Description: The definitive critical appraisal of the great comics artist's six-decade career as a pioneer, curator, and theorist
Brief description: Lee Konstantinou is associate professor of English literature at University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of the novel Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire and the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, and coeditor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace.
Review Quotes: This collection of thirteen essays explores the life and work of Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir Maus. . . . Following a biographical essay, the book is divided into four sections: 'Modernism and Form, ' 'Radical Politics, ' 'Mediating Memory, ' and 'Comics History.' Among the standout contributions, Georgiana Banita looks at Spiegelman's use of wordless comics to reflect modem art's habit of frustrating an audience's access to the past. Kent Worcester examines Spiegelman's 9/11 art in the context of a left-wing man who lived within blocks of the Twin Towers and had antipathy toward both jihadists and the Bush administration. Sarah Hamblin reviews RAW, a pivotal publication that set off the alternative comics culture of the 1980s. Harriet Earle considers Maus alongside Holocaust films, and Cara Koehler sets Spiegelman's work within the history of immigration comics. . . . Highly recommended.--C. E. Neumann "CHOICE"