The Irish novelist James Joyce, whose medium was words,
once, in a flight of linguistic fancy, wrote: Nobirdy avair soar anywing to
eagle it. If not high praise, at least acknowledgment of extraordinary
achievement. And we may say the same about Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a
Young @&%*! (76 10x14-inch
pages, many in color; hardcover,
Pantheon, $27.50). My invocation of Joyce is neither facetious nor
arbitrary: Joyce, the inventor of stream of consciousness writing, was a
formalist, unabashed and unrepentant; ditto, with a vengeance, Spiegelman, but
with pictures, not words. And Breakdowns
is the par excellence exemplar of his preoccupation. This dubious relationship
between formalists has scarcely evaded Spiegelman’s attention: the subtitle of
his book echoes that of Joyce’s
semi-autobiographical novel.
Breakdowns is part reincarnation: one
part reprints the original 1978 48-page book of that title that was almost
accidentally — and certainly perversely — published by Belier Press, otherwise a
specialist in fetish fantasies, which became the publisher-of-record by paying
the printer who had printed the book that Nostalgia Press could no longer
afford to pay for; the other part bookends the original publication with two
Spiegelman specialties, a prefatory 20-page
autobiographical comic strip and a postscriptive 8-page autobiographical
essay.
Spiegelman’s
oft-professed love for comics as an artistic medium probably accounts partially
for his overriding interest in its “forms.” As he told Dave Welch last fall at
Powells.com, the strips in Breakdowns came
“from an interest primarily in How pages are made. What is the
stuff of comics that makes up its comics-ness?” The book’s title refers to the
essential cartooning act of breaking a narrative down into discrete pictorial
“moments.” As a demonstration of the
capabilities of the comics artform, the book is usually superior. And the
demonstrations are not the stuff of dry classroom lectures: they are
entertaining. One-to-three pages long, they’re short and quippy, a little like
blackout playlets but often without punchlines.
I spend a
couple thousand more words explicating Spiegelman in my online magazine, Rants
& Raves, which you can find at the Usual Place (below); the Spiegelman essay
at Opus 242. It will also appear at full length in the 300th
“anniversary edition” of The Comics
Journal, out early in the fall.
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