looks remarkably like his self-portraits in Maus - the
groundbreaking comic-book memoir of his father's experiences in Auschwitz,
in which Jews are mice and Nazis cats. The waistcoat, the permanent
cigarette, the thick, expressive eyebrows - they're all present and correct,
as Spiegelman scuttles around his Manhattan studio (in a not entirely
un-mouselike way) attempting simultaneously to have his picture taken, field
phone calls, and tell me about his new book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the
Artist as a Young %@&*!. Ashtrays overflow with pencil-shavings, back
issues of Tales of the Incredible and Humbug line the shelves, and early
newspaper “funnies” cover the walls. It's the lair of a man who has devoted
his life's work to comics: reading, analysing, editing and making.
It's difficult to overstate the importance of Spiegelman's Maus, published in
two volumes in 1986 and 1992. Combining past - his father's traumatic
survival of the war in Poland - and present - the fraught relationship
between bitter, damaged dad and progressive cartoonist son, it mixed
autobiographical honesty with sophisticated narrative tricks. And by
transforming its characters into animals, it allowed the reader to approach
its horribly inhuman events while forcing him to re-imagine them. Maus
converted a huge swath of readers to the possibilities of the form,
convinced booksellers to adopt the weighty term “graphic novel”, and earned
Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize.
Readers of Maus who stumble across Breakdowns might be surprised: instead of
history rendered in thick, unfussy lines, they'll find a collection of
dreams, essays and surreal short stories in a wild patchwork of styles,
populated by jesters with penis-hats, midget detectives and the ghost of
Picasso.
Breakdowns is a complicated book. At its centre is a reprint of the original
Breakdowns - a long-out-of-print anthology of Spiegelman's work, first
published in 1978. This is sandwiched between an autobiographical cartoon
strip introduction and a prose afterword that put the book in context,
summing it up as “a manifesto, a diary, and a still-relevant love letter to
the medium I adore”.
Spiegelman's love affair with comics began with a single image: Breakdowns
shows him, aged 7, staring at the grotesquely ugly cartoon cover girl of MAD
magazine, on a New York drugstore rack in 1955. Spiegelman, who speaks in
rapid, articulate bursts, remembers the moment clearly: “This picture was
such a conundrum,” he recalls, waving his cigarette excitedly. “It was the
cover of a lowly comic book, showing you a beautiful girl who was utterly
monstrous, in a collage that made it look like Life magazine. That's an
incredibly subversive picture. I'd seen Donald Duck and Little Lulu, but MAD
is the one that ruined my life.”
Five years later the purchase of a cartooning kit sealed the deal. His parents
were naively indulgent of his new obsession: his thrifty father bought him a
cheap job-lot of comics - not realising that they were the lurid, violent,
sexual type that had escaped the Comics Code Authority censors. “Aged 14 I
even conned them into letting me have a subscription to Playboy,” Spiegelman
grins, “because it had started running a strip by Harvey Kurtzman [the
founder of MAD]. My mother was aware that she didn't get the culture, and
that was fine - she changed her mind when I started putting the centrefolds
up in my room.”
While studying to be a commercial artist at the High School of Art and Design
in Manhattan, he was offered a shot at a syndicated comic strip, featuring
the Mad Hatter and a Kafkaesque talking cockroach. Told to draw up two
weeks' worth of “dailies”, he never completed the assignment. “Somewhere
into the second week, I thought, ‘This is like being offered a tomb'.” More
attractive was the countercultural attitude of The East Village Other, and
Spiegelman approached the editor, who wanted strips about sex and drugs. “I
knew little about either, so I enrolled at Harpur College, New York State,
and set out to find out about both while dodging the draft.”
His studies didn't get much of a look-in: when he wasn't working
professionally for Topps, where he created trading cards and stickers
(including, many years later, the phenomenally popular Garbage Pail Kids),
Spiegelman was embracing the hippie scenes of New York and San Francisco.
But artistically he had hit a psychedelic plateau, and it wasn't until he
met the artist Robert Crumb that his passion was reignited. “Crumb had just
had a life-changing LSD trip, and his sweetness had been curdled into
knobbly-kneed, cross-hatched, gritty cartoons - a direct contrast to the
prevailing ‘less is more' aesthetic. He was so clearly light years ahead of
anybody else.”
Spiegelman took “a giant step sideways and backwards” as he tried to integrate
what he'd learnt from Crumb. Initially that took the form of rampant
taboo-breaking. Crumb and his peers were risqué but Spiegelman's portrayals
of patricide and necrophilia disturbed Crumb's wife so much that she barred
him from her home. In 1968, aged 20, he wound up in a mental hospital: he
told the doctors that it was a bad trip, but he was really suffering from
what he describes as “twisted brain passages”. Soon after returning home,
his mother committed suicide: his father found her in the bath, her wrists
slashed. There was no note. Then Spiegelman was kicked out of college.
Broken down, Spiegelman began to build himself back up. He befriended a
professor who showed him how to look at “art that didn't have speech
bubbles”. He stopped using marijuana and LSD. And in San Francisco he met
Justin Green, whose Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary opened his eyes
to the possibility that confessional autobiography could be subject matter
for comics.
This discovery led to two breakthrough strips in 1972, both included in
Breakdowns: the original three-page Maus, drawn for a magazine called Funny
Aminals, and Prisoner on the Hell Planet, the story of his mother's suicide,
drawn after a sudden onrush of memory. With its intense scratchboard
drawings, inspired by German Expressionism, and a panel structure that
forced emotional and chronological shifts, Hell Planet marked a real
departure - especially when placed next to Spiegelman's previous piece: a
four-page story about a talking turd, called Just a Piece o' Shit.
Around this time, Spiegelman's definition of comics was expanding. “I had the
amazing - to me - insight that comics are a narrative medium, but a
narrative is a story, which comes from the Latin historia, referring to the
horizontal rows of a building - and that comes from those early
painted-glass comics that were used in churches to tell the superhero story
of that guy who could walk on water. I was ultimately obsessed by comic
structure.”
That revelation plays itself out in the other avant-garde strips of
Breakdowns, which experiment with time, space, repetition and art theory to
witty and often disorienting effect. Unlike ephemeral newspaper strips, they
demand re-reading. Thus Spiegelman found himself breaking the one taboo left
standing: for the cartoonist “to call himself an artist and call his medium
an art form”.
Breakdowns was published to a resounding silence. Although Spiegelman was
deeply disappointed, it was, ironically, this lack of interest that led to
his masterpiece. Conceding that people respond to narrative and not
structure, he took all the things he'd learnt while writing Breakdowns and
“spun them in reverse” to make the 300-page Maus.
Spiegelman maintains that Breakdowns did have a trickle-down influence on
artists. Some, such as the Eisner Award-winning cartoonist,Paul Karasik, put
it more strongly: “Breakdowns is the Citizen Kane of modern comics,” he
writes. “It changed the way cartoonists built comics.”
Since then Spiegelman has worked for The New Yorker (where his wife Françoise
Mouly is art editor), produced the haunting book In the Shadow of No Towers
(inspired by watching the Twin Towers fall) and made several comics for
children, most recently the Dr Seuss-like Jack and the Box for Mouly's Toon
Books imprint. Creating comics, though, is a fraught, painful process, and
he is often tempted to retreat into his other work: writing, teaching,
editing, illustration.
But comics are Spiegelman's calling, whether or not he likes or understands
it. “At the end of this book tour I'm terrified by what I face, because I
don't know what's next. But I keep getting pulled back to comics - I figure
it's the best use of me. Other people can draw, or write, or edit better
than me ... but nobody can do comics wrong the way I can.”
Click on the multimedia link above to see a gallery of images
Art Spiegelman appears at the ICA, London SW1, tomorrow and Monday (ica.org.uk;
020 7930 3647)
Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art
Spiegelman
Viking, £20; 72pp Buy
the book
