ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
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young couple's misfortune that keeps top-
ping itself until you giggle from an over-
load of horror. Beyer's visual style is gro-
tesque; the people's faces look amoebic. The
book jacket mistakenly calls Beyer a Hier-
onymus Bosch for the '80s; Bosch was never
this cruel.
Raw aside, graphic literature isn't the
sole creation of New York's artsy set. Just
look at the working-class compilations-
American Splendor (Doubleday. $6.95) and
More American Splendor (Doubleday. $7.95)-
by Cleveland's Harvey Pekar, the hospital
worker who's made a couple of abrasive
appearances on David Letterman. Illus-
trated by various artists (including '60s un-
derground cartoonist R. Crumb), Pekar's
works are path breakers: graphic autobiog-
raphy. When Pekar talks about becoming
FROM 'MAUS' BY ART SPIEGELMAN-PANTHEON BOOKS 1986
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1987 SEYMOUR CHW
All-star team-up: Barthelme and Chwast's 'Sam's Bar' tells bar tales with class
Or "graphic novels," as they're known in
the publishing trade. This odd term might
sound as if it describes those yellowing pa-
perbacks hidden in the back of the drug-
store-the ones with titles such as "Night
Nurses" and "Sailors, We." In fact, it en-
compasses everything from "Maus"-like
visual literature to grown-up comic books
to works of fiction with pictures tacked on.
To be sure, comics themselves had al-
ready flown a long way from kid stuff like
"Superman" via the underground efforts of
the 1960s and more recent experiments at
Heavy Metal magazine. Sophisticated com-
ics were popular with adults in Europe and
CHANGE 'THE
5l1BJECT.
Japan, but the extended narrative in comic
form remained largely unknown in the
United States.
en came "Maus," the first book to
emerge from the band of avant-garde
cartoonists at Raw magazine, a New
York graphics publication edited by
Spiegelman. This month Pantheon will
publish a collection of work from the maga-
zine, Read Yourself Raw ($14.95), and a book-
length story, Agony ($7.95), by Raw artist
Mark Beyer. "Read Yourself Raw" is a
collection of postmodern cartoon experi-
ments. "Agony" is a shaggy-dog tale of a
0N
Of mice and mensch: A
page from 'Maus'
(above), Flagg takes
it on the chin
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1987 FIRST COMICS, INC. & HOWARD CHAYKIN, INC.
NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 39
OCTOBER 1987