Some Comix I Love: Subverting the Graphic Novel Norm, A Guest Post from Art Spiegelman, Author of Maus
Hardcover $999.00
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
By
Art Spiegelman
Editor
Fred Jordon
In Stock Online
Hardcover $999.00
Maus is the highly acclaimed graphic novel that changed the way graphic novels were considered and viewed. Both brutal and moving, Maus recounts the experiences of Art Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust, and it is a must-read that will linger in the minds of readers long after they’ve finished. Art Spiegelman will also be honored by the National Book Foundation with the 2022 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first comic artist to receive the DCAL medal. Keep reading to hear from Art Spiegelman himself about Comix that he loves and subvert the graphic novel norms like Maus did in its time!
Maus is the highly acclaimed graphic novel that changed the way graphic novels were considered and viewed. Both brutal and moving, Maus recounts the experiences of Art Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust, and it is a must-read that will linger in the minds of readers long after they’ve finished. Art Spiegelman will also be honored by the National Book Foundation with the 2022 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first comic artist to receive the DCAL medal. Keep reading to hear from Art Spiegelman himself about Comix that he loves and subvert the graphic novel norms like Maus did in its time!
When I started working on Maus in the late 1970s, I wasn’t thinking about graphic novels — the phrase barely existed. Maus was just an anomaly: I wanted to make a “Very Long Comic Book That Needs a Bookmark and Asks to Be Reread.” I know that “Graphic Novel” is a way better marketing term than what I just said, and ultimately, I prefer the term “Co-Mix.” (I’ve been called a Father of the Graphic Novel but I’m still demanding a paternity test!) Graphic novels now come in many genres — and all genres are normative — but the ones I’m most attracted to are the Anomalies, the ones that subvert the norms of any genre to find new ways of co-mixing words and pictures.
Lynda Barry comes to mind. Her poignant and hilarious alt-weekly newspaper strip of the 80s and 90s, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, presented middle-school memoir in a voice and style all her own, in a genre she dubbed “autobifictionalography.” In 2008’s What It Is, she started a series of autobifictionalographies in crazy-quilt collages that function as self-help manuals for killing your inner demons to release your creative self. They’re less like anything else than anything I’ve ever seen — she’s an exuberant wonder.
Kim Deitch, a first-generation underground master cartoonist, is a comix artist’s comix artist. I drop everything else whenever any new work of his appears. His style conjures up old cheerfully sinister Max Fleischer cartoons, and his convoluted yarns somehow remind me of early 20th century amusement park rides. His recent Reincarnation Stories weaves half-remembered and distorted memories of his past (and his past lives) into what may be his wildest and most labyrinthian ride yet!
Check out Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2003) if you haven’t yet, and then check out Rusty Brown (2019) to see how this influential genius started out by subverting norms and then went on to redefine normal as something that might happen when the average IQ shoots up about 30 points. His moving character-driven narratives, delivered in meticulously crafted diagrammatic drawings and page breakdowns, justify the existence of Literary Fiction as a Graphic Novel genre.
Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, uses its unique format — a young girl’s fictional sketchbook — to co-mix sumptuous drawings with short comix sequences and diary entries to tell a compelling story. It overcomes a heretofore insoluble dilemma for my medium. As Chris Ware put it: “Stories eventually eat their pictures.” That is, readers and cartoonists are usually drawn to comics by their visuals, but once one is sucked into the story, the pictures tend to become invisible. Ferris’s book not only subverts the norm; it expands the form of Graphic Novels.
Most of the above artists are alumnae of RAW, the “now legendary” (meaning “expensively out of print”) avant-garde comix magazine that Françoise Mouly and I created in the 1980s. Emil Ferris’s work came out about twenty-five years after RAW bit the dust or we surely would have invited her in, since we sought out contributors who had nothing much in common except their unique singularities. Cartoonists like Gary Panter (Jimbo) Charles Burns (Black Hole), Richard McGuire (Here), and Yoshiharu Tsuge (The Man Without Talent) all deserve paragraphs of their own here, but even saying this much puts me ten percent over my strictly allotted word count. Sigh.
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Can’t get enough of Maus and want to learn more about Art Spiegelman’s work? Check out Maus Now, a book all about the innovation and achievement of Maus that includes illustrations from Maus and the work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and scholars. With a wide range of viewpoints and responses to Spiegelman’s work, Maus Now will intrigue, educate, and entertain readers as they learn about the effects of Maus on literature, history, and art.
Can’t get enough of Maus and want to learn more about Art Spiegelman’s work? Check out Maus Now, a book all about the innovation and achievement of Maus that includes illustrations from Maus and the work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and scholars. With a wide range of viewpoints and responses to Spiegelman’s work, Maus Now will intrigue, educate, and entertain readers as they learn about the effects of Maus on literature, history, and art.