Comix 101
Art Spiegelman
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Artist
and Author of MAUS
6:00 PM, Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Irvine
Auditorium, 3401 Spruce Street
Philadelphia
Tickets: $8; $5 all students.
To order, please call 215.898.3900
(Annenberg
Center Box Office). Tickets will
also be available at Irvine Auditorium starting at 4:00
pm the day of the event (cash only at Irvine).
Seating is unreserved. Public and
classes (including high school) invited.
 Some
of the most innovative novelists of our day are cartoonists.
Within that heady league, Art Spiegelman is a towering
figure. His best-selling Maus
and Maus II brought comic books out of the
toy closet and onto the literature shelves. It would
be difficult to overstate his influence on other cartoonists
and graphic novelists and on the genre itself. In 2005,
Time Magazine named him one of their Top 100
Most Influential People worldwide.
Don't miss this Pulitzer Prize-winning
author and former New Yorker artist as he surveys
the remarkable evolution of comix (as he spells it),
"the bastard offspring of art and commerce,"
once denounced as the lowest form of literature and
never fully appreciated for its beauty and innovation.
Until now. . .
Spiegelman
believes that in our post-literate culture the importance
of the comic is on the rise. Comics, he says, "echo
the way the brain works. People think in iconographic
images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts
of language, not in paragraphs." And who hasn't
come away changed from reading Maus,
or In
the Shadow of No Towers, or others' iconic
works such as City
of Glass or Persepolis?
Following Mr. Spiegelman's lecture is
a special signing of In the Shadow of No Towers,
his artistic response to the attacks of September 11,
2001. (Signing of In the Shadow only.)
The Penn Humanities Forum gratefully
acknowledges the following cosponsors: at the University
of Pennsylvania: the Office of the Provost, Center for
Programs in Contemporary Writing, Jewish Studies Program,
and SPEC Connaissance. Outside Penn:
the International Association of Word and Image Studies/Association
Internationale pour l'Etude des Rapports entre Texte
et Image.
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Suggested Reading
Artblog
on Spiegelman's talk, by Roberta Fallon.
Dark
Comix: The art of Spiegelman, by Barbra Shotel.
Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan/Feb 2006.
"Not Funnies," by Charles
McGrath. New York Times Magazine, July 11,
2004.
Understanding
Comics, by Scott McCloud (Harper 1994).
Lambiek
Comiclopedia, an illustrated compendium of over
7000 international comic artists.
Wikipedia
on the Graphic Novel.
Comic
Books and Graphic Novels, ALA's guide to Internet
resources
Henry Jenkins speaking in PHF's Year
of the Book on Comic
Books and Convergence.
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