This is a page from BREAKDOWNS by Art Spiegelman, an oversized, hardbound, beautiful reprint of some of Spiegelman's older work accompanied by a blistering, riveting introduction, part of which you see here.The page is a compilation of a series of sketches that Spiegelman made in 1972 while living in San Francisco. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, had killed herself in 1968. "She left no note," he notes.
Suddenly, he had what Oprah would call a "light bulb moment."
"Funny, how the mind works," he writes. "I'd somehow FORGOTTEN that my mother committed suicide four years before ... Shielded myself from the memory."
The next panel: "I tossed aside the genuinely paltry piece of shit I'd been working on, and began to write as if I was possessed!"
The sketches would become "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," a raging, terrifying, electrifyingly dark comic about his mother's death.
"MY FATHER FOUND HER IN THE BATHTUB WHEN HE GOT HOME FROM WORK ... HER WRISTS SLASHED AND AN EMPTY BOTTLE OF PILLS NEAR-BYE ...."
It's about guilt, and death, and the inescapableness of trauma, and how sometimes, even when people die, they have a way of coming after you.
"...YOU MURDERED ME, MOMMY, AND YOU LEFT ME HERE TO TAKE THE RAP!!!" screams the last panel, in which Spiegelman screeches from a prison cell.
This aesthetic shift towards autobiographical self-vivisection lay the groundwork for what would one day become MAUS, which, as you may have heard, won him a Pulitzer Prize.
What I love is that the very first hints of the work, in the upper left-hand corner of the page, are little more than chicken scratches, messy scribblings, three globby, gathered figures. Yet, without it, would MAUS, his greatest work, have come into existence? I find company in this image when everything I do looks like nonsense. Maybe others do, too.
