Page 45 Review by Stephen
"Forged in a crucible of humiliation and trauma, cartoonists are made, not born..." I imagine that's a bit sweeping, but certainly it applied to Art from his inability to hit a baseball, through a stint in a mental health unit followed all too closely by the suicide of his mother. "By puberty, when asked what I would be when I grew up, I often answered: "Neurotic"." And that was before his mother's death.
BREAKDOWNS was a collection of Spiegelman's short stories published in 1978 to little or no critical acclaim and so few sales that those copies which survived the faulty printing continued to be advertised for sale in the back of his subsequent RAW anthology. Retrospect is a funny old thing. "Portrait of The Artist..." on the other hand is a 19-page, all-new autobiographical introduction by Spiegelman in full sequential art detailing his most formative moments - a self-analysis typically punctured by a self-awareness and censure of the task he's embarked upon. Combined with the substantial prose afterword, you're getting far more than a simple reprint, then. Amongst those memories are Art's first sight of a Basil Wolverton MAD cover and purchase of a Cartooning Kit (which his mother cleverly contrived to ensure he got the most from), an early disillusionment when a much anticipated "log cabin" he sent off for turned out on arrival to be little more than a barely disguised refuse sack, his first encounter with EC comics as a direct result of his father's thrift, and the death of his mother's nephew in a hit-and-run which she never recovered from. In the light of his mother's note-less suicide which later compelled him to write and draw "Prisoner On The Hell Planet", I found the photo of a young Art enjoying a copy of MAD with his mother quite halting, but perhaps that's just me.
"Prisoner On The Hell Planet" forms part of the BREAKDOWNS collection. An account of the events surrounding his mother's suicide and Spiegelman's reaction to it, it's told in an expressionist scratchboard style, and is quite the harrowing read full of guilt and accusation. "I don't tend to confuse Art and Therapy (making Art is cheaper), but I did think Hell Planet had helped me "deal" with Anja's suicide," he writes in "Portrait" after discovering thirty years on that it was far from conclusive. Alongside this is his first stab at what would later become MAUS which - apart from his choice to use anthropomorphic cats and mice - is a relatively traditional piece in terms of execution. Most of the others are far more experimental exercises in comicbook storytelling incorporating Picasso, Winsor McCay (who doesn't at some point?) and soap opera lines. There are further pages of autobiography, dream sequences, and a neat piece of (semi-)circular storytelling, but I think my favourite may be "The Malpractice Suite" which messes around with panels within panels in the same (but far more elaborate) way that those ring-bound books do whereby parts of each page can be flipped over to reveal a pair of legs, say, less congruous to the torso above. Here Spiegelman offers up often disturbing alternative extensions/extrapolations to the central panels appropriated from "Rex Morgan" newspaper strips, undermining their innocence with states of cross-dress, undress or size-inversion.
As Spiegelman often says, MAUS proved so successful that he can barely create except in its shadow, but take a glance further back as you can again now, and you'll discover an artist truly in love with the medium of his choice and playing around with it with a fierce intelligence and wit.
