Random Thoughts

Read Yourself Raw edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (267x357mm)

This book reprints Raw #1-3 — but not in full. I’ve already covered those three Raw issues in this blog series, so I’m not going to re-read this book once again… instead, I’ll just see if there’s anything interesting about what they’ve kept and what they’ve left out? OK? Ok.

This collection is printed by Pantheon, which is natural (since they’d just had a monumental success with the first Maus book)… But Raw vol 2 would go on to be published by Penguin instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess this book was designed by Mouly? It doesn’t totally look like it…

But this looks more like it. It says that the “contents” are designed by Mouly and L. Fili… perhaps that’s everything but the covers?

*gasp* It’s not set in Futura! MOULY! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!!

Spiegelman does a very chatty (and amusing introduction). Raw itself mostly eschewed this sort of stuff — the introductions were often more … conceptual, but I guess it’s time to shift to Elder Statesman and look back upon Raw as a youthful folly.

He does go into details about some issues, like the Mark Beyer trading card situation…

And he explains about the “Raw Deal”: Copies of Raw, and then profit sharing, which comes out to about $100 a page. And explains the ineffable thing about Raw: “Although many of the artists didn’t seem to have much in common with each other, either geographically or stylistically, they all seemed to recognize something in each other’s work. It was elusive — maybe it was just the seriousness of their commitment to the form — but they were enthusiastic, and gave us a mandate to do Raw again.”

The section reprinting Raw #1 is 22 pages long, and Raw #1 was 36 pages (including covers). I had imagined that they’d dump the text pages, but they included this Alfred Jarry-related text…

… but dumped this Kaz page…

… and this Fifi page that surrounded the Two-Fisted Painters booklet (but the booklet itself is included).

Also gone are Patricia Caire and Lynne Tillman. Did any women (except Mouly) make it into this book? (These two may well have been dropped for rights issues, of course — the Caire is based on a Barth text, and Pantheon may have wanted to be more careful…)

Gone is also this Mariscal, but another Mariscal piece from the same issue survived.

So… did Pantheon just have a target page length in mind, or did the editors just dislike the stuff they left out? Raw #1 is a very strong unit; it’s a great reading experience. With almost half cut, it’s less compelling. (Although the pieces that did make it are great, of course.)

Onto Raw #2 — only 18 of the original 36 pages (including covers) make it. Raw #2 is the weakest issue (until #8), so that’s understandable, but it’s still… a lot.

One thing that did make it was Mark Beyer’s City of Terror trading cards! Which is great, because I’ve never seen a copy of #2 that still had them.

They’re very difficult to enjoy here, though, because of the way they’re glued into the book… still fun.

So what was cut? Well, I’m not going to list all the cut pieces, but Rick Geary is gone…

David Levy’s long text piece is gone…

Cathy Millet’s thing is gone…

And fortunately Drew Friedman’s racist goof is gone. Which made fun of Spiegelman, so … perhaps that was a contributing factor? Or just because it wasn’t very good?

*gasp* The Ben Katchor thing is gone! The outrage!

Almost everything is included from the third issue — 42 of 48 pages (including covers). Gone is Kierkegaard…

Rick Geary again…

And the apparent Jihad against women continues — Patricia Caire did one of the few pieces to be removed from #3.

Now I have to look at the credits to Read Yourself Raw again — did any women make the cut?

A Kiki Picasso page made it… a Cathy Millet page… a couple of Mouly pages… and that’s it.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #119, page 42:

Pantheon Books’s recent publication
of Read Yourself RAW—a splendid
compendium of material from the first
three issues of RAW, the avant-garde
graphic showcase edited by art spieg-
elman and Francoise Mouly—is a
happy occasion on several counts. Its
appearance is yet another indication
of the enhanced marketability of so-
phisticated comics in America. (Pan-
theon, a division of Random House,
published spiegelman•s Maus, whose
success surpassed expectations, and is
planning several future ventures into
comics.) Read Yourself RAW’ also
make possible a further dissemination
of some superb comics that would
otherwise remain unavailable to many
readers. Finally, on some level it
vindicates the faith and persistence
Spiegelman and Mouly demonstrated
in publishing RAW against what must
have seemed insurmountable ob-
stacles.
The first issue of RAW made its ap-
pearance during an especially dreary
period in recent comics history. (To
be exact, the date was July 1980.) As
published and edited by spiegelman
and Mouly. RAW’s boldness and vital-
ity—its blissful and complete disre-
gard for the constricted American no-
lion of what “comics” are supposed
to be—set off some immediate shock
waves. As I noted in a review of the
first two issues of RAW in Journal
#64, spiegelman and Mouly’s intent
was “to shake things up, to move
beyond accepted conventions into new
areas of expressiveness and idiosyn-
crasy… RAW is a Jarryesque toying
with the arrangement of the car-
toonist•s mode of imagining.” More
than anything else. RAWS appearance
offered a corrective. In the face of so
much that is contemptible in our
popular culture. RAW was and remains
a forthright declaration that comics are
a sophisticated, adult medium. cap-
able of producing joy and pathos and
worthy of thought and contemplation.
The comics themselves attested to the
enormous, untapped potential of the
medium.
That RAW came into being at all is
a tribute to the tenacity of spiegelman
and Mouly. They set out to create a
“prototype” (their term) that would
serve “to show what someone ought
to be doing.” Given the track record
of the undergrounds in the preceding
decade, spiegelman and Mouiy had
little reason to anticipate that RAW
sales would be good In fact, they
were surprised when demand con-
tinued to exceed supply over the
course of increasing print runs for the
first four issues—the last published in
1986—RAWs audience and influence,
to everyone’s surprise, continued to
My sense is that RAW: which dev-
eloped out of spiegelman and Mou-
ly’s simple desire to see a magazine
that “would print the kind of uork that
interested us,” fulfilled long-disap-
pointed hopes among many for a
renaissance of understanding that
comics were something more than the
juvenile stuff dominating the mass
market in 1980 Having suffered the
pangs of a slow, prolonged death, the
undergrounds lost most of their econ-
moic base by the early 1970s and
ceased to be a major fixture on the
American comics scene.

[…]

Four years later. RAW #1 appeared.
If you weren’t among a select few who
had glimpsed the work of various
European comics artists, the spectacle
of these large, impressively repro-
duced pages—featuring the stark,
naturalistic cityscape of Jacques Tar-
di’s “Manhattan”; the exuberant com-
ic vigor of Joost Swarte, who has been
aptly described as the “warped step-
child of Herge (fintin) and McManus
(Bringing Up Father)”; the startling
expressionism of Munoz and Sam-
payo’s images of despair and human
isolation. “Mister Wilcox. Mister
Conrad” (in RAW 3); and the goofy
mayhem in Mariscal’s epic cartoons—
came as a revelation. There were
samples of other work, short pieces
by the Parisian Cathy Millet, the
Canadian Gerry Capelle, and the
Belgian Ever Meulen. that were in-
triguing suggestions of new
possibilities for the comics medium.
RAW also featured two lovely hom-
mages to the tradition of early com-
ics when it ran pages from Caran
d’Ache and Winsor McCay. These
served as a reminder of the honorable
and distinguished heritage of the past.
And there were the Americans.
Of special note, of course. were the
installments of spiegelman’s Maus that
began in the second issue Of RAW
These are not, of course, included in
Read Yourself RAW: which does repro-
duce spiegelman’s “Two-Fisted
Painters.” This is a playful tinkering
around with color registrations, abet-
ted by some amusingly melodramatic
contrivances, including an alien with
a color syphon, that justify the tinker-
ing. It’s wonderful stuff, and entirely
a propos of the magazine’s hip, arty
From Mark Beyer, there were his
disturbing strips featuring the child in-
nocents, Amy and Jordan, wandering
through a world of nightmarish land-
scapes and ominous, unpredictable
threats from all directions. (The
notorious Amy and Jordan bubblegum
cards have been included in Read
Yourself RAW.)

[…]

Finally, there was Gary Panter’s
memorable image of Jimbo staring out
from the cover of RAW #3. Panter’s
cartooning has generated its share Of
controversy in the intervening years.
His influence has been considerable
and undeniable. and when many
readers ran across the Jimbo “Run-
ning Sore” strip in RAW 3, they were
encountering an unusual of self-
expression or sensibility. Panter has
termed his “ratty” or punk approach
a calculated reaction against “seam-
less illusion,” and many have attacked
his work for a variety of reasons. My
own estimation is that Panter’s work
is painterly and, in terms of its aspira-
lions, often inspired. In RAW’: Panter
found the perfect outlet for a brilliant-
ly radical, uncompromised, “new”
approach to comics. (See the inter-
view with Panter in Journal #100.)
Read Yourself RAW reproduces a
majority of this material, including the
wonderful covers, exactly as it ap-
peared in the original issues. As a
special treat. there is also a wonder-
ful new Read Yourself RAW cover by
spiegelman. All of this is good news
for those who missed out on RAW’s
early issues and have found collector
prices for those early issues beyond
their means.
Missing are a few pieces that have
not been included in the collection.
Mark Newgarden’s “Mutton Geoff’
from RAW I was a good use of
familiar icons (Mutt and Jeff) for pur-
poses that brilliantly transcended
parody, and I was sorry to see it ab-
sent here. Drew Friedman’s ‘ ‘Comic
Strip” from RAW 2 is missing as well.
A happy choice might have seen
Friedman’s friendly satirical jabs at
spiegelman and Mouly exchanged for
the tiresome Andy Griffith satire,
which is included. (The Griffith satire
also appears in Any Similarity To Per-
sons Living Or Dead, but, to my
knowledge, “Comic Strip” has not
reprinted from its initial appearance
in RAW.) Some Rick Geary material
that has been reproduced elsewhere
has been dropped, along with some
pages from Kaz that will soon appear
in Buzzbomb. Several text-oriented
features, a handful Of more purely
conceptual pieces. and a few less ac-
cessible strips (like Ben Katchor’s
“The Atlantic Ocean Laundry”) have
also not made it into the collection.
These are not quibbles, just notations
for those who observe such editorial
matters closely.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Facetasm by Gary Panter and Charles Burns (226x254mm)

This is a spiral-bound book with thick cardboard pages, immaculately printed by Gates of Heck.

The gag is that the pages are cut in three (horizontally), so you can flip the three parts independently…

… creating a large number of facial combinations…

… or just look at the images individually, if you want.

I haven’t done the math on how many combinations are possible, but some combinations are better than others.

Heh heh.

Charles Burns uses his usual super sharp drawing style, and Panter seems to have adapted his usual style to match his? Which is a smart move, because it makes more combinations work (than if he’d done his usual ratty line style instead).

Some of those quotes may not actually be real! I’m so smart ess emm are tee.

The Comics Journal #153, page 128:

Facétasm contains no words, just full-page pen-
and-ink drawings of various characters’ faces shown
head-on. The ilüdividual images are unsettling enough,
as anyone with Burns’ and Panter’s work
Bould expect. But the really disquieting thing about
this book is that each page (made out of heavy card-
stock) is cut into three horimntal panels; thus, top Of
head and f)rehead, eyes and nose, and muth and chin
can all be mixed and matched, giving the characters
even more deranged appearances than in the original
drawings. The resulting jumbled faces that stare up
out of the book are sometimes comical, sometimes
disturbing. and always intriguing. Far creepier and
cooler than any epismie of Twin Peaks, this solume
takes a classic children’s book format and transforms
portrait pllgy fooyisted

Man that OCR doesn’t have OCD, now does it? It’s probably easier to read if you just click through to the scan above…

It must have been a major success, because it’s been reprinted a bunch of times.

Eric Reynolds writes in The Comics Journal #207, page 120:

Stylistically. Burns and Panter are diffe
uläély iri regard to the clean hr1€0f Burns versus
e frenetic and spontaneous brushstrokes Of
Aesthetical’y. hoi+ever, thei/ styles blend—with remarkable
never does the juxtaposition get in the way of
appre$ftioris„uch as – two of the grate/
-Ååmlll pn Roy Crane – edited by Lent. In his introduction; Lent bemoans the

Oh I give up. Click on the link above why don’t you. If you want to read the text.

I guess this is the edition he was talking about… sheesh.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Dal Tokyo by Gary Panter (148x203mm)

Fantagraphics reprinted the Daltokyo strips in a definite edition in 2012, so I won’t actually talk about the strips themselves (since I did that in that blog post, see?) in this brief blog post.

This was published by Sketch Studios in France (but not translated into French), and as an object, it’s impeccable. It’s got these full-size flaps with a “hidden” page, which I just love.

Nice end papers…

Stylish credits…

And then, bang! Straight into the strip. It’s perfect: No introduction, no chatter, nothing to distract: It’s the way I wish all books had been designed. Even the paper is perfect for Daltokyo — even more so now, 30 years later, when it’s yellowed more: It feels like an artefact.

The decision to publish this in this format doesn’t quite work for all the strips. That is, bits of the artwork disappears into the gutter… So the Fantagraphics edition makes more sense, really, if you want to read the story.

This is more like a perfect object to sit and flip through, reading a strip here and there, and otherwise just marvel at Panter’s artwork.

It’s very nicely printed, too — very sharp, despite the slight roughness of the paper.

And then a bibliography.

Indicia.

The end.

It’s a thrilling object in itself.

Them French people sure are good at making them bookses. Shucks.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Maus I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (mm)

This is it: The pivot point in this blog series. You may not have thought so (if you’ve been reading a few of these blog posts), but there’s a kind of loose structure going on here. I wanted to divide the series into a “before” and an “after” part, and Maus I is where things change. (That I’m buying more stuff from ebay confuses the picture even more, so er sorry?)

Anyway! This is the most important single comic book in the history of comic books.

I don’t mean that as an aesthetic judgement or anything, but just an impartial observation.

This was the first comic that showed the normal, non-comics-reading audience that there existed some comics worth reading. (And for two decades, it showed that audience that there was exactly two comics worth reading: Maus I, and Maus II, and that didn’t change until Fun Home was published in 2006, and after that, the floodgates opened.)

This is when art comics went from being a punk, underground thing to being something that normal, well-adjusted, educated and/or rich people would buy (and read). In principle.

I remember visiting a couple in Manhattan a few years ago that owned an entire house on the lower east side — it was totally gorgeous; smart and interesting people. And in their bookcase, filled with Pulitzer prize novels (think Philip Roth and John Updike) and art books, there were the two red spines of Maus I & II, and absolutely no other comics: Among a certain class of people, these are still the only two comic books that are worth reading.

Maus I led to all the major publishers, all over the world, going “there’s a market here”, and for a couple of years, they all published “comics for adults”… and nothing else sold to a general audience other than Maus, and they all shut down that thing fast.

But, I think, it made the world aware that reading a comic was, like, possible, and I don’t think the post-2006 comics history would have been possible without Maus I opening some doors. These days, the New York Review are publishing comics, and The Paris Review are interviewing comics creators.

Before this blog post, most of the comics covered were either self-published or published by various oddball art publishers. The rest of this blog post will be dominated by comics published by the big, mainstream book publishers. (I mean, modulo what I’m finding on ebay…)

I didn’t actually own this book back in the 80s: I had read the booklets included in Raw, and I got a collected edition decades later, so this is the first time I’m reading the Actual Book.

This turns out to not actually be The Actual Book — this is (re)bound by Turtleback Books, and was published after Maus II had been published… so… sometimes in the mid-90s? Darn those ebay peeps.

Does this mean that I have to find an actual early edition… My CDO is acting up… let’s see what happens…

And does that line of 75 … 71 mean what it usually does? That this is the 71st printing of Maus I? It sounds in-credible, but… I tried googling how many copies of this has been published (by Pantheon), but I’m unable to find any numbers. So…

There’s been a buttload of translations, though — that page lists more than a 100 different editions.

The first few chapters here have been redrawn from the original booklets in Raw, making the artwork more consistent.

The lower left hand corner panel now seems more than a bit funny.

You may find this mixture of telling the reader about the making of the book they’re reading kinda cutesy? I think it works brilliantly — it’s not just a gag; it gives us some breathing space between the pages of heartbreak from Vladek’s story.

His incredible daring and intelligence…

… and at the same time being the most exasperating parent ever.

But you’ve all read Maus, so I’m not going to natter on about it. And I’ve read this already once over the previous months in serialised form, and I was wondering how it read in book form… You read some serialised works and it’s WOW and then it’s collected and it’s “eh?” Loses some of the magic in book form?

That’s not the case with Maus. It was really flabbergasting reading it as inserts in Raw, and it’s still a punch to the stomach to read it in book form.

I love reading take-downs of books that I love, so let’s look at the only negative article I can remember seeing about Maus, and this is from 1986. Harvey Pekar writes in The Comics Journal #113, page 54:

Spiegelman diminishes his book’s inten-
sity and immediacy by representing humans
as rather simply and inexpressively drawn
animals—Jews as mice, Germans as cats,
Poles as However, the animal metaphor
is ineffective because this single element of
fantasy is contradicted by Spiegelman’s
detailed realism. For instance, he uses the
real names Of people and places; i.e., a mouse
named Vladek Spiegelman lives in the
Polish town of Sosnowiec, wears human
clothing, and walks on two feet.
The animal metaphor also perpetuates
ethnic stereotypes. Spiegelman generally
portrays Jews as prey (mice) for the Germans
(cats). However, he shows some Poles tak-
ing risks for Jews, yet insultingly pictures all
of them as pigs.
Art’s narrative sometimes rambles and
bous down, partly because he is preoccupied
with making Vladek look bad. Using a sub-
plot involving contemporary sequences is
good idea, but in them Art denounces his
father as a petty cheapskate and tyrant far
more Often and predictably than is neces-
sary. This distracts attention from the Holo-
caust story, clamorously interfering with the
elevated tone of Vladek’s reminiscences.
One might think Spiegelman dwells on
his father’s faults to illustrate the terrible
mark the Holocaust left on people. How
ever, he quotes Mala, who also ‘ ‘went
through the camps” as saying that no Holo-
caust survivor she kne.v was a heartless
miser like Vladek. A complex person With
contradictory characteristics, Vladek isn’t
portrayed clearly in Maus, but perhaps the
next volume will allow us to understand
him better.
Spiegelman’s prose is sometimes stiff, but
this problem is largely overcome by the rich
material he presents. He does not attempt
to sensationalize information already so evo-
cative, but lets his father speak of his
Holocaust experiences simply and With dig-
niry, creating a work historically significant
and often moving.

[…]

I hold to the opinion that Maus is overall
good and a significant work, primarily,
because of Vladek Spiegelman’s moving and
informative narrative. That seems obvious.
It seems equally obvious to me that Art
Spiegelman has done some things in Maus
that are less than admirable, and I have
heard some criticism of the book expressed
privately but for some reason people seem
reluctant to go on record in print about its
defects. Perhaps the serious tone of Mates
and its subject matter cows them. Howard
Chaykin, who has a reputation for being
outspoken, seemed on the verge of saying
something “pejorative” about Spiegelman
during a recent Comics Joumal interview but
asked that the tape recorder be turned off
at the crucial moment. A gentile comic
book fan suggested to me that some people
might be reluctant to criticize Maus for fear
of being called anti-Semitic—that’s under-
standable these days when right-wing Jews
accuse left-wing Jews Of being “self•hating
Jews,” their definition of a self-hating Jew
apparently being any Je.v more liberal than
Ariel Sharon.

[…]

Questions occur to me in this regard, such
as why, if Spiegelman is so offended by
brutality, he prints such violent, ewen
sadistic, stories in RAW as am a Cliche,”
“Tenochtitlan,” “Theodore Death Head.”
and “It Was the War Of the Trenches.” I don’t
criticize him for doing this; I merely point
out that it seems inconsistent with his state-
ment abhorring inhumanity in the Louis-
Ville Times. (These stories, incidentally, con•
tain human characters, not cats and mice.)
The major defect in Maus, one that is far
more disturbing than the use Of “animal
metaphors,” is Spiegelman’s biased,
sided portrayals of his father, himself, and
their relationship. Some reviewers of Maus
have come away with the impression that
Art is the hero of the book and Vladek the
villain. Let me, for example, quote from
Laurie Stone’s Village Voice review. “Spieg-
elman’s finest, subtlest achievement is mak-
ing Art’s survival of life in his family as
important as Vladek and Anja’s survival of
the war… It doesn’t dawn on Vladek that
his tyrannies are a mouse-play of Nazi ter-
rorism; nor does he question why Anja
lived through Auschwitz but not her mar-
riage to him… The irony that the Holo-
caust alone gave Vladek a chance to be
brave and generous—to rise above his small-
mindedness—isn’t lost on Art… Spiegel-
man understands that Hitler isn’t to blame
for Vladek’s and Anja’s personalities. Long
before the war Vladek was wary of other
people and Anja nervous, overly compliant
and clinging—she had her first nervous
breakdown after the birth of Richieu.
Vladek and Anja don’t recover from their
lives, but their son does. He lets his parents
live inside him in order to let them go. And
detachment has served this brave artist
ceptionally well.”
I disagree with Stone’s interpretation,
especially assuming it is based solely on
evidence presented in Maus. For one thing,
there is very little meaningful material about
Anja, always a subsidiary character in the
book. To blame her suicide on Vladek, or
Art, for that matter, as One of the family
friends does is to jump to conclusions with-
out sufficient evidence. Perhaps Art can give
us more facts in Maus’s second volume to
clear things up, but until then there’s n0
point in jumping to conclusions, especially
as Anja’s mental breakdown in the 1930s
occurred at a time when she was seemingly
getting along with Vladek.
I also would question whether Art is as
noble and Vladek as base as Art apparent-
ly would have us believe. I see Art in Mates
as a guy going after a big scoop who cares
less about his father than his father does
about him. Why is Art finally visiting
Vladek after two years, though both live in
the same city? Is it because Vladek has had
two heart attacks, lost vision in one eye, and
Art wants to comfort him? No. it’s because
Art wants a story from him. That is clearly
demonstrated in the book. Art shows
Vladek asking him to leave information
about his bachelor lovelife out of Maus, say-
ing that it has nothing to do with the Holo-
causti Art protests but Vladek holds firm
so Art promises he won’t use it. But, Sur-
prise, it shows up in the book anyway.
Did Stone notice this occurrence involv-
ing her “brave” artist! The reason I men-
tion it is not to question Art’s ethics, which
are of no concern to me, but to point out
that it and other things make me doubt
whether Art’s portrayal of his father is
accurate.
It’s easy for American Jewish writers to
parody their European-born parents,
especially if they’re old and sick like Vladek.
I’ve done it and it is often justifiable because
someof them have less than admirable char-
acteristics. However, in a parody, readers
recognize that distortion and exaggeration
are involved in order to draw attention to
these characteristics. people are So holy
that they can’t be parodied or kidded. Mat’S,
howe.’er, is presented as a “serious,” realistic
work that attempts to portray characters in
a multidimensional manner. Why then is
Vladek routinely shown to be a crazy, pet-
ty, tyrannical miser at both the beginning
and end of two-thirds of Maus’s chapters
(the third, fourth, fifth and sixth)! At the
beginning of the second chapter Vladek
isn’t counting his money but he is counting
his pills—there’s another metaphor for you.
What’s the reason for this overkill? Is
Spiegelman afraid we’ll miss the point about
his feeble old father, that we might overlook
two or three incidents of Vladek’s cheapness
so that ten must be cited? The malice in
Spiegelman’s portrayal of his father is so
obvious to me, despite the fact that Spieg-
elman tries to veil it, that I question his
ability to portray Vladek accurately. Is
cheapness Vladek’s only qualityd
I am a Jew with a background similar to
Spiegelman’s. Many of my relatives died in
the Holocaust. My parents, uncles, aunts,
and some Of my cousins were born in
Poland. Furthermore they came from small
towns and probably would seem unsophis-
ticated and puritanical to most Americans
ewen by comparison with Spiegelman’s pap
ents. Spiegelman’s father owned a factory;
my father was literally a teamster, driving
a horse and wagon for a living, picking up
grain from farmers and taking it to mills to
be ground into flour. My folks were tight
with me about mone,•; it seemed that I had
fewer toys than everyone else, that my
clothes were older, if not hand-me-downs.
I resented my parents; they were trying to
raise me as their parents had raised them.
They didn’t realize treating urban American
children as if they were living in a Polish
shtetl could result in serious problems. They
didn’t understand and I didn’t realize that
they didn’t until a lot Of damage was done.
But if Eastern European Jews like my
parents didn’t provide their kids with a lot
of toys that seemed worthless to them, they
good about other things. If possible
they made sure thgir kids had good health
care and ate well and they sacrificed so that
their children could go to college. They tried
to be good parents but often didn’t know
all that being a good parent in America
involved.
I have the feeling based on the informa-
tion in Maus, which is all we readers have
to go on, that Art deliberately tried to make
Vladek look bad, yet there are scenes in the
book where Vladek does show concern for
his son, despite Art’s intentions. For ex-
ample, once befuddled Vladek throws out
an old coat that Art’s been wearing, cone
sidering it shabby, and offers him another
one which he believes is better. Art has a
fit, accusing the old man of treating him like
a kid. L imagine most people sympathize
with Art during this scene, especially the
way it’s presented, but is what the old man
did really so terrible? Yes, he misjudged his
kid, something parents commonly do, but
Vladek was trying to help him by giving
him what he thought was a better coat.
What’s the big deal? Don’t gentile parents
throw out their children’s stuff too—even
their valuable baseball card and comic book
collections? Some mildly unpleasant things
have to be taken in stride because they’re
so common. It’s silly for a 35-year-old man
to blow up athis sick Old father an Old
coat.

Heh heh heh. I love Pekar.

There was much backlash.

The Comics Journal #116, page 78:

Further into the review, Pekar
says that he feels “that Art delib-
erately tried to make [his fatherl
look bad.” Here, especially, Pekar
presumes too much. First of all,
both father and son are shown to
be alternately compassionate and
reactionary; in other words,
human. Secondly, in reading
Maus, I gave the benefit of the
doubt to both Spiegelman and his
father. insofar as the passages they
share are personal reflections that
can scarcely be considered per-
fectly factual or entirely objective.
I have to doubt that the various
situations between them happened
as depicted. but to expect such
scenes to be anything but subjec-
tive is to miss the point entirely.
Pekar justifies his presumptions
by saying that lots of kids have
problems with their parents, so
what’s the big deal? When citing
a sequence in which Spiegelman’s
father throws out his son’s coat and
gives him one he thinks is better,
Pekar writes,’ “It’s silly for a
35-year-old man to blow up at his
SICK old ratner over an old coat:
It’s equally silly to presume that it
was simply the loss of a coat that
was the basis of Spiegelman’s out-
burst. I would venture to say that
it was more a matter of personal
respect, as well as the likelihood
that Spiegelman and his father
simply did not get along, and that
this was just another in a lifelong
series of mounting frustrations.

Edward Shannon writes in The Comics Journal #116, page 78:

Throughout his piece, Mr. Pekar refers to the
character Of Art Spiegelman as if he were One and
the same with Spiegelman the artist. Not only is this
impossible for us to know (as Pekar does admit), it
is completely beside the point! Although Spiegelman
uses his own name, he gives his readers a clue as
to just how closely he is identified with his character:
Spiegelman isn’t a mouse!
Indeed, the quality Mr. Pekar despises is the very
quality that makes the character Of Art, and the rest
of Maus. work. This quality is pettiness. Art, in the
story, is a selfish brat who cares little about what
his father has experienced except that it is useful
in his own work. In the same way, Mala and Vladek
do not try to understand each other and grab what
they can get out of their own lives—just as the Nazis
feared and hated the Jews for being different and ex-
ploited them for what they could supply.

Pekar and R. Fiore went into an endless discussion…

It started like this in The Comics Journal #132, page 43:

Now that you’ve all had time to digest
Harvey Pekar’s article in Journal #130
— and what a great, big, fiber-laden
chunk it was — it’s as good a time as
any to examine the stool. What it
demonstrates primarily is that, other
accomplishments notwithstanding, Pe-
kar is a lousy critic: slipshod in his
methods, weak on facts, given to shod-
dy reasoning even when he’s correct,
and largely motivated by envy of any-
one in comics he perceives to have a
higher reputation than his.

But what did Fiore really mean?

It went on for years.

Did somebody ever collect the entire discussion?

Anyway: Maus I: The comic book that changed everything forever.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.