109-413: Wild Pilgrimage is the third wordless novel of American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985), published in 1932. It was executed in 108 monochromatic wood engravings , printed alternately in black ink when representing reality and orange to represent the protagonist's fantasies. The story tells of a factory worker who abandons his workplace to seek a free life; on his travels he witnesses a lynching, assaults
218-543: A transgressive work in the vein of fellow underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson . Spiegelman's work also appeared in underground magazines such as Gothic Blimp Works , Bijou Funnies , Young Lust , Real Pulp , and Bizarre Sex , and were in a variety of styles and genres as Spiegelman sought his artistic voice . He also did a number of cartoons for men's magazines such as Cavalier , The Dude , and Gent . In 1972, Justin Green asked Spiegelman to do
327-610: A CD-ROM version of Maus with extensive supplementary material, and Spiegelman illustrated a 1923 poem by Joseph Moncure March called The Wild Party . Spiegelman contributed the essay "Getting in Touch With My Inner Racist" in the September 1, 1997, issue of Mother Jones . Spiegelman was comics editor of the New York Press in the early 1990s. He was comics editor of Details magazine in
436-534: A DVD update of the earlier CD-ROM. Library of America commissioned Spiegelman to edit the two-volume Lynd Ward : Six Novels in Woodcuts , which appeared in 2010, collecting all of Ward's wordless novels with an introduction and annotations by Spiegelman. The project led to a touring show in 2014 about wordless novels called Wordless! with live music by saxophonist Phillip Johnston . Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective débuted at Angoulême in 2012 and by
545-639: A Hungarian cavalryman disillusioned by his World War I experiences. Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová (1894–1980) was the first woman to produce a wordless novel, Z Mého Dětství (1929); later republished in French as Enfance (1930) and later republished in English as Childhood (1931), . Childhood represented middle-class life, rather than the working-class struggle found in the works of Masereel or Nückel. Bochořáková described her books as "cycles" rather than novels. Surrealist artist Max Ernst made
654-438: A Rego Park newspaper. After he graduated in 1965, Spiegelman's parents urged him to pursue the financial security of a career such as dentistry, but he chose instead to enroll at Harpur College to study art and philosophy. While there, he got a freelance art job at Topps, which provided him with an income for the next two decades. Spiegelman attended Harpur College from 1965 until 1968, where he worked as staff cartoonist for
763-499: A cartoon of a line of prisoners being led to the gas chambers; one stops to look at the corpses around him and says, "Ha! Ha! Ha! What's really hilarious is that none of this is actually happening!" To promote literacy in young children, Mouly encouraged publishers to publish comics for children. Disappointed by publishers' lack of response, from 2008 she self-published a line of easy readers called Toon Books , by artists such as Spiegelman, Renée French , and Rutu Modan , and promotes
872-507: A cartoonist, editor, and promoter of new talent. Chief among his other early cartooning influences include Will Eisner, John Stanley 's version of Little Lulu , Winsor McCay 's Little Nemo , George Herriman 's Krazy Kat , and Bernard Krigstein 's short strip " Master Race [ fr ] ". In the 1960s Spiegelman read in comics fanzines about graphic artists such as Frans Masereel , who had made wordless novels in woodcut . The discussions in those fanzines about making
981-517: A collaboration, "In the Dumps", with children's illustrator Maurice Sendak and an obituary to Charles M. Schulz , "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy". Another of Spiegelman's essays, "Forms Stretched to their Limits", in an issue was about Jack Cole , the creator of Plastic Man . It formed the basis for a book about Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (2001). The same year, Voyager Company published The Complete Maus ,
1090-690: A daughter, Nadja Rachel , born in 1987, and a son, Dashiell Alan, born in 1992. All comic-strip drawings must function as diagrams, simplified picture-words that indicate more than they show. Spiegelman suffers from a lazy eye , and thus lacks depth perception . He says his art style is "really a result of [his] deficiencies". His is a style of labored simplicity, with dense visual motifs which often go unnoticed upon first viewing. He sees comics as "very condensed thought structures", more akin to poetry than prose, which need careful, time-consuming planning that their seeming simplicity belies. Spiegelman's work prominently displays his concern with form, and pushing
1199-541: A decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker . He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman . In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters . Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which
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#17327981908311308-497: A defamation suit against Hellman for $ 1.5 million. Hellman published a "Legal Action Comics" benefit book to cover his legal costs, to which Spiegelman contributed a back-cover cartoon in which he relieves himself on a Rall-shaped urinal. In 1997, Spiegelman had his first children's book published, Open Me...I'm a Dog , with a narrator who tries to convince its readers that it is a dog via pop-ups and an attached leash. From 2000 to 2003, Spiegelman and Mouly edited three issues of
1417-406: A farmer's wife, educates himself with a hermit, and upon returning to the factory leads an unsuccessful workers' revolt. The protagonist finds himself battling opposing dualities such as freedom versus responsibility, the individual versus society, and love versus death. Ward simplified his approach after the more complex, novelistic story of his previous book, Madman's Drum (1930), returning to
1526-553: A glamorous husband. The book, Eve (1943), also uses "picture balloons" as He Done Her Wrong does. Inspired by mediaeval religious block books and working in an Art Deco style, American illustrator James Reid (1907–1989) produced one wordless novel, The Life of Christ (1930); due to the book's religious content, the Soviet Union barred its importation under its policies on religion . In 1938, Italian-American Giacomo Patri (1898–1978) produced his only wordless novel,
1635-482: A greater cinematic flow. The work inspired Ward to create a wordless novel of his own, Gods' Man (1929), which he followed the next year with Madman's Drum , a story with a much more complicated plot and developed characters than the first. Ward returned to the simpler, more streamlined style of the first book with Wild Pilgrimage . The 108 prints for Wild Pilgrimage were larger than in Ward's previous two books;
1744-585: A phase of increasing formal experimentation; the Apex Treasury of Underground Comics in 1974 quotes him: "As an art form the comic strip is barely in its infancy. So am I. Maybe we'll grow up together." The often-reprinted "Ace Hole, Midget Detective" of 1974 was a Cubist -style nonlinear parody of hardboiled crime fiction full of non sequiturs . "A Day at the Circuits" of 1975 is a recursive single-page strip about alcoholism and depression in which
1853-560: A single book. The books were designed to be mass-produced for a popular audience, in contrast to similar but shorter portfolios by artists such as Otto Dix , George Grosz , and Käthe Kollwitz , which were produced in limited editions for collectors. These portfolios of typically from eight to ten prints also were meant to be viewed in sequence. Wordless novels were longer, had more complex narratives, and were printed in sizes and dimensions comparable to those of novels. A large influence
1962-549: A slightly darker black field employing standard four-color printing inks with an overprinted clear varnish. In some situations, the ghost images only became visible when the magazine was tilted toward a light source. Spiegelman was critical of the Bush administration and the mass media over their handling of the September 11 attacks. Spiegelman did not renew his New Yorker contract after 2003. He later quipped that he regretted leaving when he did, as he could have left in protest when
2071-586: A studio cartooning class at the San Francisco Academy of Art . By the mid-1970s, the underground comix movement was encountering a slowdown. To give cartoonists a safe berth, Spiegelman co-edited the anthology Arcade with Bill Griffith , in 1975 and 1976. Arcade was printed by The Print Mint and lasted seven issues, five of which had covers by Robert Crumb . It stood out from similar publications by having an editorial plan, in which Spiegelman and Griffith attempt to show how comics connect to
2180-600: A three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals [ sic ]. He wanted to do one about racism, and at first considered a story with African Americans as mice and cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan . Instead, he turned to the Holocaust that his parents had survived. He titled the strip "Maus" and depicted the Jews as mice persecuted by die Katzen , which were Nazis as cats. The narrator related
2289-520: A young Philip Roth in his ability "to make the Jewish speech of several generations sound fresh and convincing". Spiegelman makes use of both old- and new-fashioned tools in his work. He prefers at times to work on paper on a drafting table, while at others he draws directly onto his computer using a digital pen and electronic drawing tablet, or mixes methods, employing scanners and printers. Harvey Kurtzman has been Spiegelman's strongest influence as
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#17327981908312398-532: The Biblia pauperum . These artists used the awkward look of woodcut images to express feelings of anguish. The wordless novel grew out of the Expressionist movement. The Belgian Frans Masereel (1889–1972) created the earliest example, 25 Images of a Man's Passion , in 1918. It was a commercial success and was followed by Passionate Journey , which at 167 images was Masereel's longest book. It
2507-618: The East Village Other and traveled to San Francisco for a few months in 1967, where the underground comix scene was just beginning to burgeon. In late winter 1968, Spiegelman suffered an intense nervous breakdown , which cut short his university studies. He has said that at the time he was taking LSD with great frequency. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital , and shortly after he exited it, his mother died by suicide following
2616-559: The Great American Novel in comics later acted as inspiration for him. Justin Green 's comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) motivated Spiegelman to open up and include autobiographical elements in his comics. Spiegelman acknowledges Franz Kafka as an early influence, whom he says he has read since the age of 12, and lists Vladimir Nabokov , William Faulkner , Gertrude Stein among
2725-732: The School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978, and continued until 1987, teaching alongside his heroes Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner . "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview", a Spiegelman essay, was published in Print . Another Spiegelman essay, "High Art Lowdown", was published in Artforum in 1990, critiquing the High/Low exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art . In
2834-452: The shooting at its headquarters earlier in the year, Spiegelman agreed to be one of the replacement hosts, along with other names in comics such as writer Neil Gaiman . Spiegelman retracted a cover he had submitted to a Gaiman-edited "saying the unsayable" issue of New Statesman when the management declined to print a strip of Spiegelman's. The strip, "Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist", depicts Muhammad, and Spiegelman believed
2943-399: The 16th century under artists such as Dürer , Holbein , and Amman , after which engraving techniques superseded woodcuts. Pioneered by Thomas Bewick , wood engraving enjoyed popularity beginning in the 18th century, until the method gave way by the 19th century to more advanced printing methods such as lithography . Post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin revived woodcut printing in
3052-543: The American atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll . The work tells of an American evacuation of an island for nuclear tests, where one family is left behind. Polish-American Si Lewen 's (1918– ) first book, The Parade: A Story in 55 Drawings (1957), won praise from Albert Einstein for its anti-war message. Canadian George Kuthan's Aphrodite's Cup (1964) is an erotic book drawn in an ancient Greek style. In
3161-712: The English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple worked for The New Yorker , which Spiegelman left to work on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), about his reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001. Spiegelman advocates for greater comics literacy. As an editor, a teacher, and a lecturer, Spiegelman has promoted better understanding of comics and has mentored younger cartoonists. Spiegelman's parents were Polish Jews Władysław (1906–1982) and Andzia (1912–1968) Spiegelman. His father
3270-707: The February 15, 1993, Valentine's Day issue and showed a black West Indian woman and a Hasidic man kissing. The cover caused turmoil at The New Yorker offices. Spiegelman intended it to reference the Crown Heights riot of 1991 in which racial tensions led to the murder of a Jewish yeshiva student. Twenty-one New Yorker covers by Spiegelman were published, and he also submitted some which were rejected for being too outrageous. Within The New Yorker ' s pages, Spiegelman contributed strips such as
3379-523: The Holocaust, Spiegelman's parents sent Rysio to Zawiercie to stay with an aunt, Tosha, with whom they believed he would be safe. In 1943, the aunt poisoned herself, along with Rysio and two other young family members in her care, so that the Nazis could not take them to the extermination camps . After the war, the Spiegelmans, unable to accept that Rysio was dead, searched orphanages all over Europe in
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3488-426: The U.S. with a lecture called "Comix 101", examining its history and cultural importance. He sees comics' low status in the late 20th century as having come down from where it was in the 1930s and 1940s, when comics "tended to appeal to an older audience of GIs and other adults". Following the advent of the censorious Comics Code Authority in the mid-1950s, Spiegelman sees comics' potential as having stagnated until
3597-512: The United States. In Spiegelman's Maus , from which the couple are best known, Spiegelman used the spellings "Vladek" and "Anja", which he believed would be easier for Americans to pronounce. The surname Spiegelman is German for "mirror man". In 1937, the Spiegelmans had one other son, Rysio (spelled "Richieu" in Maus ), who died before Art was born, at the age of five or six. During
3706-590: The action of reading comics and sees comics as functioning best when expressed as diagrams, icons, or symbols. Spiegelman has stated he does not see himself primarily as a visual artist, one who instinctively sketches or doodles. He has said he approaches his work as a writer as he lacks confidence in his graphic skills. He subjects his dialogue and visuals to constant revision—he reworked some dialogue balloons in Maus up to forty times. A critic in The New Republic compared Spiegelman's dialogue writing to
3815-421: The artwork drew attention, such as the prominent rear shots of the protagonist, the sort of imagery that prompted Susan Sontag to note Ward's work in her 1964 essay " Notes on 'Camp' " . Writer Sarah Boxer found the prominence of such imagery distracting. Spiegelman defends the book against critics who smirk at the Ward's artwork's affinity with the "fetishistic figures and landscape" of Thomas Hart Benton and
3924-402: The book in which "Ward became a master of his medium", praising in particular the quality of the clarity and richness of the artwork. Freedom and responsibility, individuality and society, and love and death are among the binaries the symbolic work abounds in. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman comments that Ward had mastered a fluid rhythm of pacing with his third book, achieving a flow that minimized
4033-713: The book-length Maus , about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, ethnic Poles as pigs, and citizens of the United States as dogs. It took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991. In 1992 it won a special Pulitzer Prize and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work. Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991. The oversized comics and graphics magazine helped introduce talents who became prominent in alternative comics , such as Charles Burns , Chris Ware , and Ben Katchor , and introduced several foreign cartoonists to
4142-726: The books to teachers and librarians for their educational value. Spiegelman's Jack and the Box was one of the inaugural books in 2008. In 2008 Spiegelman reissued Breakdowns in an expanded edition including "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" an autobiographical strip that had been serialized in the Virginia Quarterly Review from 2005. A volume drawn from Spiegelman's sketchbooks, Be A Nose , appeared in 2009. In 2011, MetaMaus followed—a book-length analysis of Maus by Spiegelman and Hillary Chute with
4251-414: The boundaries of what is and is not comics. Early in the underground comix era, Spiegelman proclaimed to Robert Crumb, "Time is an illusion that can be shattered in comics! Showing the same scene from different angles freezes it in time by turning the page into a diagram—an orthographic projection !" His comics experiment with time, space, recursion , and representation. He uses the word "decode" to express
4360-456: The broader realms of artistic and literary culture. Spiegelman's own work in Arcade tended to be short and concerned with formal experimentation. Arcade also introduced art from ages past, as well as contemporary literary pieces by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski . In 1975, Spiegelman moved back to New York City, which put most of the editorial work for Arcade on
4469-550: The children's comics anthology Little Lit , with contributions from Raw alumni and children's book authors and illustrators. Spiegelman lived close to the World Trade Center site , which was known as "Ground Zero" after the September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center . Immediately following the attacks Spiegelman and Mouly rushed to their daughter Nadja's school, where Spiegelman's anxiety served only to increase his daughter's apprehensiveness over
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4578-534: The college newspaper and edited a college humor magazine. After a summer internship when he was 18, Topps hired him for Gelman's Product Development Department as a creative consultant making trading cards and related products in 1966, such as the Wacky Packages series of parodic trading cards begun in 1967. Spiegelman began selling self-published underground comix on street corners in 1966. He had cartoons published in underground publications such as
4687-400: The commercial comics industry in the early 1950s to do government and educational work. He returned in the 1970s when the atmosphere had changed and his readers and peers seemed more receptive to his ambitions. In 1978, he began a career of creating book-length comics, the first of which was A Contract with God ; the book was marketed as a "graphic novel", a term that became standard towards
4796-522: The company had given him. The relationship was nevertheless strained over issues of credit and ownership of the original artwork. In 1989 Topps auctioned off pieces of art Spiegelman had created rather than returning them to him, and Spiegelman broke the relation. In 1990, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. In 1991, Raw Vol. 2, No. 3 was published; it was to be the last issue. The closing chapter of Maus appeared not in Raw but in
4905-415: The death of her only surviving brother. In 1971, after several visits, Spiegelman moved to San Francisco and became a part of the countercultural underground comix movement that had been developing there. Some of the comix he produced during this period include The Compleat Mr. Infinity (1970), a ten-page booklet of explicit comic strips, and The Viper Vicar of Vice, Villainy and Vickedness (1972),
5014-906: The discussions turned to talk of the Great American Novel being made in comics. These discussions inspired cartoonist Art Spiegelman (b. 1948), who in 1973 made a four-page strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", in an Expressionist style inspired by Ward's work. Spiegelman later incorporated the strip into his graphic novel Maus (1992). While graphic novels generally use captions and dialogue, cartoonists such as Eric Drooker , Peter Kuper , Thomas Ott , Brian Ralph , Masashi Tanaka , Lewis Trondheim , and Billy Simms have made wordless graphic novels. As Gross did in He Done Her Wrong , Hendrik Dorgathen [ de ] 's wordless oeuvre uses textless word balloons containing symbols, icons, and other images. The influence of
5123-451: The early 1960s, he contributed to early fanzines such as Smudge and Skip Williamson 's Squire , and in 1962 —while at Russell Sage Junior High School, where he was an honors student —he produced the Mad -inspired fanzine Blasé . He was earning money from his drawing by the time he reached high school and sold artwork to the original Long Island Press and other outlets. His talent caught
5232-680: The early 21st century, Canadian George Walker made wordless woodcut novels, beginning with Book of Hours (2010), about the lives of those in the World Trade Center complex just before the September 11 attacks . The popularity of wordless novels peaked around 1929 to 1931, when " talkies " were introduced and began to supersede silent films. In the 1930s the Nazis in Germany suppressed and detained many printmakers and banned Masereel's works as " degenerate art ". Following World War II, US censors suppressed books with socialist views, including
5341-480: The end of 2014 had traveled to Paris, Cologne, Vancouver, New York, and Toronto. The book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps , which complemented the show, appeared in 2013. In 2015, after six writers refused to sit on a panel at the PEN American Center in protest of the planned "freedom of expression courage award" for the satirical French periodical Charlie Hebdo following
5450-407: The end of the 20th century. Eisner called Ward "perhaps the most provocative graphic storyteller" of the 20th century. He wrote that Ward's Vertigo (1937) required considerable investment from readers in order to fill in the story between images. Interest in the wordless novel revived with the rise of the graphic novel. Comics fans discussed the works of Masereel and others in fanzines, and
5559-490: The example of the wordless novel inspired cartoonists such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman to create book-length non-genre comics—" graphic novels ". Cartoonists such as Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels. Wordless novels use sequences of expressive images to tell a story. Socialist themes of struggle against capitalism are common; scholar Perry Willett calls these themes "a unifying element of
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#17327981908315668-602: The eyes of United Features Syndicate , who offered him the chance to produce a syndicated comic strip . Dedicated to the idea of art as expression, he turned down this commercial opportunity. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan beginning in 1963. He met Woody Gelman , the art director of Topps Chewing Gum Company , who encouraged Spiegelman to apply to Topps after graduating from high school. At age 15, Spiegelman received payment for his work from
5777-406: The farmer's wife, the man is forced off the farm. He finds refuge with a hermit, who allows him to stay in his cottage and teaches the man to grow fruits and vegetables. The man educates himself with the hermit's books. He finds himself in a reverie in which he and the hermit battle a slave-owning capitalist. The man returns to his former place of employment and rouses a workers' rebellion. During
5886-572: The fray, he fantasizes that he decapitates his employer's head; when he raises it, he discovers the head to be his own. Awakening from the fantasy, he is felled in the midst of the battle. Born in Chicago, Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was a son of Methodist minister Harry F. Ward (1873–1966), a social activist and the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union . Throughout his career, Ward displayed in his work
5995-517: The genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US. Following World War II, new examples of wordless novels became increasingly rare, and early works went out of print. Interest began to revive in the 1960s when the American comics fandom subculture came to see wordless novels as prototypical book-length comics. In the 1970s,
6104-407: The genre's aesthetic". In both formal and moral aspects, they draw from Expressionist graphics, theatre , and film . Wordless novelists such as Frans Masereel appropriated the awkward aesthetic of mediaeval woodcuts to express their anguish and revolutionary political ideas and used simple, traditional iconography. Text is restricted to title and chapter pages, except where text is a part of
6213-473: The genre; themes of oppression under capitalism were prominent, a pattern set early by Masereel. At age thirteen, Polish-French artist Balthus drew a wordless story about his cat; it was published in 1921 with an introduction by poet Rainer Maria Rilke . In Destiny (1926), Otto Nückel (1888–1955) produced a work with greater nuance and atmosphere than Masereel's bombastic works; where Masereel told tales of Man's struggle against Society, Nückel told of
6322-419: The graphic novel. Art Spiegelman Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman ( / ˈ s p iː ɡ əl m ən / SPEE -gəl-mən ; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman , is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus . His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent
6431-433: The homoerotic art of Tom of Finland , saying the book's "passion and even its off sexual subcurrents are among its strengths", and calls it "in some ways the most accessible and satisfying" of Ward's books. Wordless novel The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques,
6540-441: The hope of finding him. Spiegelman talked of having a sort of sibling rivalry with his "ghost brother"; he felt unable to compete with an "ideal" brother who "never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble". Of 85 Spiegelman relatives alive at the beginning of World War II , only 13 are known to have survived the Holocaust. He began cartooning in 1960 and imitated the style of his favorite comic books , such as Mad . In
6649-535: The influence of his father's interest in social injustice. The younger Ward was early drawn to art, and contributed art and text to high school and college newspapers. After graduating from university in 1926, Ward married writer May McNeer and the couple left for an extended honeymoon in Europe. Ward spent a year studying wood engraving in Leipzig , Germany, where he encountered German Expressionist art and read
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#17327981908316758-722: The intention of creating a book-length work based on his father's recollections of the Holocaust Spiegelman began to interview his father again in 1978 and made a research visit in 1979 to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where his parents had been imprisoned by the Nazis . The book, Maus , appeared one chapter at a time as an insert in Raw beginning with the second issue in December 1980. Spiegelman's father did not live to see its completion; he died on 18 August 1982. Spiegelman learned in 1985 that Steven Spielberg
6867-483: The ire of political cartoonist Ted Rall in 1999. In "The King of Comix", an article in The Village Voice , Rall accused Spiegelman of the power to "make or break" a cartoonist's career in New York, while denigrating Spiegelman as "a guy with one great book in him". Cartoonist Danny Hellman responded by sending a forged email under Rall's name to 30 professionals; the prank escalated until Rall launched
6976-521: The issue was banned from Indigo – Chapters stores in Canada. Spiegelman criticized American media for refusing to reprint the cartoons they reported on at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015. Spiegelman is a non-practicing Jew and considers himself "a-Zionist"—neither pro- nor anti- Zionist ; he has called Israel "a sad, failed idea". He told Peanuts creator Charles Schulz he
7085-479: The issue. Called "Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage", the article surveyed the sometimes dire effect political cartooning has for its creators, ranging from Honoré Daumier , who spent time in prison for his satirical work; to George Grosz , who faced exile. To Indigo the article seemed to promote the continuance of racial caricature. An internal memo advised Indigo staff to tell people: "the decision
7194-525: The late 1990s; in 1997 he began assigning comics journalism pieces in Details to a number of his cartoonist associates, including Joe Sacco , Peter Kuper , Ben Katchor , Peter Bagge , Charles Burns , Kaz , Kim Deitch , and Jay Lynch . The magazine published these works of journalism in comics form throughout 1998 and 1999, helping to legitimize the form in popular perception. Spiegelman's influence and connections in New York cartooning circles drew
7303-530: The late-19th century, favouring it for its primitivist effect. Early in the 20th century, woodcut artists such as Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) and Max Klinger (1857–1920) published portfolios of woodcuts, thematically linked by themes of social injustice. Expressionist graphic artists such as Max Beckmann (1884–1950), Otto Dix (1891–1969), Kollwitz, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) were inspired by an early-20th-century revival of interest in medieval graphic arts—in particular Biblical woodcut prints such as
7412-433: The life of an individual woman. Destiny appeared in a US edition in 1930 and sold well there. Clément Moreau (1903–1988) first tried his hand at the genre with the six-plate Youth Without Means in 1928. István Szegedi-Szüts (1892–1959), a Hungarian immigrant to England, made a wordless book in brush and ink called My War (1931). In simple artwork reminiscent of Japanese brush painting , Szegedi-Szüts told of
7521-425: The linocut White Collar . It chronicles the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and was intended to motivate white-collar workers to unionize. It also deals with controversial topics such as abortion, accessibility of health care for the poor, and loss of Christian faith. From 1948 to 1951, Canadian Laurence Hyde (1914–1987) produced his single wordless novel, the woodcut Southern Cross , in response to
7630-470: The magazine ran a pro- invasion of Iraq piece later in the year. Spiegelman said his parting from The New Yorker was part of his general disappointment with "the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush era". He said he felt like he was in "internal exile" following the September 11 attacks as the U.S. media had become "conservative and timid" and did not welcome the provocative art that he felt
7739-421: The need for the reader to spend time deciphering images before moving to the next page, while encouraging multiple readings and interpretations. At the same time, Spiegelman writes, the images reward a closer look on rereading. Ward's images offer a diversity of textures, moods, detail, and composition, and mix in influence from movements such as American Regionalism and Futurism . The seeming homoeroticism in
7848-445: The need to create. Nevertheless, Spiegelman asserted he left not over political differences, as had been widely reported, but because The New Yorker was not interested in doing serialized work, which he wanted to do with his next project. Spiegelman responded to the September 11 attacks with In the Shadow of No Towers , commissioned by German newspaper Die Zeit , where it appeared throughout 2003. The Jewish Daily Forward
7957-545: The original printing of the book itself measured 10 by 7 inches (25 cm × 18 cm). The "reality" portions are printed in black ink, and the "fantasy" segments in orange. The book saw print in November 1932, published by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas . Unlike Ward's previous books, which had titles between scenes, Wild Pilgrimage provides the reader with no textual cues. In 1937 Irvin Haas called Wild Pilgrimage
8066-409: The panel borders and "dialogue balloons" show in images what the characters are saying. Cartoonist and illustrator William Gropper 's Alay-oop (1930) tells of three entertainers' disappointed dreams. In Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts (1933) Charles Turzak documented the American president . Animator Myron Waldman (1908–2006) wrote a wordless tale of a plump young woman looking for
8175-460: The print run was unusable due to printing errors, an experience that motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process. She took courses in offset printing and bought a printing press for her loft, on which she was to print parts of a new magazine she insisted on launching with Spiegelman. With Mouly as publisher, Spiegelman and Mouly co-edited Raw starting in July 1980. The first issue
8284-471: The reader follows the character through multiple never-ending pathways. "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" of 1976 is made up of cut-out panels from the soap-opera comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D. refashioned in such a way as to defy coherence. In 1973, Spiegelman edited a pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations and dedicated it to his mother. Co-edited with Bob Schneider, it was called Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations . In 1974–1975, he taught
8393-457: The rejection was censorship, though the magazine asserted it never intended to run the cartoon. In 2021, Literary Hub announced that Spiegelman was co-creating a work Street Cop with author Robert Coover . Spiegelman married Françoise Mouly on July 12, 1977, in a New York city hall ceremony. They remarried later in the year after Mouly converted to Judaism to please Spiegelman's father. Mouly and Spiegelman have two children together:
8502-574: The rise of the graphic novel revived interest amongst readers and publishers in the early 21st century. "... Ward's roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree ..." There have been sporadic examples of textless comics (see Pantomime comics ) throughout the medium's history. In the US, there were comic strips such as Otto Soglow 's The Little King , begun in 1931, and Carl Anderson 's Henry , begun in 1932. German cartoonist E. O. Plauen 's wordless domestic comic strip Father and Son (1934–37)
8611-457: The rise of underground comix in the late 1960s. He taught courses in the history and aesthetics of comics at schools such as the School of Visual Arts in New York. As co-editor of Raw , he helped propel the careers of younger cartoonists whom he mentored, such as Chris Ware, and published the work of his School of Visual Arts students, such as Kaz , Drew Friedman , and Mark Newgarden . Some of
8720-479: The scene, such as in signs. The storytelling tends to be melodramatic, and the stories tend to focus on struggles against social oppression in which characters are silenced by economic, political, and other social forces. The characters are clearly delineated as good or evil—the good drawn sympathetically and the evil with the contempt of the artist's moral indignation. Most wordless novelists were not prolific; few besides Masereel and Lynd Ward produced more than
8829-450: The second volume of the graphic novel, which appeared later that year with the subtitle And Here My Troubles Began . Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work of comics, including an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Hired by Tina Brown as a contributing artist in 1992, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years. His first cover appeared on
8938-653: The shoulders of Griffith and his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin . This, combined with distribution problems and retailer indifference, led to the magazine's 1976 demise. Spiegelman swore he would never edit another magazine. Françoise Mouly , an architectural student on a hiatus from her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, arrived in New York in 1974. While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade . Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman, when Spiegelman
9047-725: The silent collage novel Une semaine de bonté in 1934. Following World War II, Werner Gothein [ de ] (1890–1968), a member of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke , produced The Tightrope Walker and the Clown (1949). In 1926, the American Lynd Ward (1905–1985) moved to Leipzig to study graphic arts; while there, he discovered the works of Masereel and Otto Nückel. He produced six such works of his own; he preferred to call them "pictorial narratives". The first, Gods' Man (1929),
9156-492: The simplicity of his first, Gods' Man (1929). Wild Pilgrimage achieves more fluid pacing and varied imagery than the first two books, incorporating the influence of art movements such as American Regionalism and Futurism . A factory worker leaves his place of work to live a free life. He travels deep into the woods, where he witnesses a lynching . Deeper in the woods, he finds farm work, but it does not last long—when discovered attempting to enact his sexual fantasies on
9265-496: The situation. Spiegelman and Mouly created a cover for the September 24 issue of The New Yorker which at first glance appears to be totally black, but upon close examination it reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. Mouly positioned the silhouettes so that the North Tower's antenna breaks into the "w" of The New Yorker ' s logo. The towers were printed in black on
9374-522: The story to a mouse named " Mickey ". With this story Spiegelman felt he had found his voice. Seeing Green's revealingly autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary while in-progress in 1971 inspired Spiegelman to produce "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", an expressionistic work that dealt with his mother's suicide; it appeared in 1973 in Short Order Comix # 1, which he edited. Spiegelman's work thereafter went through
9483-516: The terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany. The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice . The first such book
9592-555: The wake of the success of the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls, Spiegelman created the parodic trading card series Garbage Pail Kids for Topps in 1985. Similar to the Wacky Packages series, the gross-out factor of the cards was controversial with parent groups, and its popularity started a gross-out fad among children. Spiegelman called Topps his " Medici " for the autonomy and financial freedom working for
9701-470: The wordless novel The Sun (1919) by Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972). Ward returned to the United States and freelanced his illustrations. In 1929, he came across German artist Otto Nückel 's wordless novel Destiny (1926) in New York City. Nückel's only work in the genre, Destiny told of the life and death of a prostitute in a style inspired by that of Masereel, but with
9810-686: The wordless novel is prominent in Drooker's Flood (1992) and Kuper's The System (1997), both metaphorical stories that focus on social themes. Since 2011, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book have awarded the annual Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel, a cash prize established by Ward's daughters to highlight their father's influence on the development of
9919-528: The work published in Raw was originally turned in as class assignments. Spiegelman has described himself politically as "firmly on the left side of the secular-fundamentalist divide" and a " 1st Amendment absolutist". As a supporter of free speech , Spiegelman is opposed to hate speech laws. He wrote a critique in Harper's on the controversial Muhammad cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten in 2006;
10028-399: The work-in-progress, Pantheon agreed to release a collection of the first six chapters. The volume was titled Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History . The book found a large audience, in part because it was sold in bookstores rather than in direct-market comic shops, which by the 1980s had become the dominant outlet for comic books. Spiegelman began teaching at
10137-507: The works of Lynd Ward, on whom the FBI kept files over his socialist sympathies; this censorship has made early editions of wordless novels scarce collectors' items in the US. By the 1940s, most artists had given up on the genre. The most devoted practitioners, Masereel and Ward, moved on to other work for which they became better known; Masereel's obituary did not even mention his wordless novels. Many wordless novels remained out of print until
10246-535: The world of comics and helped her find work as a colorist for Marvel Comics . After returning to the U.S. in 1977, Mouly ran into visa problems, which the couple solved by getting married. The couple began to make yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends. Mouly assisted in putting together the lavish, oversized collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns in 1977. Breakdowns suffered poor distribution and sales, and 30% of
10355-439: The writers whose work "stayed with" him. He cites non-narrative avant-garde filmmakers from whom he has drawn heavily, including Ken Jacobs , Stan Brakhage , and Ernie Gehr , and other filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and the makers of The Twilight Zone . Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the comics medium and comics literacy. He believes the medium echoes the way the human brain processes information. He has toured
10464-453: Was accessible to socially conscious artists who wanted to tell wordless stories of the working classes. In 15th-century medieval Europe, woodcut block books were printed as religious guides; particularly popular was the Ars moriendi . The early 16th century saw block books disappear in favour of books printed with the movable type of Gutenberg 's presses. Woodcut printing persisted into
10573-470: Was also the most commercially successful, particularly in Germany, where copies of his books sold in the hundreds of thousands throughout the 1920s and had introductions by writers such as Max Brod , Hermann Hesse , and Thomas Mann . Masereel's books drew strongly on Expressionist theatre and film in their exaggerated but representational artwork with strong contrasts of black and white. Masereel's commercial success led other artists to try their hands at
10682-527: Was born Zeev Spiegelman, with the Hebrew name Zeev ben Avraham. Władysław was his Polish name, and Władek (or Vladek in anglicized form) was a diminutive of this name. He was also known as Wilhelm under the German occupation , and Anglicized his name to William upon immigration to the United States. His mother was born Andzia Zylberberg, with the Hebrew name Hannah. She changed her name to Anna upon immigrating to
10791-406: Was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to
10900-436: Was his most popular. Ward used wood engraving rather than woodcutting and varied image sizes from page to page. Gods' Man sold 20,000 copies, and other American artists followed up on this success with their own wordless novels in the 1930s. Cartoonist Milt Gross 's He Done Her Wrong (1930) was a parody of the genre; the book uses varying panel designs akin to those of comics: the action sometimes takes place outside
11009-437: Was introduced to Europe in the 15th century. It requires an artist to draw or transfer an image to a printing block; the areas not to be printed (the white areas) are cut away, leaving raised areas to which ink is applied to make prints. The monochrome prints were usually in black ink, and occasionally in a different colour such as sienna or orange. Relief printing is an inexpensive but labour-intensive printing technique; it
11118-427: Was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world." In response to the cartoons, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promoted an Iranian cartoon contest seeking anti-Semitic cartoons. The organizers of the contest intended to highlight what they perceived as Western double standards surrounding anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Spiegelman produced
11227-537: Was popular in Germany, and was collected in three volumes. Antonio Prohías 's textless Mad magazine feature Spy vs. Spy began in 1961. Cartoonist Will Eisner (1917–2005) first came upon the work of Lynd Ward in 1938. Eisner was an early pioneer in the American comic book industry and saw in Ward's work a greater potential for comics. Eisner's ambitions were rebuffed by his peers, who saw comics as no more than low-status entertainment. Eisner withdrew from
11336-546: Was producing an animated film about Jewish mice who escape persecution in Eastern Europe by fleeing to the United States. Spiegelman was sure the film, An American Tail (1986), was inspired by Maus and became eager to have his unfinished book come out before the movie to avoid comparisons. He struggled to find a publisher until in 1986, after the publication in The New York Times of a rave review of
11445-509: Was subtitled "The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides". While it included work from such established underground cartoonists as Crumb and Griffith, Raw focused on publishing artists who were virtually unknown, avant-garde cartoonists such as Charles Burns , Lynda Barry , Chris Ware , Ben Katchor , and Gary Panter , and introduced English-speaking audiences to translations of foreign works by José Muñoz , Chéri Samba , Joost Swarte , Yoshiharu Tsuge , Jacques Tardi , and others. With
11554-510: Was the Belgian Frans Masereel 's 25 Images of a Man's Passion , published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man , which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong . Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity,
11663-483: Was the most popular silent visual medium of the time: silent films . Panning, zooming, slapstick, and other filmic techniques are found in the books; Ward said that in creating a wordless novel, he first had to visualize it in his head as a silent film. Typically, wordless novels used relief printing techniques such as woodcuts , wood engraving , metalcuts , or linocuts . One of the oldest printing techniques, relief printing has its origins in 8th-century China and
11772-599: Was the only American periodical to serialize the feature. The collected work appeared in September 2004 as an oversized board book of two-page spreads which had to be turned on end to read. In the June 2006 edition of Harper's Magazine Spiegelman had an article published on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy ; some interpretations of Islamic law prohibit the depiction of Muhammad . The Canadian chain of booksellers Indigo refused to sell
11881-457: Was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After she read "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course. Spiegelman introduced Mouly to
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