Synopses & Reviews
"Designed with Mr. Spiegelmans help, [Co-Mix] has the tall, narrow proportions of Raw...its images form a chronological sampling of Mr. Spiegelmans extraordinary imagination, including his precocious early work, underground comics, preparatory notes and sketches for Maus, indelible covers for The New Yorker, lithographic efforts and much else."—New York TimesIn an art career that now spans six decades, Art Spiegelman has been a groundbreaking and influential figure with a global impact. His Pulitzer Prize-winning holocaust memoir Maus established the graphic novel as a legitimate form and inspired countless cartoonists while his shorter works have enormously expanded the expressive range of comics.
Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps is a comprehensive career overview of the output of this legendary cartoonist, showing for the first time the full range of a half-century of relentless experimentation. Starting from Spiegelman's earliest self-published comics and lavishly reproducing graphics from a host of publications both obscure and famous, Co-Mix provides a guided tour of an artist who has continually reinvented not just comics but also made a mark in book and magazine design, bubble gum cards, lithography, modern dance, and most recently stained glass. By showing all facets of Spiegelman's career, the book demonstrates how he has persistently cross-pollinated the worlds of comics, commercial design, and fine arts. Essays by acclaimed film critic J. Hoberman and MoMA curator and Dean of the Yale University School of Art Robert Storr bookend Co-Mix, offering eloquent meditations on an artist whose work has been genre-defining.
Review
“Co-Mix shows Mr. Spiegelmans twin senses of pathos and humor throughout his vast career, from his indelible post-Sept. 11 cover for The New Yorker to a comic strip for Playboy in which a man and a woman are depicted having a dialogue with speech bubbles below the waist.” —The New York Times
Review
“A classic of a different kind - by which I mean that I am declaring it to be a classic right here and now - is
Co-Mix, a "retrospective" of comics, graphics and "scraps" by Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of
Maus. Among the collectors' items gathered within are full-page reproductions of covers for Robert Crumb's
Short Order Comix; a full-size insert of the long out of print Raw comic
Two-Fisted Painters; and Spiegelman's peerlessly brilliant
New Yorker strips about Maurice Sendak and - my favourite - Charles Schulz. The ultimate swank present for any completist Spiegelman fan.”
—Guardian Graphic Books of the Year Review "Exploring the breadth of his work, [Co-Mix] shows that, perhaps more than any other single artist, Spiegelman has energized the range of emotional possibility in comics."—
San Francisco Weekly“As [Co-Mix] makes clear, Spiegelmans only true comics peer is Robert Crumb.” —The Montreal Gazette "Whats refreshing about Co-Mix is the level to which it demonstrates Arts diversity. While many retrospective publications like to show off just the one creative direction, this revels in the frenetic intellectual talent that produced the graphic novels finest example."—It's Nice That
Synopsis
The career of a literary and art comic pioneerCo-Mix is a comprehensive career overview of the output of the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Gorgeous full-page reproductions of his artwork, including covers for R. Crumbs Short Order Comix and panels from Maus, overwhelm the senses. Essays by the acclaimed film critic J. Hoberman and the MoMA curator and dean of the Yale University School of Art Robert Storr bookend Co-Mix, offering eloquent meditations on an artist whose work has been genre-defining in every sense of the word.
Co-Mix began as a museum retrospective detailing Spiegelmans lifelong involvement with comics, and was published in France in a bilingual edition during his presidency at the prestigious Angoulême International Comics Festival. This expanded North American edition has an additional thirty-two pages of content, including a full-size insert of the long-out-of-print Raw comic “Two Fisted Painters” and Spiegelmans New Yorker comics about the authors Maurice Sendak, Charles Schulz, and Harvey Kurtzman.
Spiegelman has been a leader of, and an inspiration for, alternative comics artists throughout the past three decades, long before Raw magazine and Maus, and in Co-Mix readers will be able to trace the evolution of this multifaceted artist throughout his storied career.
About the Author
Born in Stockholm in 1948, Art Spiegelman was the first comics artist to win the Pulitzer Prize, which he received for his groundbreaking bestseller Maus. He coedited Raw, and his comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Playboy, and Harpers. He has been named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time, elected to the Art Director Clubs Hall of Fame, made a Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005 (promoted to Officier in 2012), and played himself on The Simpsons. In 2011, Spiegelman was elected president of the Angoulême International Comics Festival and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Festival. He lives in New York City.