Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! | 
 enlarge | Author: Art Spiegelman
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 43863
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 72
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 14.1 x 10.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0375423958
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9780375423956
ASIN: 0375423958
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
For the last 40 years, comics artist Art Spiegelman has been influential in both pushing the limits of the medium, as well as bringing underground "comix” to the forefront of popular culture. He's perhaps most famous for Maus, the story of his parents' experience in the Holocaust, which earned him a special Pulitzer Prize Letters award in 1992. More recently, his work has appeared in the New Yorker--including the stunning, somber post-9/11 cover--and he was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2005. We sent him a few questions about Breakdowns, and he was kind enough to respond with this handwritten document. See the full image with more questions and answers. [JPEG, 389K]
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Breakthrough Book October 7, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
The real title of this book is "Portrait of The Artist as A Young...", but I have taken the artistic liberty to rename it, my reasons shall become clear.
Art Spiegelman is an amazing artist. He is also a tortured artist, ravaged by guilt, and yet, through his work (some of which is self therapy), his genius shines through. As is very clear in 'Breakdowns', this book celebrates the major themes and movements in his life. The suicide of his mother in 1968, the Auschwitz stories his father told, his exposure to Robert Crumb and the underground movement can all be found and traced through the art/text. Primarily a book designed to reprint 'Breakdowns', his 1978 poorly received collection, it is the addition of the pre-and post breakdown material that provides more solid glimpses into his psyche.
If you were to sit Mr Spiegelman down and ask him the question, what is art to him, this book would be your answer. If you were to ask him to plot the major influences in his life, the answer is this book. Ask him about his career as artist for Topps, and he just might not say anything, but everyone remembers those marvelous stickers. As him where Maus came from, he would direct you to the section of Breakdown after the Introduction, and then discuss his father and Uncle. If you were to ask him to lend you $50, the answer would probably be no.... However, as a piece of autobiographical illustrato, it is remarkable for its' passion and poignancy.
Considered a failure in 1978, 'Breakdown' led him to Maus. Today, this book is perfectly timed and a good companion piece to his Pulitzer prize winning tome, and should be considered a successful (if not odd), glimpse into the 'art' of Art.
Viewed as a collection of short stories we find delightful touches like 'Auto Destruction', Introduction, Maus, As the Mind Reels, A Little Passion, Prisioner on the Hell Planet (drawn in a woodcut style), and Ace Hole. Sure, they are for Adults Only as the book cover says, and now 'underground' is 'mainstream', and the 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young...' is a success.
Congratulations Mr Spiegelman. You were ahead of your time.
Tim Lasiuta
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