Web Only: Interview with Art Spiegelman
A full-length interview with Art Spiegelman
The first set of questions I have, you talked a little about this in class, but the conflicts you’ve seen and that you talked a little bit about, comics being brought into the institution of the museum and that versus the underground and also how you feel about comics being taught as classes. Is there any conflict there?
I think it’s all good because it creates a structure that one can rebel against. I think I mentioned in one of the earlier classes that the process of canonization being beckoned into the hallowed halls of bookstores, museums, universities allows the medium to stay alive past it’s life as a mass media, and once that happens then there’s room for an artist to come say “I like working with this stuff, but comics should really be graffiti and shit,” and that’s only possible if there’s still a zone in which all this can happen in and as it, it’s like comics are at this point more a calling than a career. There’s relatively few people actually make a good living doing comics. We have them doing storyboards, graphic art, trying to get into some branch of filmmaking or if they’re good writers just becoming screen writers. Doing comics is just too labor intensive to be a good idea as a way to make a living. So people do it because they need to do it. By creating these kind of alliances with the more reliably cultured cultures, it gives a kind of island for the stuff to subsist through and continue to happen, including the stuff that is in total resistance to this being a gallery art. The danger of it of course is that it becomes so academicized, it loses it’s oxygen, but that doesn’t seem to be the way it’s playing out so far.
Well I think the idea of canon is interesting in and of itself because Columbia as an institution highly values its canon. That’s classically the reason for going, to get the core, to get this strain of artists from the Iliad on that we’re supposed to all know and I was wondering as far as the class goes was that a consideration. You do call it “Comics Marching into the Canon” so it’s something that I was thinking of from the very beginning. Was that something you were considering? Do you see differences between the Canon you are doing here?
I love looking at paintings and reading. Like right now I find myself reading more 19th century novels then I read most of my adult life, getting interested in it and I feel as I get older if I don’t read them now I’ll never have read them, but for me it’s sort of like canon’s are meant to be wrestled with and it’s already having rewarding fruits, like there’s a book that I hope is on reserve now called Art Out of Time by Dan Nadel and in a way it’s functioning as a rebuttal against the “Masters” canon although ironically both artists in the “Masters” canon and many of the artists in Art Out of Time were all published in Raw Magazine. It’s not like the notion of a canon is really meant to be really exclusionary, but it’s meant to set up a navigational system where you begin to find your way into something that otherwise is just formidable. Like, before you turned on the tape recorder, James Romberger’s here and we were talking about Jack Kirby. How do you even sort through this stuff? Someone who drew for different artists, who was working “Beat the clock” kind of system, still managed to get a personality to assert itself, despite everything, which is very different though than looking at something made by just one artist. It’s a different work structure, working for comic syndicates than it is for comic books, which are both rather different than working on what’s now called what ‘Independent comics,’ ‘alternative comics?’ whatever those distinctions are, but they’re all made in different situations and to be able to come in from the outside and dive in, it’s useful to have a sense of what happened before and so the cartoonists who are coming up and becoming artists, it’s useful for them to have a place to understand where these marks come from, the one’s that they’re trying to learn by looking at other comics. It’s useful to note that it didn’t start with whatever the twelfth generation version of Caniff that they’re copying from a DC comics book, once was. And the range of possibilities that can happen. It becomes useful at least know who McCay was… One of the things that’s interesting to me and the reason of course I started with Rolphe Topffer is there’s idea that that guy had that never found their way back into comics even though he’s the first artist to very self-consciously make a graphic novel back whenever that was, 1830? And so it’s useful to have him brought back as a central figure and to know that history. So, I don’t know. I’m comfortable with the Faustian deal that’s being struck, and all of it’s incarnations with the understanding that canons are meant to be argued with, but a show like the ‘Masters’ show could never happen for painting because it’s all been done, absorbed and now moving on. At this point now you have shows of red, you know different painters all use red. And that’s very different than setting up these are the important cubists and cubism led to this and… that whole genealogy that is represented by certain figures.
Sure. One thing I’m actually supposed to do an interview with Dan Nadel. He teaches also a Graphic Novels course at the New School so…
I know he has no use for the ‘Masters’ show, but that’s a very attractive Avant-garde position one can take once there’s a canon.
Well kind of going on that idea of the creation of a canon and also this canonizing, ‘academicizing,’ you talk a little in class about artists creating their precursors and looking back to Frank King and all that. Is that a way that artists can almost turn what they’re doing into some sort of Academic past? Have you thought about that?
It could be and then it depends on the artists own daring. Like I would say Chris Ware is doing anything other than just recapitulating Frank King even though he’s obviously taken things from Frank King. And it’s richer, somehow for me, to be able to read the stuff and know what he’s in dialogue with, but he’s definitely making something new out of it. There’s also the kind of academicizing that’s just like fossilizing the work. The word academicizing, or academic studies, just my interior understanding of the word feels negative, but if you deal with scholarly I think it becomes something else, because at that point, man, I’d love to know more than I’ve been able to find out and there’s only a finite number of reference books that’s multiplying. There’s only a finite number of strips being reprinted. There’s a lot of stuff that got lost and certainly when film went into that zone of having moved from being movies to becoming ‘cinema.’ When it became cinema a lot of great B-Movies got on earth. A lot of great strange experiments in film got brought back and are now available as part of the available cultural well.
I mean on that note, do you see technology playing a role? I know in the film classes I’ve taken a lot of teachers point to the fact that DVDs have basically reinvigorated a lot of the old films that were in existence, or were barely in existence or shabbily in existence. Now at least they have the best of the best copy which they can hold onto.
All that stuff that got totally lost is amazing. The number that films that survived is a fraction of what was made. And we’re talking about strips like ‘Thimble Theater’ finally been saved, but for a long time you couldn’t find it. And this is a strip that I just read this week, 70 million people in America read thimble theater at a time when the total population of America was 180 million. That’s incredible ubiquity that just appears totally.
I guess the other question, this whole idea of pop culture entering academia on a larger scale. I’m sure some nay sayers of comics might say if you let comics into academia what’s next?
Video Games.
Well that’s one I thought of…
Well reasons for academia to be terrorized. The main thing is nobody would argue with novels being taught in colleges, right? But back in the day, back in the 1820s, this was the comic book of its moment, you know, this was seen as vaguely sub-culture. And not meaning subculture, but below culture.
Yeah and I mean you can think of Jazz as an example that comes up in my head, but I guess I also wonder are there lines that can be drawn as far as what makes art, what doesn’t make art? I mean we talked about all the precursors to film and things like that. I don’t see there being as many courses or possibility of courses about just the precursors of film.
Oh I would be that somewhere, either in NYU that has an avid film studies department, or out in some part of UCLA or CalArts there must be a film course because it’s really interesting and some of the stuff gets revivified as it’s useful, like the woodcut at one point was just a medium for reproduction. Nobody thought of it as specifically art. It was just a way to make copies. And then it falls into disuse in the 20th century until artists get really excited about what you can get by hacking at a piece of wood and things happen again. Similarly, I can imagine somebody getting excited about Magic Lantern slideshows and wanting to make more. And stereopticon cards, anybody whose working with 3-d will end going back and looking at those things and what’s interesting with stereopticon cards is they were used to tell stories. It wasn’t just one card… do you remember viewmaster?
Yeah I still have one.
Stereopticon cards were a version of the same. You would buy a set of twelve and it would tell a story.
And do you see that as the nature of what might happen to comics?
No. Comics have some degree of genuine life, have some kind of genuine future on the internet because they can be homemade and puet there, but they’ll morph into something else. The same way that a comic book isn’t the same as a comic strip and a so-called graphic novel isn’t the same as a comic book. The aspects of production, which include how they’re printed, who they’re for, and the physicality of the medium changes the nature of what’s there so that comics to use an equivalent way of looking this, cannibalize their precursors to make their content. In other words, photoplays were the same as… when people first invented movies they were called photoplays. Photoplays’ first subject matter is the theater adapted into film, silent film. Similarly, the comic books start as reprinted comic strips. Then they develop their own rhythms and their own possibilities, where you’re working with full pages, one after another, little cadences and ways that make itself known, become a different animal. Similarly, once you’re on the internet, why not put a sound effect in? Why not animate a panel? Why not have something that’s not bound by the rectangles of screens, but scrolls to the left or to the right or can be clicked on to open another page. All of those things have their own semantic possibilities and therefore their own evocative possibilities. Not for me, I love print. I’m just grateful people are still printing. On the other side, the same way the DVD revitalized film and made it more available, one can see that somewhere between the internet and DVD discs of anthology of old Sunday pages. This material will be available to the more limited numbers who might like such a thing, as opposed to the greater number who might have liked Peanuts enough to buy the complete Peanuts that’s coming out. And ironically, the new medium that’s replaced comics, which is the digital electronic medium, has allowed for more books to come out in small runs with beautiful production values that wouldn’t get reprinted. So it just has to find it’s own level.
I have noticed that while some students may talk about the histories in their presentation, you like to point out the structure and diagramming and things like that, the physical set of symbols, roughly the same idea Scott McCloud talks about in his books. I notice that tendency. In other comics classes I have taken, I notice looking at more the literature side. Are there different ways of teaching comics?
I tend to be very attracted to the picture writing language that makes up comics. It’s what keeps me engaged personally as an artist, but as we move through different kinds of material, we have to, by definition move toward discussions that aren’t as visual. It’s just why some of the stuff works on museum walls than others, like Segar doesn’t work well on a museum wall. It looks like wallpaper and so we were taking in today’s class about the crazy cartoon language he’s using, but it makes sense to talk about it in terms of comparisons to theater. It makes sense to talk about the mythic structures that are part of the character development in Thimble Theater. It becomes more clear when we deal with finite works like what’s so-called, the phrase that makes me cringe, graphic novels. There’s definitely something where you have to talk about the novel side of it. It’s easier to talk about the visual structure of a Winsor McCay, than it is about the visual structure, per se, of Thimble Theater, Carl Barchs, and Peanuts because you can get through it quicker and then you’re left with, talk about Peanuts, you’re left with his themes and characters, as well as themes and characters as well as his beats and rhythms. And when you start talking about, I don’t know if you’re going to talk about Maus. If you’re going to talk about Sarapi’s Persepolis, you’ve got to be talking about the subject matter and the way it’s deal with as a branch of literature that has pictures as well as talking about the pictures. What get my goat with Maus is people assume is it’s all story and the pictures are vestigial and it’s certainly not what made it take 13 years.
Well then I’m happy because the one paper I wrote on it primarily talks about the pictures…
I mean usually it just talks about ‘Well there are mice and cats.’ But it’s not about the things I keep going back to in these things that drives me that have to do with panel shapes and page structures and so on.
I guess the only other question I have and I don’t know if this will get to more than just why it is in the American Studies department, but what makes comics in your mind an American medium or is it an American medium?
I hope I proved that it wasn’t by starting with Topffer and…
Is there anything particular about American comics?
Well we’re talking about an entire body of work that goes through different cultures, that is probably at the moment dominated by Japanese comics. The French comics have a totally different dialect. Once of the things I regret not having been able to show when I made all the slides was Gustave Doret’s early comic book work, inspired by Topffer but before the invention of comics per se and there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in Europe specifically and what’s American is the real embrace of art and commerce, which is part of the wrestling match of what we have to deal with to try to find the art part of it. So it’s just a convenience. I mean I don’t think the school had any idea of whether to put it. It was just humanities rather than sciences but after that it could have fallen, and at some universities it does, at the art department or the literature department or the courses in sociology that use pop culture, which I guess is a branch of American Studies very often, but the nice thing about comics is what makes it attractive to try to grab hold of is that it’s a slippery little critter.
That’s true. You’re talking about Film Noir and it’s so funny the way my one film class which was the basic film class was they separated those out but they had very clear rules for everything.
Well film noir wasn’t made as film noir. It’s retroactive as a definition. And what’s kind of interesting now is artists and critics help define an area of film. Like the “calle de cinema” crowd in France, which was the crowd that began to say “look this is ingenious.” The people writing this stuff were Truffaut, and Godard, and Alan Rennet. Big fans of comics, Godard and Rennet both. Among the first fans in France to set up a cultural zone for that stuff to happen. They got to help re-write what might be in such film departments and yet what’s amusing to me is that movies happening because they were popular and because people could get hold of cameras. And only what happens as it has to be, is academics end up running behind the train trying to catch up and then tell you what kind of train you are riding.
Yeah I think we’ve covered everything I’ve thought of. Is there anything you want to add?
Well it’s not like I wanted a career as an academic. I’m interested in keeping the various components that make it interesting to me alive. I was involved as I mentioned in getting that Masters show going and I have a lot of problems with the ultimate show. I certainly don’t like the idea that it would be “these 15 artists, that’s the canon.” If you want to have a second canon after, ok. It was always meant to be the beginning of a much bigger conversation. The reason that your final paper is to kick somebody out of this group and add somebody else in has to do with just opening it up not trying to shut it down and say “I’m inside the gates. You guys are out.” The comics I am most interested in now are the ones I’ve had a hard time articulating why I love them so much. It certainly includes Segar. It includes, who isn’t in that show, but he opens up to a whole other world and should have been in, my mind, easily included, Carl Barchs. He’s difficult to talk about but an interesting artist. Also I love Booty Rogers work, which some of that is in that Dan Nadel work and the first time that resurfaced in years and years and years after its first publication was inside one of the issues of Raw.
And I think something I started this class talking about is yeah there’s a “seriositiness” to it all now that’s part of the over-compensation for what has happened. But ultimately what it opens up into, hopefully is something that has enough dimension to keep reading.
That’s the hope. It’s been an interesting way to look at it. I have been absorbing and re-absorbing comics for a year and it’s been this whirlwind ride for me.
I mean if it wasn’t alive. If this kills it, I will have made a dreadful mistake. But I think it’s the opposite. Like when you get exposed to it, you go “ok, it’s real useful to have Krazy Kat inside your head.” It helps you understand your relationships better. Or its kind of wonderful to have McCay’s dream life in your head or for that matter Al Capp, who is not to me, if I had to choose ten artist to go to a desert island with their body of work, I’m not sure it would be Al Capp, but I love having that stuff as one of the ways of thinking about stuff, you know?
It’s true and it’s been interesting because I went through my other teacher another whirling artist another version of this. We did Scott McCloud, and we looked the Contract with God Trilogy, We looked at Daniel Clowes, We looked at R. Crumb. We Looked at David B. We went to Jules Feiffer. I feel like by the end of this I will have spent all my money on comics.
Well when you are asking why is it worth having this stuff taught it in the university is it gives reason for this stuff to stay alive so at some point after the so-called canon is exhausted, people say “I want to do a whole paper on TAD!” because TAD was forgotten and then all of a sudden a reprint book of TAD comes out. It seems amazingly enough in a relatively 150 or 200 year history depending on how you want to slice it, enough was done to really absorb people for a lifetime if that’s the sub-discipline you want to enter into. You look at it as literature. You look at it as art. You look at it as sociology.
Speaking to Paul Buhle, he comes from a similar background in underground comics, and he had started bringing up comics at Brown and suddenly he had English professors flooding him with a desire to cover superhero comics. They wanted to talk about myth and all this other stuff. Is that also a fear of yours? Do you fear that academia push in an another direction?
Well afraid where? The same way that now that there are a lot of so-called graphic novels coming out. I don’t have to like them and I don’t like 90% of them, but I don’t have to. The way it’s finally been collapsed in my head is it takes an incredible amount of shit to get a few flowers to grow. Similarly, I looked on something called the Comic Scholars message board and most of it is done by Marvel fans doing the academic equivalent of do you think that the Thing could beat up the Hulk. And because it’s dominated comics for so long that it’s almost become synonymous with American comics, I’m interested in what else comics have been, can be and will be and I think the people genuinely interested in their fanboy past and had to parse it and make a living out of it and continue to rationalize their enjoyment of it will be a guard to action. Because the comics themselves don’t have much vitality to them. The few times I have dipped over the past 20 years or so, I haven’t gotten much further.
I am conflicted because I read superhero comics and now am reading this and some of the criticisms about technology and these computer generated fonts are true, but I still feel when I create my own writing I use a computer. I can’t write by hand at all practically, so these conflicts arise.
Well technology affects what you do. Like I don’t think Hemingway could have wrote what he wrote without a typewriter. The pounding beat of the typewriter defines the rhythm of the sentences, and stuff that’s written on Microsoft has weird loopiness, because people have taken globs of it and oozing it on other parts of the paper and then taking that and sprinkling it earlier. Everything has a much less rigorous outline than when it was written on the typewriter.