Everybody’s favorite chainsmoking, vest-wearing, Pulitzer prize-winning, Garbage Pail Kids-drawing, creatively neurotic and artistically groundbreaking Jew – Art Spiegelman, ladies and gentlemen! – brightens Pantheon’s fall releases with a reissue (and reconsideration) of Breakdowns, his oversized and rare 1978 collection of experimental comix.
The original offered enough of the artist’s weird graphic brilliance from the 70s to, like, blow your mind, man. This new edition’s got all that, plus an illustrated introduction that runs for pages and pages to provide an autobiographical context for the original collection and an afterword that sums up the introduction, the original collection, the artist himself, and what makes comics worthwhile (and what it takes to make worthwhile comics). This vastly enhanced edition is subtitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*!, which is fucking hilarious, and it makes one wish that all young %@#*!s were this entertaining to read when they’ve gotten this old.
This article appears in September 26 • 2008.