Breakdowns; Portrait of an Artist as Young %@#*!

So you’ve just had a nervous breakdown so intense that you have to go to hospital. You come out and you’re on your way home. Things are not bright but they’re not bleak either. And there’s a crowd outside your home, a crowd of people. Your mother has killed herself. The last time you met her, she came to your room to ask if you still loved her. You assured her you did but cursorily, cursorily. Oy vey, you’re a Jewish boy all right.

Now, your dad.

It’s your dad’s story that has made you so famous that you may never ever do something big and significant again. You did Maus when no one took comics seriously, when no one thought you could win a Pulitzer for a comic. You did Maus because you were looking for a story idea to fit into a series. And it grew from there into one of the must-reads of Holocaust literature. People who would not be caught dead with a comic make an exception for your gut-wrenching story of your father and mother and the shadows of the gas chamber that hang over them.

When Breakdowns comes out, your fans are buying it without even stopping. Whatever you do is gold. And hey, this one has the back story of Maus. Look, there’s some of his Underground stuff and that can have two effects. If you have some of the Underground Spiegelman, you’re going to curse at the democratisation of access. If you don’t, no way you’re missing this one.

But should you?

It’s a mixed bag. There’s ”˜Prisoner on the Hell Planet; A Case History’ which is about as riveting a story as you will get. It’s drawn with passion and power and a great deal of blood and bile. But there’s also ”˜Cracking Jokes; A Brief Inquiry into Various Aspects of Humor’ which doesn’t work well. It’s, ah let’s just say it, self-indulgent and sophomoric. Scott Adams does this kind of thing better because he takes it a lot more seriously and you have to get serious about humour if you want to talk about its internal workings. (Have you tried reading G Legman on the joke? You don’t want to.) ”˜As the Mind Reels’ mixes the real and the biographical and the televised to great effect but then there are the dreams of Spiegelman. Is there anything more boring than someone else’s dreams? Or worse still, analyses of those dreams? “The party is obviously the Nazi party. The hostess bears an uncanny resemblance to Odilo Globocnik, head of the Polish S.S. The sausage (a Polish sausage) is roughly the same shape as a map of occupied Poland!!”

But someone must be looking out for old Art. For once, a comic book you want is priced reasonably. Go on, get it, you know you’re going to.