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Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
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Breakdowns

Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

By Art Spiegelman

By Art Spiegelman

By Art Spiegelman

By Art Spiegelman

Best Seller

Part of Pantheon Graphic Library

Part of Pantheon Graphic Library

Paperback $25.00

Dec 13, 2022 | ISBN 9780375715389

Hardcover $27.50

Oct 07, 2008 | ISBN 9780375423956

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    Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
    Paperback $25.00
    Dec 13, 2022 | ISBN 9780375715389

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    • Paperback $25.00

      Dec 13, 2022 | ISBN 9780375715389

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    Hardcover
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    • Hardcover $27.50

      Oct 07, 2008 | ISBN 9780375423956

      Buy from Other Retailers:

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    About Breakdowns

    This legendary 1978 collection of comics by Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the best-selling Maus, presents the seminal early works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today—now with a new Afterword by the author.

    “Some of the smartest criticism of the comics genre ever rendered.” —NPR

    Innovative, serious, funny, and many decades ahead of its time, Breakdowns is offered here in its entirety: the long-sought-after collection of the artist’s comics of the 1970s, along with an introduction almost as long as the book it introduces—and just as autobiographically intimate and experimentally daring.
     
    At once the story of an artist and of his medium, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

    About Breakdowns

    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.

    About Art Spiegelman

    ART SPIEGELMAN is one of the world’s most admired and beloved comic artists, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, Maus. Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman began studying cartooning in high school and drawing professionally at age sixteen…. More about Art Spiegelman

    About Art Spiegelman

    ART SPIEGELMAN is one of the world’s most admired and beloved comic artists, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, Maus. Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman began studying cartooning in high school and drawing professionally at age sixteen…. More about Art Spiegelman

    Product Details

    Category: Graphic Novels & Manga | Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs

    Paperback | $25.00
    Published by Pantheon
    Dec 13, 2022 | 76 Pages | 8-3/4 x 12 | ISBN 9780375715389

    Category: Graphic Novels & Manga | Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs

    Hardcover | $27.50
    Published by Pantheon
    Oct 07, 2008 | 72 Pages | 10 x 13-7/8 | ISBN 9780375423956
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    Praise

    PRAISE FOR BREAKDOWNS:

    “Some of the smartest criticism of the comics genre ever rendered.” —NPR

    “Intricate … funny … truly weird … Breakdowns really comes into its own.” —The Guardian

    “Revelatory … [Breakdowns] traces [Spiegelman′s] development of both a philosophy and an aesthetic that would result in comics being taken more seriously than they had been.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “This reprint of Spiegelman’s 1978 collection of comics is a must-have for any comics aficionado, art-house dude, hipster or anyone who ever thought to himself, “Hmm, comics are kinda cool.” Spiegelman gives us the story that led to Maus, and we see how he evolved from an R. Crumb-loving artist with neuroses pertaining to The Dick Van Dyke Show to a tight storyteller of anxious, modern folktales. One of the functions of the artist is to take us to hell and get us out in one piece. Spiegelman’s early trips into hallucinatory darkness do this. We come out in one piece; it’s not clear he did. —Publisher’s Weekly [starred review]

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