Black Holes and Dark Sides: Notes on American Comics from Art Spiegelman to Art Spiegelman (via Tom Tomorrow)

One could say that Art Spiegelman – with his editorial work for , the impulse to the very concept of “graphic novel” through his , his summing up and conceptualizing of the experiences of the whole history of American comics, Golden Age to the Underground – opened up a new consciousness for the identity, the specificity, and the storytelling potential of “writing with pictures” (Spiegelman’s definition) in the context of American culture. The paper examines the move, over a period from the 1980s to date, of American comics toward concerns that are more central to the formation of a national identity through the (story)telling of “American stories”. Spiegelman will be considered the alpha and the omega (with his ) of this outline, that offers its considerations to analyses in the light of the recent publication of, among others, issue #13 of (2004) and (2006), both endowed with interesting preoccupations for anthologizing and historicizing the whole phenomenon.