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.
