Breakdowns has 17 strips or sketches in it. Among these are “Zip-a-tunes and Moiré Melodies,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Ace Hole, Midget Detective” and “Little Signs of Passion.” Each of these stories is explained within the pages of the book’s afterward. The four mentioned above do very imaginative things such as mimic Picasso’s modern art (as in “Ace Hole”) or using non-sequitur images throughout a story (as in “Little Signs of Passion”). I do not believe I can do them due diligence in this review to explain and analyze them fully. Instead, I want to quote Spiegelman who explains “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” in the book’s afterward: “[D]rawn over several months in 1973, and physically as well as conceptually at the center of Breakdowns, [this story] was the result of my wrestling match with Cubism. [. . .] It refracted space into panel-sized facets, froze time, and unmoored words from pictures, all with the subject matter as dynamic as a bowl of fruit. Like much of my work, it was dismissed by some readers as depressing. The comment depressed me.” Straddling what he calls the High-Low art fence, this strip and others helped to reshape the boundary of graphic novels and their forms. Spiegelman’s work transformed comics from a childhood pastime to an adult form. These strips moved some “underground” comics away from self-indulgent psychedelic journeys of the artist’s sexual and chemical appetites to works that could use art and artistry more seriously to make profound statements about society, history, and psychological.
One of the most significant examples of this shift is “Maus,” the earliest comic in the collection. As a concept — imaging Jews as mice living, dying, and surviving the Holocaust —“Maus” succeeds alone. As a comic, “Maus” outlines the future potential for cathartic, familial mourning that his later masterpiece will attempt. Much like the “Li’l Pitcher” strip already discussed, the father now as a mouse tells his son about a traitorous Jew who turns over other Jews to the Nazis. Unlike the graphic novel which centers on Artie’s oral history project with his father, Vladek, this shorter version of “Maus” is framed as a bedtime story. “Mickey” (Maus), the son, is naïve and oblivious to the trauma underlying the story. For example, when the father explains how the “mice” were all corralled in the ghetto, Mickey’s response is “Golly!” At the end of the story after he reaches the climax of this bedtime tale — regarding their exodus to Mauschwitz — the father sobs, “I can tell you no more now . . . I can tell you no more . . . It’s time to go to sleep, Mickey!”. Mickey’s reaction appears as blissful ignorance: he is on his way to sleep and replies to his father, “Uh-huh … G’night Poppa!”. Spiegelman’s framing the strip as a bedtime story conveys the generational disconnection between trauma survivors and their offspring. Indeed, Mickey and Poppa may play out the rest of the story with similar results; we see a similar trans-generational fragmentation play out throughout the two-volume Maus. The major difference between this version in Breakdowns and the longer version in Maus is Spiegelman’s insistence on character. Poppa and Mickey and other Jews never break character as mice; there are no mice masks which appear upon Artie’s face as the novel progresses in Maus. Reading “Maus” without such masks, without the true life father-son dynamic reminds us that Breakdowns is really about breaking through, about trying to find a voice and form to represent the repressed mind.
Overall, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@§! is a great book that offers for artists, fans, and/or intellectuals an experience into the earlier works of a master. Seeing his postmodern break from tradition, readers can appreciate the innovation that this work and others by Spiegelman spurned in future comic artists. As a teacher and critic, this collection is invaluable for it offers a glimpse into the creative process and thematic foundation of one of America’s most significant and important contemporary writers. To close let me borrow Spiegelman’s ending sentences in the afterward; he writes, “I’m glad to see Breakdowns get a new spin around the block, now that comics are thriving while the rest of America turns to shit. The discoveries I made while working on the strips in that book have somehow been absorbed by those interested in stretching the boundaries of comics of the past thirty years [. . .] As a result, some may look at Breakdowns as a mere artifact of its time. But for me, it’s a manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note and a still-relevant love letter to a medium I adore.” Ditto for this reviewer.
Images [©2008 Art Spiegelman]
Tags: Art Speigelman, Breakdowns
