The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form...and how it formed
him! **In a new flexibound format with an updated afterword** 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. 'Art Spiegelman is the single most important comic
creator' Alan Moore
