Lead Pipe Sunday

1989Two sided lithograph 22" x 30"Edition of 100Published by The Print Center Created during a one month residency at The Print Center in 1990, Lead Pipe Sunday was Art Spiegelman's first lithograph. Because of its significance, it is now widely held and is in a number of public collections, including the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir Maus, is also a historian of comics. This two-sided print is an homage to American comics and just like the funny papers it folds down the middle. The front page is drawn as a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, in which the lawman comes upon a cartoon version of the center pages crime scene. Open the print and there is the scene itself, a who's who from cartoon history (Spiegelman's favorites) scramble around the female figure. The colorful abstracted images on the back page are actually the mis-registered and reworked plates from the front panel-