Art Spiegelman Interview

An interview with legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman author of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*!’. Breakdowns was the first collected book of comic art Spiegelman had published. Created between 1972 and 1977, the volume has been reissued with an illustrated 20-page introduction, which – like the works that follow – pretty much redefines what might be considered as a typical comic book narrative. Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus — which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. In 2004 he completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages, In the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books. A book version of these highly political works was published by Pantheon in the United States, appeared on many national bestseller lists, and was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004. In 2005, Spiegelman was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame in 2006. Recorded October 14, 2008