What the %@&! Happened to Comics?

A lecture with Art Spiegelman

Sponsored by Philadelphia Alumni Writers House

Wednesday, November 10, 2010
8 p.m.
Writers House website

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly 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. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America.

Spiegelman’s comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity and controversial content. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for "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.”

In 2005, Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and in 2006, he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and—the American equivalent—played himself on an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2008.

This event is co-sponsored by the Holocaust Remembrance Committee, the Klehr Center for Jewish Life, The Office of the Provost, Brooks College House and the Departments of Judaic Studies, Art & Art History, History, English and The Center for Liberal Arts and Society.

The Franklin & Marshall bookstore will be on hand to sell books.

This event is open to the public.

Free; no tickets required.