Lead Pipe Sunday

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--here the artist and characters have run amok.

Spiegelman liked the idea that The Print Center's residency allowed him, the cartoonist who brought the high back to the low, to complete the circle and make a lithographic cartoon as art. The Print Center’s Residency Series was co-directed by Anne Schuster Hunter and Hester Stinnett and printed by Tim Sheesley of Corridor Press.