Art Spiegelman Interview: The Future of Comics Is in Their Past

By Joel Jonientz
Contributing Writer

Few artists have had more of an impact on their medium than Art Spiegelman. He shook up the literary world in 1992 when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel “Maus,” a portrayal of his father’s experience surviving the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust. In his career, he has been an artist, editor, publisher, and one of the most influential advocates for comics and their history.

Spiegelman began his career as an underground cartoonist in San Francisco in the early 1970s, working alongside comics luminaries such as, Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith. Besides “Maus,” Spiegelman has published several book-length comics, which include a recently republished anthology of his early work, “Breakdowns,” and a graphic retelling of his experience as a witness to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, “In the Shadow of No Towers.”
He spoke with me by telephone recently from his studio in New York. What follows is the edited transcript of that conversation.

Joel Jonietz: Your parents had wanted you to become a dentist. When did you first seriously consider making comics?

Art Speigelman: Way before they had the idea that I should be a dentist. It was my first career choice after cowboy and fireman. Someplace along the line, I realized that comics were actually made by somebody, and it was from that moment on that I had no choice but to want to do that, even though I didn’t have the skill set for it.

JJ: So you were interested in the history of comics at an early age.

AS: Yes, very early. In fact, I even got to know a lot about caribou. Because what would happen is that there wasn’t a lot of information available at the time. You see, now you can actually find out this stuff. It’s easy to find on the interweb. At the time though, any information one found was at great sweat, equity, and expense. So whenever I would see an encyclopedia, I would look up comics, and if they didn’t have comics, I would look up cartoon, and if they didn’t have cartoon, I would look up caricature. When you look up caricature, caribou appears right above it so I got to know something about it by default.

JJ: You wrote two of the best histories of comics I have ever read. The first is in your book, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” and the second is in the introduction of “The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics,” which you edited with your wife Françoise Mouly. As you get deeper and deeper into this history, how has that affected the work you make?

AS: I think it thoroughly informs it because I believe that basically the future of comics is in the past. It is interesting to me to see how comics are being made, often by people who don’t know the history, but who are looking at and referencing people who do know the history. You see, every medium has a DNA, and you can cure diseases if you can figure out the right code.

JJ: When did you begin to create “Maus”?

AS: In the afterword of my book “Breakdowns,” I explain how “Breakdowns” led directly to “Maus” by as many things in my life that lead directly one to the other through absolute cataclysm and crisis rather than forward movement. The work I gathered in “Breakdowns”—nobody needed it or wanted to see it except me. It wasn’t a book that there was a clamor for. I just needed to understand what I was making and put it together in one book. It did not have any obvious value as a franchise. It was a hardcover, oversized book of disparate short pieces of comic art that don’t seem in any obvious thematic way linked until you really start digging in. It took me years to sell the thirty-five-hundred-copy print run.

The upshot of it was that I realized I was at a cusp point in what kind of work I was making. I am interested in the structure of comics more than in the content of comics and that became, insofar as you can divide those things up, the kind of comics I was making. I realized that if I pursued this direction any further, before I knew it, I would end up in a gallery at best, and most likely, I would end working at a Kinko’s. Although they didn’t have Kinko’s back then.

From where I was, there was no obvious route to being a comics artist because that was not what comics were about. People were interested in comics not because of the way they fit together structurally and formally, but because it’s really nice to read about Charlie Brown or to check in with Spiderman when he is not being Peter Parker and being neurotic. They want their story. So I realized that if I was going to deal with comics, I would have to tell a story, and I just couldn’t get myself interested in the genre conventions that came with the dominant mode. I could make it funny, which was more interesting than the alternative, which was to make it a testosterone-filled fantasy. And, that led ultimately to doing “Maus” as a corrective. Because, if I wanted to make comics for print, it had to be something that people would read. It wasn’t about consciously trying to make the world a better place or tell people what they needed to know. It had other motives, but the most obvious one for me was that if I was going to make comics, I had to tell a story and what story did I know that was worth telling. At that time there weren’t a lot of stories about what my parents went through.

JJ: It took you thirteen years to create Maus. During the period that you were writing it you were also growing older, maturing and living your life. Did the story change for you as you were creating it?

AS: Yes. It changed a lot. During the course of the thirteen years, one major event happened in that my father died in 1982. I was working on it until 1986 and ultimately finished it in 1991 when I finished the second book. So, there was a long period after his death in which I could no longer have access to Vladek, and I was still shaping this thing. In the course of that, several things happened. One was that I had to resist any trope towards sentimentalizing him because my relationship with him got a lot easier after he died. Second, I was diving deeper in to the thing. I was trying to understand how to give form to this story in a way that would be built to last. My interest in form didn’t disappear. I just had to sublimate or hide it while creating a narrative that was easy to follow considering how difficult the story is, and the double track narrative of what my parents lived through, and what I understood of them.

JJ: You were an eyewitness to the attack on the World Trade Center. How difficult was it to edit that experience into a comic, as say, compared to editing your father’s story?

AS: It was a totally different way in. I certainly had to be aware of the stupid rhyme between his cataclysm and my personal mishap in terms of what befell me as a result of September 11 and being a close-up witness to disaster, as, say, the Poles might have been during the death camp years. It was not in any obvious way connected, except that I think I might have phrased it somewhere in the body of that work, as disaster is my muse. I couldn’t think of anything else because my neighborhood had been destroyed.

So, the process of working through it was probably therapeutic. Although when I say that I really don’t mean it. It was in that I needed to work my way through what would normally be called post-traumatic stress. I couldn’t work on the pieces that I had been working on before it.

I also didn’t think there was going to be much of a future. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. So, I figured that if I just made single pages, maybe I could get another one done before the shit hit the fan. It wasn’t about working for posterity. It was only about a couple of years later when I figured if the world is going to end it is sure taking its time about it. So, I began to think about how on earth could I put that cycle of pages together as a book. It was not obvious. It was way too big. It was way too short, but the idea of wanting to make a book already implied a nod toward the idea that somebody in the future might want to read it as opposed to making them as I did, which was for whatever newspaper or magazine would be willing to publish it. Meaning, it was therefore thoroughly part of the ephemeral world.

JJ: The book “In the Shadow of No Towers” was published in a different format than I have ever seen comics published before. It almost resembles a children’s board book in some ways.

AS: It was the only way to get a page that big that didn’t have to break at the bend. The best line I heard about that book was from the manager of the bookstore in Grand Central who told me that they had a big display of this book when it was first out, and they overheard this fantastic conversation. A man and a women were looking at these books and the woman turns to the man and says, “But why did he make it a baby board book?” and this obviously quick thinking man turns to her and says, “It’s so the President will read it.”

JJ: Last question. One of the most recent developments in comics is that of motion comics. Have you tried to create anything like that? Do you see a future in it?

AS: Well, clearly it’s the future, but I am more interested in how the past will inform it. So far, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that this is what I want except when it’s a means of conveying what might better be seen on paper. But at least it’s available. I like when old comic books get uploaded to the Web, and I can at least see them without having to spend $800.00 on a comic book. I haven’t really seen or understood what this new moment will bring. Obviously, it is going to bring something, and it will be as related to what I think of as comics as comic books are related to comic strips are related to nineteenth century illustrated novels. It is another evolution of what happens when you put words and pictures together. Although, I hate the motion comics I have seen so far. Once you add sound and movement, the things that really interest me about comics begin to get lost. That will be part of what all of this evolves into, retaining whatever bits of comics language are useful to the form. I have no animus against the future happening, I hope there is one, but it is not what makes me get up in the morning and want to work.

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“A Conversation with Presidential Lecturer Art Spiegelman” will be held March 23, 2010 at 8 p.m. at the Chester Fritz Auditorium on the UND campus. For a complete schedule of events, go to http://www.undwritersconference.org.