Author of ’Maus‘ Holocaust Comics to Speak at Ithaca College

Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize--winning cartoonist and author of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the two-volume story of a Holocaust survivor rendered in comic book form, will give a lecture on Tuesday, March 27. Spiegelman, this year’s distinguished speaker in the humanities, will begin his talk at 7:30 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Spiegelman’s books will be available for sale and autographing.

A cofounder and editor of the avant-garde graphics and comics magazine Raw, Spiegelman has had his work published in the New York Times and the Village Voice, and his drawings have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in galleries across the United States and abroad. He has also published a children’s book, Open Me . . . I’m a Dog, and has taught the history and aesthetics of comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is a contributing editor of the New Yorker.

He is best known, however, for publishing the story of his father’s Holocaust experiences. The two volumes of the work, which appeared in 1986 and 1991, respectively, unfold like a historical narrative but are illustrated like comic books, with Nazis depicted as cats and Jews as mice. The two books --- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began --- interweave the tale of horror narrated by Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, with a son trying to come to grips with his own failings in dealing with his difficult father. In 1992 Spiegelman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in a category created especially for his unique genre. (The judges recognized the quality of Maus but realized the work didn’t fit into the biography, editorial cartoon, or fiction categories.)

In his talk, "Comix 101," Spiegelman will discuss the history and evolution of comics, emphasizing the value of the medium and its claim to being taken seriously. "Comics echo the way the brain works," he says. "People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs."

The Distinguished Speaker in the Humanities Series, sponsored by the School of Humanities and Sciences, is now in its second year. The inaugural speaker was Robert Pinsky, the 39th poet laureate of the United States.

For more information call the School of Humanities and Sciences at 274-3102.