Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
The Indie Comics Legend Returns With an Updated Anthology
Art Spiegelman is most famous for his autobiographical Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus. As in that seminal work, Spiegelman proves in Breakdowns: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young %@&*! just how good he is at making his own life interesting and relatable to the reading public without seeming narcissistic.
Artistic Style
While Spiegelman is clearly influenced by Robert Crumb, and he says as much in Breakdowns, he isn't rigid in the least in his drawing style. He employs a unique practice of varying the style, from cartoon to detailed, to suit the different plots and the emotions conveyed in them.
For example, Prisoner On The Hell Planet, the comic strip about his mother's suicide, is drawn in stark black and white and looks like a woodblock print or something out of Murnau's famous silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Spiegelman proves that it's much more effective to show somebody what you mean than to simply tell them. The angularity of the art in this strip expertly reflects the disturbed, confused state of Spiegelman's mind at the time. The decision to publish the book in a large format helps too. This allows the drawings to practically explode off the page.
Plot and Theme
For those expecting a linear storyline like in Maus, prepare for something different. That's not to say that Breakdowns has no structure at all. Like a conventional autobiography, the book starts with Spiegelman's childhood and ends with his adulthood, although this path isn't exactly straight and narrow. Several strips have nothing directly to do with Spiegelman himself.
An over-arching theme is that nothing has influenced Spiegelman's life more that comic books have. In many ways, Breakdowns is an essay on the place comic books have in society.
A visual theme is a squiggle that shows up throughout the book. His contentious relationship with his fairly conservative, Jewish immigrant family is another theme explored throughout. Spiegelman began his career in the hippie era and his narratives on young vs. old and past vs. present vs. future are expertly written and drawn.
The Bottom Line
Spiegelman comes from a group of comic book creators, including Alan Moore and Daniel Clowes, who believe that comics could be just as profound and important as "high" literature. They weren't and aren't afraid to be controversial and in some cases vulgar in the eyes of conservative society. They also prove that comic books don't all have to be about spandex-wearing, overly-muscled superheroes. Breakdowns proves that a picture really does say a thousand words. The imagination is basically an inner eye and Spiegelman's is wide open.
Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
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