Thou Art in Heaven

Hear me, O comics nerds and graphic-novel snobs: The Messiah cometh! And he’ll bring with him a large screen and a catalogue of comics lore the likes of which have never been unleashed in these hills before. As one of your ranks, believers, my heart poundeth at the very mention of his name: Art Spiegelman, creator and compiler of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards and Arcade and Raw and Maus and Little Lit and In the Shadow of No Towers and still more. For he is one of us, he hath walked as we have through deepest reaches of early Mad magazine and the trenches of a thousand dog-eared Superman comics, straight up to the cover of The New Yorker and the highest peaks of the land called Pulitzer Prize.

Okay, enough. In fact, while Spiegelman is a walking treasury of comic-art history, he says that he’d rather not be thought of as a “canon-maker.” But he will philosophize and voice his many opinions anyway, when he gives a presentation today at 4:30 p.m. in Macky Auditorium, CU-Boulder campus, in conjunction with a new exhibit at CU’s UMC Gallery titled Graphia: Comics, Graphic Novels and the Humanities on the Front Range, and the Goldberger Week of Jewish Culture, hosted by the CU Program in Jewish Studies.

Admission to Spiegelman’s lecture is free (words to make any true comics nerd shed a few tears); for details, go to www.colorado.edu/umc/artgallery or www.colorado.edu/jewishstudiesAnd for a more in-depth look at Spiegelman’s world, see my interview on the Latest Word blog at www.westword.com.
Sun., Jan. 25, 4:30 p.m., 2009