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

Overview

“Comics echo the way the brain works,” says Art Spiegelman. “People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.”

Spiegelman, the famed comic book artist, took 13 years to write MAUS, a Holocaust narrative with Jews recast as mice and Nazis as cats. The graphic novel won him the 1992 Pulitzer Prize as well as a fair share of controversy, but success and infamy were nothing new; over a decade as a contributing artist for The New Yorker he had created some of the magazine’s most iconic (and scandalous) covers.

As a passionate advocate for 'post-literacy', the author is appearing in Melbourne to take his audience on a tour of the evolution of comics over history, and to underline their relevance in the here and now.