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

Art Spiegelman has almost singlehandedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative MAUS – which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity and controversial content.

‘Art Spiegelman … to the comics world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others,’ wrote The New York Times. ‘It would almost be impossible to overstate the influence of Maus among other artists.’

Spiegelman will take us on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of the medium and why it should not be ignored.

Spiegelman believes that in our post-literate culture, the importance of the comic is on the rise. ‘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.’

This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the world’s great artists and innovators, speaking in passionate defence of the medium he has redefined.

Art Spiegelman appears in association with the Sydney Opera House and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.