CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps by Art Spiegelman

Abstract

124 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews mediation, allowing himself to yammer on at times about how hard life is as a poet. Interesting tangents outside of Soto’s life occur in episodes such as “Keeping Alive,” when Soto meditates on such hard times as he describes how Gabriel García Márquez ate out of trash cans to survive. In “A Woman Stops Her Car,” Soto tells how he ran away at age seventeen and slept in cars, stole biscuits from churches, and eventually worked at a tire factory. Soto shares these raw personal stories with the reader because he wants to show how a writer is a survivor, too. However, what could be just a cathartic account of traumatic scenes from the inner thoughts of a writer becomes something much more meaningful. Through these episodes, Soto describes that a poet’s most redeemable quality is his eagerness to be loved: “like dogs, if you call them they will point to their chest and say, ‘You mean me?’” Soto’s greatest achievement in these episodes is writing not humanely, but “humanly”— he writes the writer’s real life. Moreover, a writer’s constant yearning for praise and recognition is not inevitably seen as a bad thing, but it is inevitable. While Soto may criticize writers for being too invested in winning awards and fame, he wants his readers to understand that it’s human nature. For Soto himself , he unabashedly admits, “Dogs frequently appear in my poems. I respond to love. If you call me, I will get up from my chair, a little slower now that I’m a senior, and come to you.” Growing old might make some writers feel ashamed, but at least we can agree with Gary Soto that, for better or for worse, this is “What Poets Are Like.” Marilyse Figueroa University of Oklahoma Art Spiegelman. CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2013. isbn 9781770461147 For the reader who first heard about Art Spiegelman with the phenomenal success of Maus, CO-MIX is evidence that he had been creating original and provocative art for many years before the two-volume Pulitzer Prize winner. His body of work has a rich provenance , for Spiegelman is a scholar of illustration, comics, and the counterculture , as his drafts and finished work show. But this volume does much more than trace Spiegelman’s history: it offers myriad pleasures for the fan and about-to-become fan. Published concurrently with an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, the book provides almost as much pleasure as walking through the retrospective and includes the added benefit of inviting many revisits. There is a treasure trove of rich material here, from the incisive J. Hoberman introduction, “Drawing His Own Conclusions: The Art of Spiegelman,” through early examples of the artist’s work such as Short Order Comix through RAW, on to Maus and finally to the New Yorker covers, his recent forays into book covers, collaborations with the dance company Pilobolus, and paintedglass windows for his high school Benjamin Zephaniah To Do Wid Me Bloodaxe / Dufour Editions To Do Wid Me is an exuberant experiment in poetry publishing, as it is not meant to be simply read but seen and heard. This collection is a mixture of political poetry shouting for multiculturalism and spunky children’s poetry, accompanied by a DVD of live performances that illuminate the spirit and rhythm of Zephaniah’s poetic style. Nota Bene Translated by Denis Mair Foreword by Simon J. Ortiz Jidi Majia r hap s o dy i n b lac k Poems An indigenous poet of the Nuosu (Yi) people of mountainous southwestern China, Jidi Majia is well known and celebrated among the Chinese. But his lyrical and worldly work, though widely published and honored, has not found its voice in English translation in the West—until now. The poems in Rhapsody in Black, presented in Chinese and deftly translated by the gifted and respected Denis Mair, at long last introduce the Englishspeaking world to this remarkable Chinese writer. $19.95 PAPERBACK · 208 PAGES World Literature Today May 2014 .indd 1 2/20/14 2:47 PM alma mater...