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(Real) Life in a Speech Balloon
Steven Heller
Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist As a Young %@&*! Pantheon Books |
Before reviewing this new edition of Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman’s first anthology of autobiographical and experi- mental comics originally published in 1978, I must disclose that Spiegelman and I have been friends since the late ’60s. We both contributed to underground newspapers, The East Village Other and The New York Ace, and later, as The New York Times Op-Ed page art director, I commissioned him to do the first ever comic strip on the page and maybe in the entire newspaper (though as a concession to the Times’ editorial bias against comics, it was wordless). I also shamefully admit that when Spiegelman told me he was working on a comic about his parents’ life in Auschwitz, I suggested he was crazy to tackle such a sensitive subject using anthropomorphic animals, particularly Jews as mice (since the Nazis relentlessly referred to Jews as vermin). Nonetheless my wife, the former art director of Pantheon Books, was partly responsible for getting Maus published after it had already been turned down by Pantheon only a year earlier. So any “objective” review of Spiegelman’s out-of-print classic might reasonably be suspect.
Yet back in the late ’60s, despite my respect for Spiegelman’s talents and my avid interest in underground comics, I failed to accept the medium as anything more than a low popular art. Comics might have been more meaningful to my generation of misfits than the paintings of Picasso or Klee but were not, nor ever would be, art for the ages. Breakdowns changed all that—in particular the comic strip titled “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (1972) about the suicide of Anna, Spiegelman’s Holocaust-survivor mother. I was weaned on hilariously ribald, drug-induced, anti-establishment comics by R. Crumb, Kim Deitch and Gilbert Shelton but was unprepared for Spiegelman’s heart- and mind-wrenching confessional laced with biting humor and cut with sharp introspection. What’s more, he was so secretive I didn’t even know at the time that he was the child of survivors.
Rendered in a black and white scratchboard technique, evocative of the German Expressionists and the picture novels of Lynd Ward, Otto Nuckel and Frans Masereel in the 1920s and 1930s, the first panel includes a vintage photograph of 10-year-old Artie posing with his mother in a bathing suit, which segues into a drawn self-portrait of a gaunt Spiegelman in prison garb (referring to his brief stay as a teenager in a state mental hospital) with the speech balloon: “In 1968 my mother killed herself...she left no note!” The sequence of panels of the funeral later in the strip, with Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, splayed on the coffin tortuously wailing “ANNA ANNA ANNA,” left me in tears when I first read it and still has the same effect after so many years. But the last frames remain the most haunting: From behind prison bars, Spiegelman chides his mother: “Well, mom, if you’re listening...Congratulations! You’ve committed the perfect crime. You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!”
Until this strip, underground comics were primarily outrageous, derisive and raucous attacks on puritanical and puerile comic book conventions imposed by the infamous Comics Code Authority (the industry’s self-regulatory body) on the comics publishers during the McCarthy era. It was an attempt to preempt congressional interference and protect malleable American youth from the corrosive amorality of sex and violence and all things evil. Busting these taboos was both virtue and reward. But Breakdowns taught me that comics artists were more than just heirs to Lenny Bruce’s insurgent legacy; comics were a means of telling psychologically layered stories, both fiction and fact, raw and sophisticated, visual and literary that transcended slapstick comedy or sentimental romance. Spiegelman was in the vanguard (if not the vanguard) of the revolution that was about to occur. The great comics master Will Eisner had already produced some autobiographical “graphic novels” about his life as a Jew in New York, but Spiegelman allowed himself to be even more emotionally stripped bare.
Although it was not his intent, Breakdowns, with its formal and conceptual experiments in what Spiegelman calls “commix” (as in a co-mixture of word and image), became a kind of manual for a future generation as well as his own hothouse. An initially stiffer iteration of Maus was published in Breakdowns, which as it turned out forced Spiegelman to refine and loosen his style. He admits that had he not reduced his rendering to a more simplified shorthand he would never have been able to complete his two-volume opus. Moreover, his final Maus was a lot less cartoony than the original.
For anyone who has followed Spiegelman’s career, Breakdowns is a unique entrée to the developing work of a decidedly skilled practitioner who was finding his voice(s) while fine-tuning his art. Yet what is most extraordinary (and I use that word because Spiegelman never ceases to surprise me; he avoids resting on his laurels, he never seems to stagnate and is always pushing his medium) is the new introductory comic strip essay that taps his sense of history and love of style. In this masterpiece of autobiographical concision he sets the stage for the vintage work to follow, while examining his own highly developed neuroses. Each “chapter” of this comic, representing a different aspect of his artistic and emotional development, is produced in a manner and technique that draws from his total obsession with comics and his commitment to raise its cultural currency. His more conventional afterword fills in the empty spaces in the introduction with biographical details and publishing history. For instance, Breakdowns would not have been published at all, Spiegelman explains, had it not been for Jeff Rund: “A purveyor of fine bondage and pornography books, who had just published a Crumb anthology, generously came to my rescue, explaining to a resistant printer: ‘I don’t understand two-thirds of the shit in this book, but anyone who could do that Maus strip and the thing about his mother’s suicide deserves a break.’” The rest is history.
Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at The School of Visual Arts in New York and the author of more than 100 books on design, most recently, Iron Fists: Branding the Twentieth Century Totalitarian State.