Art Spiegelman: What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?

7PM

The Koffler Centre of the Arts presents a remarkable evening with the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist/illustrator, comic book legend and author of Maus and Maus II.

Art Spiegelman’s comics are best known for their shifting cartoon styles and sometimes controversial contents. In his talk What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?, Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. In our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.”

About Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the bookshelves. As part of the underground comix subculture of the 60s and 70s, Spiegelman created Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids; in 1980 he founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine; and in 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus – which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. In 2004, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers was selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004; in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People; and in 2006 he was inducted into the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2007, and in 2008 played himself on an episode of The Simpsons.

Spiegelman won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2011, marking only the third time an American has received the honor. The honor also included a retrospective exhibition of his artwork, shown in the Pompidou Center and traveled to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum in NYC, and the last stop at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

This December, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) will pay homage to Art Spiegelman with an exhibition highlighting the breadth of his career. Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective opens at the AGO on December 20, 2014, and runs to March 14, 2015. Embracing the belief that comics are a medium for personal expression, Spiegelman once noted, “Spiegel means mirror in German, so what sounds like one more Jewish name co-mixes languages to form a sentence: Art mirrors man.” Spiegelman has drawn inspiration from a wide range of sources in his work including politics, the Holocaust, Cubism and hard-boiled detective fiction. Maus, a two-volume graphic novel  that recounts his parents’ life in Nazi-occupied Poland and later at Auschwitz, was the first and only work of its genre to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1992. The AGO’s presentation of Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective will display original manuscripts of Maus, rarely seen due to their fragility. The exhibition also features 300 works on paper ranging from trading cards to magazine covers. For more information, please visit ago.net.

Image at top: Art Spiegelman © Enno Kapitza – Agentur Focus