Modernist Disruptions

This chapter explores Art Spiegelman's allegiance to a modernist aesthetic and his integrity as “fine” artist with faux mass-cultural credentials. It presents a wide net across Spiegelman's career as avant-garde cartoonist, editor, and historian to argue that a key impetus of his contributions on all these fronts is the desire to create striking assemblages in the tradition of modernist collage. The chapter seeks to understand both Spiegelman's pre-Maus work and his engagements with the legacy of modernist aesthetics, which played an important role in his artistic development. It then addresses this gap in Spiegelman's critical reception to argue that in many of his early works, Spiegelman employs the key modernist aesthetic of formal juxtaposition to jar and unsettle, while simultaneously drawing new connections by means of visual parataxis. In tracing Spiegelman's overlapping modernist efforts over twenty years, the chapter aims to show how he extended the logic of visual parataxis to radically reshape the possibilities of comics, their presentation, and their cultural cachet. It first investigates some of Spiegelman's early experimental comics, including “Don't Get Around Much Anymore” and “Ace Hole: Midget Detective,” as well as his collection Breakdowns (1977), which brought many of these strips together. Finally, the chapter shows how Spiegelman's attachment to the practice of visual parataxis combined his interest in the formal logic of comics—which relies on sequence and juxtaposition—with elements of modernist art, particularly the effects derived from the play of forms.