11/27/2007

portrait of the artist as a young %@?*!

The Fall 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review included a special thematic section titled "The Holocaust: Remembrance and Forgetting." This included Tony Kushner's essay on Hans Krasa's opera for children, Brundibar, Lawrence Wechsler's "A Berlin Epiphany: On Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe," and an except from Michael Chabon's novel in which Israel does not exist. And Art Spiegelman's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!: The Origin of MAUS," which Spiegelman introduces (through a blurb on the contents page): "It all started bakc in '71, when my pal, Justin Green, invited me to do a short strip for an underground comic called Funny Aminals. I had some notion for a story about a cartoon mouse caught in a mouse trap drawn in a 50s horror comic style, but it didn't pan out. I was totally stuck til I sat in one of Ken Jacobs' film classes at Harpur College."

No comments: