Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is Art Spiegelman looking at the comics form and at how it formed him, published by Pantheon in 2008 at oversized broadsheet dimensions.

The book opens with the new work the title names: a sequence of vignettes about the people, events and comics that made him, running from a MAD-obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult watching his parents' memories of Auschwitz reach his own son.

The second half is a facsimile of Breakdowns itself, the collection of his 1970s comics that had been out of print and hard to find for decades, and which is what set the recollections going in the first place. It is the book where formally ambitious comics arrived: cubist experiments, an essay on humour in comic form, the genre-warping detective story "Ace Hole, Midget Detective", and the original three-page "Maus" that the later book grew out of.

Taken together it works as a memoir, a manifesto and a piece of comics history at once, and it is much stranger and more technical than Maus.