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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for February
| Arthur Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden, and emmigrated to the United States with his parents in his early childhood. Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and started drawing professionally at age sixteen. Despite his parents wanting him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman majored in art and philosophy at Harpur College, and joined the comic underground when he left in 1968, meeting such characters as Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar. |
Art Spiegelman |
| On Friday, January 28 Art Spiegelman was made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the first comic artist to be so honoured. Its easy to see why. His groundbreaking comic novel Maus made the literary world take the genre seriously for the first time. In his magazine Raw, founded with his partner Frncouis Mouly in the 1980's, Spiegelman championed emergent talent, and encouraged many of today's greatest talents. His work has three distinct strands; political and social commentary, as exemplified by his covers for the new Yorker, such as a hasid and woman of colour kissing, books for children, often in collaboration with his wife, Francouise Mouly. He also seeks out forgotten classics and illustrates them, bringing them a whole new audience. Examples from each strand are listed below. |
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Essential Reading
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The
Complete Maus
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Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.
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On 11th September 2001, Art Spiegelman raced to the World Trade Center, not knowing if his daughter Nadja was alive or dead. Once she was found safe in her school at the foot of the burning towers he returned home, to meditate on the trauma, and to work on a comic strip. Subversive, iconic, and burningly articulate, In the Shadow of No Towers is New Yorker Art Spiegelman's extraordinary account of 'the hijacking on 9.11 and the subsequent hijacking of those events' by America.
 |
Open
Me...I'm a Dog!
|
Not so much a book as it is three-dimensional art, Art Spiegelman's Open Me ... I'm a Dog! is a fun romp through the usual expectations of children's stories, in this case a dog who is transformed into a book by a wizard. As the "book" tries to make its way back into being a dog, it gets turned into a variety of other things. Every page is filled with that sense of innocent wonder that appeals to children and adults alike. And after you finish the story (or before you even get to it), you can't help but be amazed by the completeness of the book/dog, from the furry end papers to the attached leash. Just don't let your cat see it.
Little Lit: Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies In this provocative anthology, Spiegelman
and his wife, New Yorker art editor Mouly, enlist well-known artists to retell traditional tales and invent visual games. Spiegelman himself kicks things off with
Prince Rooster, a typical be-yourself tale. Among the contributions
are William Joyce's Humpty Trouble, a revisionist egg-stravaganza featuring ovoid voice bubbles and delicate watercolor images, David Macaulay's straightforward pen-and-ink
Jack and the Beanstalk, and the lone female contributor, Barbara
McClintock's gentle, old-fashioned Princess and the Pea. But by far the most adventuresome item comes from
Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware, who turns the endpapers into a stylized board game called
Fairy Tale Road Rage.
Spiegelman and Mouly's sophisticated collection, unified by a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale theme, lingers at the crossroad between kids and adults, classics and parodies, children's literature and comics.
The Wild Party : A lost "classic"? It's odd how strikingly some writing may date to an era yet can later be resuscitated because of its potential for art and camp, and thus gain a new audience. That's what Spiegelman
has pulled off here by rediscovering and illustrating this jazzy, insistently rhyming roaring '20s period poem, banned in Boston when first published in 1928. What Spiegelman, in his introduction, calls his "fetishistic" pleasure in the poem, penned by the New Yorker's inaugural managing editor, is borne out by March's dither of hard-edged rhythms recounting the boozing, brawling and fractious lovemaking of an all-night party ending in a murder. The characters are hard-boiled and needy-and stereotypically presented. The women, especially, seem deliberately one-dimensional, even offensively so-if one is inclined to take offense at all. But the poem works as a bouncy artifact, and the black-and-white illustrations are appropriately, viscerally graphic, summoning up the sense of a knockabout urban spree with debonair zeal and well-appointed crudeness. Previous
Authors of the Month Also
Recommended:
(£14.95)
The Lost Classic by Joseph Moncure March
(£9.95)
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Saul Bellow
Henry Roth
John Updike
