Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Breakdowns was first published in 1978 in an edition of 5,000 copies, 1,000 of which were ruined in an accident at the printers. For years it’s been a rare, coveted book, so when Pantheon republished it in 2008 it was unbelievable. I remember seeing a used first edition of Breakdowns in a New York store for $375 and it was on sale. It was the book everybody wanted but couldn’t afford, and now it costs $27.50.
You’ve done a lot of work with Art Spiegelman, but you haven’t chosen his most famous book, Maus, for your list;Maus being Spiegelman’s account of his father’s experience in the German death camps – perhaps one of the most influential accounts of the Holocaust next to Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Before you tell us about Breakdowns, can you tell us why Spiegelman became famous?
I would say that Art Spiegelman is the most famous and influential cartoonist alive. And I would also argue that he’s the most important figure in the literature of the boomer generation. Paul Auster and Art are friends, and Art nominated Paul when I suggested this to him. The publication of the first volume of Maus in 1986 was absolutely a terrain-shifting moment. It was nominated for a National Book Critic Circle award in the category of biography and people freaked out. In 1991, the second half was on the New York Times bestseller list on the fiction side of the ledger. Art wrote a letter to the Times complaining and, for the first time in the history of that list, they published his letter and moved it to non-fiction. So it’s this pushing on taxonomy that Maus accomplished and which fascinates me so much. Maus changed the face of comics and also modern literature.
Tell us about Breakdowns.
Breakdowns was first published in 1978 in an edition of 5,000 copies, 1,000 of which were ruined in an accident at the printers. For years it’s been a rare, coveted book, so when Pantheon republished it in 2008 it was unbelievable. I remember seeing a used first edition of Breakdowns in a New York store for $375 and it was on sale. It was the book everybody wanted but couldn’t afford, and now it costs $27.50.
What’s all the fuss about?
This book collects all of Art’s work from the 1970s, when he was really pushing on received notions about what comics as a narrative form could do. Broadly, the comics in Breakdowns are heavily modernist or avant-garde comics. They play with conventions of time, space, causality, setting the bar very high for comics quite early on. But a lot of people haven’t been aware of Breakdowns until recently, when the Pantheon edition came out. It’s a collection of several different stories, one of which is a three-page version of ‘Maus’. There’s ‘Prisoner on The Hell Planet’, which would later appear in Maus. But there’s also ‘Cracking Jokes: A Brief Enquiry into Various Aspects of Humour’, which is kind of the first comics essay, featuring, amongst other things, Freud as a character. It’s Art really going out on a limb, without a supporting culture already there, taking comics as far as they can go.
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Hillary Chute is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and her new book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, comes out in October this year from Columbia UP. She is also associate editor of MetaMaus, a project by Art Spiegelman forthcoming from Pantheon in 2011.
