Infancy of art: comics, childhood and picture books

Abstract

Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels are arguably the most canonical and widely studied publications in the field, attracting the attention of scholars working in literature, holocaust studies and psychoanalysis. Yet his work for children, which often straddles the line between comics and picture books, remains relatively underappreciated. This is remarkable since Spiegelman’s fascination with childhood and picture books forms a thread that connects his early creative works (as the Garbage Pail Kids and the Wacky Pages) to his later work as an editor of and contributor to the Little Lit and Toon Book series, and his critical essays on classic picture-book artists, such as Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. While Spiegelman himself claims a didactic impulse behind these latter books (they aim to teach children literacy), this paper proposes the argument that there may be a more fundamental link between the theme of childhood and Spiegelman’s interest in visual storytelling. Analysing both Spiegelman’s creative work and his criticism (among which his book-length study of Jack Cole), I demonstrate how his work is engaged in an investigation into our emotional attachment to images from our childhood, and the specific role of the comics in the radical redefinition that the notion of childhood underwent in the second half of the twentieth century.