Art Spiegelman at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), to March 14. $19.50, srs $16, stu $11, free Wednesdays 6-8:30 pm. 416-979-6648. Rating: NNNN
If any cartoonist deserves a museum retrospective, it’s Art Spiegelman. Beginning his comics career as a teenager, he single-handedly transformed the medium into a format for serious material with Maus.
His brilliant two-volume retelling of his father’s Holocaust story with Jews as mice and Germans as cats, subtly filtered through his own experience as a child of survivors, is naturally the centre of Co-Mix. (The show title, a play on the spelling used by 60s underground comix, also signals Spiegelman’s skill at combining words and images, high and low culture, autobiography and politics.)
As a fan of the books, I was thrilled to see preparatory sketches and original art displayed with page proofs. Vitrines contain family documents, among them the photos that are sparingly yet harrowingly deployed in Maus.
Work produced during the 13 years he laboured on his magnum opus ranges from Topps Gum’s Garbage Pail Kids trading cards to Raw magazine, which he put out with wife Françoise Mouly to promote the comix sensibility, and covers for avant-garde novels by Boris Vian.
Projects since include illustrations for jazz-era poem The Wild Party strips and covers for the New Yorker (Mouly became its art editor) books for children In The Shadow Of No Towers, a series about 9/11 and the war in Iraq plus collaborations with Philip Glass and Pilobolus dance company represented on video.
Comics are meant to be enjoyed on the page rather than mounted on walls, and the show presents them mostly in original size, eschewing curatorial bells and whistles. It’s not easy to read all the text in three large rooms of strips, but a few books are available to peruse while seated.
Spiegelman draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of the medium in a talk called What The %&@*! Happened To Comics at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on Monday (January 26) – and will probably also weigh in on Charlie Hebdo, for whose work he is a strong advocate. His father’s not the only one who bleeds history.
art@nowtoronto.com
