Bought from: McSweeney's.
spiegelman is a curious case: after a decade's steadily productive stream of formalistically inventive work, he makes a 180 degree turn to devoting the next decade to his dad's biography that also happens to be a documentary of the Final Solution that also triples as the writer-artist's confessional about his relationship with his dad, a book that goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize, then followed by a couple of decades of ... nothing.
Or rather, nothing much, as spiegelman did come out with a book here and there every once in a while - some kiddie books, one big book on his reaction to 9/11, quite a number of covers for THE NEW YORKER (where his wife and daughter work in the art editorial), a book of annotations on MAUS - but nothing along the lines of MAUS or even BREAKDOWNS. It seems after an astonishingly aggresively creative first two decades, spiegelman lies wiped out, making notes, stirring his inkpot every once in a while.
It's an interesting production, it has to be said, all this ephemera coming out, although it should be mentioned that BE A NOSE! consists of ephemeral work produced peripherally around MAUS, the sketchbooks bearing spiegelman's heavy anxieties in the wake of all the critical attention MAUS had initially earned, and all the fallout following it: it is never mentioned directly, but the fact that all three sketchbooks are all unfinished and spans quite a number of years between them can be seen as evidence of the creative, intellectual, social, and critical weight that MAUS had unloaded on spiegelman's back, and all evidence points to his back breaking under the weight.
BE A NOSE! is a very interesting essay on the perils of walking down from the pinnacles of artistic genius.
spiegelman is a curious case: after a decade's steadily productive stream of formalistically inventive work, he makes a 180 degree turn to devoting the next decade to his dad's biography that also happens to be a documentary of the Final Solution that also triples as the writer-artist's confessional about his relationship with his dad, a book that goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize, then followed by a couple of decades of ... nothing.
Or rather, nothing much, as spiegelman did come out with a book here and there every once in a while - some kiddie books, one big book on his reaction to 9/11, quite a number of covers for THE NEW YORKER (where his wife and daughter work in the art editorial), a book of annotations on MAUS - but nothing along the lines of MAUS or even BREAKDOWNS. It seems after an astonishingly aggresively creative first two decades, spiegelman lies wiped out, making notes, stirring his inkpot every once in a while.
It's an interesting production, it has to be said, all this ephemera coming out, although it should be mentioned that BE A NOSE! consists of ephemeral work produced peripherally around MAUS, the sketchbooks bearing spiegelman's heavy anxieties in the wake of all the critical attention MAUS had initially earned, and all the fallout following it: it is never mentioned directly, but the fact that all three sketchbooks are all unfinished and spans quite a number of years between them can be seen as evidence of the creative, intellectual, social, and critical weight that MAUS had unloaded on spiegelman's back, and all evidence points to his back breaking under the weight.
BE A NOSE! is a very interesting essay on the perils of walking down from the pinnacles of artistic genius.
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