“I feel like they want a kinder, gentler Holocaust to present.” —Art Spiegelman

Two years ago, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee banned the first—and only—Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel from their 8th grade curriculum: Art Spiegelman's Maus.

"suffering doesn't make people good, it just makes them suffer"

But Art Spiegelman literally write a book about how comparing people to mice is a horrifying bad idea. He opened Maus with this:

The IDF did not get the memo.

self portrait/"author's photo" by Art Spiegelman, 1989

Mark Beyer (American, 1950—)

Two panels from "Nothing", published in RAW no. 6 ("The Graphix Magazine that Overestimates the Taste of the American Public"), eds. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, May 1984

JOMP BPC - November 16th - Graphic Novels

all the graphic novels I've got on my TBR 💕 I might dedicate some time to reading them in the new year

Free underground comix samples on JSTOR!

RISD's Adler Archive of Underground Comix collection on JSTOR includes sample scans from comix from the 1960s to the 2000s by artists such as Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Dori Seda, Art Spiegelman, and many others, as well as anthology titles such as Arcade Comics Revue, RAW, Weirdo, Young Lust, and Zap. Free to download for everyone, no login required!

My Comics Collection - part 2

Jesse Jacobs, Lorenzo Mattotti, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Art Spiegelman

comic book shop put aside a copy of maus for me we are so in it guys

"The Complete Maus" - Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman's Maus is one of Variety's “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”—have you?

Two extraordinary books. Sixteen pages of bonus material—including lithographs and comix—designed by the award-winning artist. One incredible box set.

Y'know Art Spiegelman? The guy who wrote Maus? What if I told you he was indirectly responsible for one of the worst films I've ever seen hands down?

Often some of the best films come from unexpected places. Cult favorite Boondock Saints was never supposed to be made and yet some how a no budget Boston masterpiece captured the hearts and minds of college dorm rooms everywhere. Spaghetti Westerns were low budget castoffs of a genre no longer en vogue, and yet produced hands down some of the best cowboy films we've ever seen. My point is that often movies that come from unexpected sources have that spark that conventional productions don't. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, on the other hand, may come from an unexpected source, but is an exception to this rule.

It started when Topps, a chewing gum/collector card company created their own twisted parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids out of spite after a licensing agreement went sour. Speigelman was one of the first designers on the project, and he and his team (including James Warhola, nephew of Andy Warhol) put out a series of wacky collector cards depicting what were basically softcore ratfink reimaginings of the Cabbage Patch line that proved to be so popular as to be banned in schools. The cards did so well that just a couple years later Topps produced the live action disaster that was the Garbage Pail Kids Movie.

This is a film completely irredeemable in almost every way. Part of my distaste for it comes from the fact that rather than pull a Gremlins and have these walking aberrations actually cause chaos, the film tries to somehow soften them into something that could deliver a moral to the story. Not that there's much story. The plot is paper thin, to the point that the motivator for the Garbage Pail Kids (lost Garbage Pail Comrades) is hastily wrapped up with an "I guess they're dead!" (???????) and we're whisked away to an equally uninspiring plot point where the Garbage Pail Kids do more stuff we don't care about.

Obviously I don't think we should be demanding prestige writing from the series known for figureheads like Messy Tessie and Greaser Greg, but dear lord not a single character in this film is even narrowly sympathetic. The bully/antagonist force in this sucks, and yet frankly you sort of root for them to end these creeps. The main character (played by Sean Astins brother apparently?) is written as a peeping tom who wholly deserves the sewer dunking he gets, and none of the other characters are much better. The Garbage Pail Kids aren't even fun in their mischief, just awful to look at and listen to. There's a segment where the main love interest (who is grooming Astin's character, by the way) has a block of dialog dedicated to how horrible the Garbage Pail Kids are, and though its certainly cast as an unfeeling villain speech, she's 100% correct in her assessment. Nobody in this movie has positive traits. I would kill Foul Phil with a ball peen hammer.

One of the most jarring parts of this film for me was--in a fairly innocuous scene--the presence of a MACVSOG patch the costumers stuck on Astin's jacket. What sort of secret messaging is there in the Garbage Pail Kids Movie that they're alluding to the CIA's special operations group that was tied to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and US operations in Laos?

Don't watch this film. If I ever see Foul Phil again it's on sight.

100 of time greatest comics (2014)