Art Spiegelman Friday, Nov. 7, at Politics and Prose

Readers who know Art Spiegelman’s work only from Maus are already familiar with at least one piece from Breakdowns, his 1977 limited-edition comic. In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” Spiegelman despairingly recalls his mother’s suicide in a grim black-and-white woodcut style that evoked severe religious iconography and German Expressionism. That piece might have given the impression that all of his pre-Maus work was an endless fit of self-flagellation, but though fear and loathing is a constant theme in Breakdowns—now republished with an extended comic introduction and written afterword—it’s as much a set of provocative experiments about the possibilities of comic art as it is a reflection of Spiegelman’s anxieties. For instance, a one-page strip about Spiegelman’s life in a roach-infested apartment becomes ever more disarming as your eyes move down the page, with the author’s self-loathing increasingly covered in roaches. A lengthier piece, “Cracking Jokes,” is an ingenious Freudian study of how humor works, complete with guest star Zippy the Pinhead and a jester’s fool’s cap festooned with penises. So perhaps he earns the right to assert, as he does in the afterword, that back then he “was breaking the one taboo left standing: He dared to call himself an artist and call his medium an art form.” Indeed, stylistically the book was all over the place—colorful, quasi-pornographic abstraction here, soap-opera-strip knockoffs there. But Spiegelman’s introduction makes it clear that a small set of influences were at work. In rough order of importance: Mad magazine, Mom, and a slowly gleaned knowledge about his family’s experience during the Holocaust, a story he’s still incapable of not telling.

SPIEGELMAN DISCUSSES AND SIGNS COPIES OF HIS WORK AT 7 P.M. FRIDAY, NOV. 7, AT POLITICS AND PROSE, 5015 CONNECTICUT AVE. NW. FREE. (202) 364-1919.