Art Spiegelman’s Original Stories, Now Shown in a New Light

Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!”
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon Books, 72 pages, $27.50.

When the artist Art Spiegelman published “Breakdowns” in 1978, it came out in a limited edition of about 3,000 copies.

As Spiegelman recalls, “There was no demand for a deluxe large-format album that collected the scattered handful of short autobiographical and structurally ‘experimental’ comics I’d made between 1972 and 1977 — except by me.”

Now, 30 years later, things have changed. For one thing, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Here, the Forward shows a page from 1975, which will be included in a deluxe visual memoir, “Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!,” to be published next month by Pantheon.

Spiegelman is the creator of the graphic Holocaust memoirs “Maus” and “Maus II.” Book II was originally serialized in the Forward. He is also the author of “In the Shadow of No Towers,” serialized in the Forward in 2002-2003.

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