PX99: Art Spiegelman: Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps

Art Spiegelman: Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps by Art Spiegelman (240x336mm)

This is a very handsome softcover exhibition catalogue to accompany La Centrale dell’Arte’s travelling Spiegelman exhibition in 1999. (It was designed by Mouly and Spiegelman.)

Spiegelman likes long (sub)titles, so this is called “From Maus to Now to MAUS to Now”. (His first collection was (sub)titled “From Maus to Now”, so there’s like all kinds of punniness going on here.)

It is what it says on the tin: It’s a collection of essays and bits and bobs. All the essays are printed both in English and in German.

Some of the stuff is pretty fascinating, like this three-page exegesis on his one-page Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.

Other stuff is less fascinating, but that’s fine.

The main bulk of the book, though, consists of reproductions of various comics and illustrations and stuff…

Like these covers he did.

And studies for work that’s very familiar, which I think is pretty neat to get to see.

Maus gets a lot of space, of course, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

And there’s a bunch of comics here (done for various magazines) that I haven’t read before.

And, of course, his New Yorker covers.

And you can’t have a Raw-related book without some kind of printing flourish.

We also get some of his curricula.

And an early (late-60s) dissection of a Bernie Kriegstein piece.

As catalogues for art shows go, this is pretty spiffy. It’s thoughtfully put together, and very readable.

Indeed:

One thing I’m curious about though — when looking this up to see if it was still in print, I discovered that it wasn’t (though relatively easy to find used copies of) — but the upcoming book Co-Mix sounds like it might be a reprinting of this book with a different cover and title. Once Co-Mix comes out, I’ll take a look at it to compare — but if these two books are the same, that’s a very good thing. This work deserves to be in print. Art Spiegelman is a fascinating author when he talks about comix theory — and I don’t know if he gets credit for that. This book definitely fixes that. If you’re a cartoonist, or just interested in cartooning, you really need this book. Spiegelman’s work shows you how to do good comix, and how to think about and read comix.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX03: The Complete Maus

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (163x232mm)

I’ve already talked about Maus in this blog series, so I’m not going to go over all that again. But I happen to have the collected edition (in addition to the I and II books), so I thought I’d just have a quick peek and see how they’re printing it these days. (Well, OK, about a decade ago, I guess?)

This edition is from 2003, but this is apparently the 22nd (!) printing. And that’s only the collected edition.

Comparing it with the first printing of Maus II, it looks like the printing plates are getting worn or something. (Collected edition to the right.) The collected edition is on shiny paper while the original is on matte, so you’d expect to be able to see more details, but instead it looks like you’ve got ink bleeding into the white areas.

It’s not very noticeable, though — it’s still quite nice, but… why the shiny paper? It just seems… wrong aesthetically.

The collected edition doesn’t look edited in any way — it’s just a facsimile edition or something.

Anyway. Wasn’t that interesting! No? Darn.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX14: Here

Here by Richard McGuire (173x242mm)

“Here” was originally a short piece printed in Raw Vol 2 #1, and was hugely influential: It was a brand new way to tell a story.

So — 25 years later, McGuire expanded it to a three hundred page graphic novel.

If you’ve been living under one of those them there rocks where they don’t have comics, “Here” told the story of a location — we skip back and forth through history, but all the drawings are made from the exact same angle.

So the differences between pages may be small or large…

… and they sometimes tell little narratives.

None of them were very extensive in the original strip, but here they get longer.

And the layout can get pretty convoluted — and you can follow the progression between the different ages and watch people grow up (and old). So — it’s like multi-narrative: There’s narrative between the images, and when turning the pages, too. It’s a fascinating reading experience.

But. While the original short story was “*gasp* it cannot be!”, this is more like… “hm; interesting”. I mean, there’s a lot to enjoy here: The artwork’s good; the colouring’s spot on, the bits are interesting. But it’s like… there’s stuff that annoys, too, like just the way it’s printed. It feels like I have to constantly fight the book not to lose so much in the gutters.

McGuire also makes everything so explicit: We’re being told, several times, that this is a book about history. He even drops in some historians, and he has Benjamin Franklin drop by… and then somebody actually naming him, as if he had no confidence that we’d already guessed that.

It just feels like he had people telling him he should make it more edumacational.

And then he seems to say that the entire book is basically a tour taken in 2213 with space age projectors, which just took all the fun out of it for me.

So, sorry: There’s so much to enjoy here, but that twist just makes it into a dumb sci-fi thing for me.

I can’t remember reading anything negative about the book, though:

Read, watch, or peruse Here in one mood, and you’ll discover a lyrical tribute to those attachments; read it in another, more fatalistic mood, and you might admire even more the varying textures of the lives—the many lives, in one place—that McGuire has made.

So it’s probably just me:

In “Here,” McGuire has introduced a third dimension to the flat page. He can poke holes in the space-time continuum simply by imposing frames that act as trans­temporal windows into the larger frame that stands for the provisional now. “Here” is the ­comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation of the spirit of place, a family drama under the gaze of eternity and a ghost story in which all of us are enlisted to haunt and be haunted in turn.

I guess:

In Here, we are a particularly fascinating species of flourishing fauna, a force as elemental in our time as the sun or the ocean. We’ve never seemed so small or so big, so important or so meaningless. Neither have comics. The pink lady remembers why she came in here again, and picks up a small hardcover book.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.