This legendary 1978 collection of comics by Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the best-selling Maus, presents the seminal early works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today-now with a new Afterword by the author.

"Some of the smartest criticism of the comics genre ever rendered." -NPR

Innovative, serious, funny, and many decades ahead of its time, Breakdowns is offered here in its entirety: the long-sought-after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, along with an introduction almost as long as the book it introduces-and just as autobiographically intimate and experimentally daring.

At once the story of an artist and of his medium, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.