Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form - and how it formed him! This book traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. The second part presents a fascimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought-after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s. Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being.