Sunday, December 13, 2009
"Prisoner on the Hell Planet" by Art Spiegelman
So this never occurred to me until after I read over a section in Maus, but at the age of 20 Spiegelman suffered a nervous breakdown. It's mentioned in Maus (pages 100-103) in the comic-within-a-comic section entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet." It's very possible that Dr. Clemente mentioned something about this in class, but I was very surprised to read all of that... not to mention I was surprised to see his comic incarnation of himself look that old, although that was just a personal thing. Well I did the research, and Art Spiegelman went to Harpur College (now The University of New York) where he actually suffered from severe sleep deprivation and malnutrition (although his apparent trials of LSD could have had something to do with it) due to the free atmosphere of college versus his incredibly structured life at home (this is pretty dang evident just by reading Maus). Because of this he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital where he would often horde different items in his room. He later learned that this mentality was actually very common in Holocaust survivor children; the need to get as much as you can at that moment was almost genetic. So when he checked himself out, he was shocked to find that his father had found his mother dead in their bathroom; she had slit her wrists (supposedly) because her brother had just died. Anyway, in dealing with all that happened he wrote the very expressive "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," and moved on with his life. At the end of this blog I included the links to the various interviews, autobiographies, and general links I used to find all of this information. Feel free to take a look at the various information within each website. Well, I hope that this puts a little bit more in perspective!
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