The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form ... and how it formed him! This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem “The Wild Party,” and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.

This volume is the first comprehensive analysis of a new type of executive instability without regime instability in Latin America referred to as "presidential breakdown." It includes a theoretical introduction framing the debate within the institutional literature on democracy and democratization, and the implications of this new type of executive instability for presidential democracies. Two comparative chapters analyze the causes, procedures, and outcomes of presidential breakdowns in a regional perspective, and country studies provide in-depth analyses of all countries in Latin America that have experienced one or several presidential breakdowns: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. The book also includes an epilogue on the 2009 presidential crisis in Honduras.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.

Helps professional women experiencing feelings of disempowerment and dissatisfaction regain the confidence, courage, and energy to take control of their lives Identifies 12 crises professional women face today and offers specific advice and tools for overcoming them Draws on interviews with over one hundred women, offering inspiring stories and practical advice for addressing and resolving disempowerment Thousands of professional women, though outwardly successful, find themselves in the midst of a crisis, believing that they’ve sacrificed meaning, fulfillment, and balance in their lives to achieve work-related success. Their lives feel unmanageable—and they are confused, blocked, overwhelmed and unable to move forward effectively. Kathy Caprino sheds light on this growing epidemic of disempowerment and shows women how to reinvigorate and reclaim their lives. Breakdown, Breakthrough uses a comprehensive coaching, behavioral, and spiritual framework to explore how women can restore their power and reconnect with their life visions as they awake from the paralysis of professional dissatisfaction and personal diminishment. Caprino outlines a new model for understanding disempowerment, one that focuses on women’s relationships with themselves, with others, with the world, and with what she calls their higher selves. She identifies twelve specific challenges professional women face and offers concrete, practical advice for overcoming each one—helping readers “step back, let go of what is holding them back, and say yes” to creating a compelling and rewarding next chapter of life and work. This is also a deeply personal book. Caprino candidly discusses her own struggles with crippling feelings of disempowerment, and shares moving stories and heartfelt advice gleaned from her interviews with over one hundred women who experienced and overcame the crises she describes. Breakdown, Breakthrough offers working women who are stressed, stuck, and dissatisfied access to new inspiration, hope, and a definite plan of action.