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Published On: Oct 15, 2004 10:50 PM
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Published On: Oct 15, 2004 10:50 PM
Art Spiegelman article from the New York Times / Worth a read!
Dark Nights, Sharp
Pens
Art Spiegelman
A panel from Mr. Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers," created on large sheets like comic strips from the early years of the 20th century.
By MEL GUSSOW
Published: October 15, 2003
"I've accepted the fact that there are various personages in there," he said about himself. "There is not enough to make a planet, but there's enough to make a person named Art Spiegelman." At 55 he is, as he described Maurice Sendak, "a one-man armada."
Mr. Spiegelman's range is typified by two current projects. He and his wife, Françoise Mouly (art editor of The New Yorker), are the editors of "It Was a Dark and Silly Night," the third in a series of Little Lit cartoon books for children (published by HarperCollins). For the past year Mr. Spiegelman has also been drawing a dark — and sobering — comic strip about 9/11. Called "In the Shadow of No Towers," it has been appearing in The Forward, the Jewish newspaper, and in periodicals throughout Europe.
For the Little Lit series the editors invite cartoonists and authors to improvise on a theme. The prescription for the new book was simply to begin with the words "It was a dark and silly night."
It was, Mr. Spiegelman said, "an insane dare." For Lemony Snicket and Richard Sala, a little girl named Lucretia hears a knock on her door and discovers a yeti, which she tries to trail through the snowy wilderness. In the story by Neil Gaiman and Gahan Wilson, children have a ghoulish party in a graveyard. R. Sikoryak is open-ended, leaving blanks in his tale to encourage reader participation.
In contrast to the childlike wonder of the "Little Lit" series, "In the Shadow of No Towers" is deeply political. In an early strip Mr. Spiegelman set the tone with a drawing of himself compulsively retelling "the calamities of September 11th to anyone who'll still listen." He is also pictured at his drawing table, Osama bin Laden hovering over him with a bloody scimitar and President Bush aiming a revolver in his direction.
At the time of the terrorist attack, he said, he was so depressed that he decided not to begin any long-range project. "If I thought in page units," he said, "I might live long enough to do another page," and that might eventually lead to a book. In imitation of comics at the beginning of the 20th century, he worked on a large canvas, the size of a broadsheet newspaper, which allows him to sneak in side remarks, like an attack on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for banning smoking in public places.
As with all of his work, drawing "No Towers" is a very slow process, taking five weeks for each installment. He spent 13 years on the two volumes of "Maus" (published in 1986 and 1991), in which he depicted Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
"It's hard to explain why these drawings that everybody thinks you scrawl on the side of a math test should take so long to put into shape for publication," he said. "I think it's useful to think of them as haikus," as acts of distillation. There are, he said, "so few words you can fit into a balloon."
With "No Towers," as with "Maus," he is marked by his audacity. "I didn't realize I was breaking so many taboos when I was doing `Maus,' " he said. Speaking about taboos turned him to The New Yorker, where for several years he was a regular contributor and consistently courted controversy. In the middle of the Crown Heights racial conflict in 1993, he drew a New Yorker cover of a Hassidic man kissing a black woman. When Good Friday fell on April 15 in 1995, he commemorated the day with a cover of an Easter bunny crucified by tax forms.
For some time Mr. Spiegelman has also been working on the libretto for an opera, "Drawn to Death." The subject — no surprise — is a history of the American comic book, something about which he is an authority. His studio is filled with books on the subject.
"Comics were beginning to become far more varied in the 1950's," he said. "Then came this moment that's the centerpiece of my opera: the Senate hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency that resulted in the most draconian code of what could be published. That knocked out all comics except the funny animal comics and the superheroes."
Looking back on his own comics history, he said that he discovered Kafka when he was 11 (and living in Queens): "That's when my childhood ended. Oh, a story about a guy who turns into a cockroach." That is also when he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. By the time he was 15 he was being paid for his drawings. As he said, "There was no stopping me."
From 1966 to 1986 he was a creative consultant for Topps, designing novelty stickers for "Garbage Pail Kids" and other products, and also worked as an artist and editor on underground comics. He remembered showing his father one of his first comics: "His only response was, `From this you make a living?' "
After Mr. Spiegelman met Ms. Mouly in 1975, they started Raw Books and Graphics and published his cartoons and work by others. That eventually led to "Maus. " Because " Maus" was such a success, it was, he said, both a blessing and a curse, something he was expected to repeat.
"Maus" showed that comics were not, in Mr. Spiegelman's words, "scurrilous subliterature that caused illiteracy." Because they had become respectable, they could no longer be called comics and were renamed graphic novels. "This," he said, "was a way of talking about comics without being stuck with pejoratives. People began seeing that it was possible to make these long forms for a constituency other than adolescent males. Over a decade or so, a number of very serious comics found their way into bookstores," in special sections devoted to graphic novels.
Asked if children should be encouraged to read comics, he said: "Everybody could read comics. There are some that will absolutely hold their own with any other" form of literature. Looking ahead, he said: "Comics have the opportunity to find out what they can do better than movies, better than prose. I think anybody who liked what I did in `Maus' had to acknowledge that it couldn't have happened in any other idiom."
Whatever he does, it is obsessively personal. "I live inside my head, inside a room away from other people almost all the time," he said. "I get narcissistically centered in my work. Film, theater and certainly television require large groups of people working together. At their purest, comics can be made by one, even if multiphrenic person."
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Spiegelman in his SoHo studio. His current projects include a children's book and a 9/11 reflection.
Art Spiegelman
A panel from Mr. Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers," created on large sheets like comic strips from the early years of the 20th century.
By MEL GUSSOW
Published: October 15, 2003
"I've accepted the fact that there are various personages in there," he said about himself. "There is not enough to make a planet, but there's enough to make a person named Art Spiegelman." At 55 he is, as he described Maurice Sendak, "a one-man armada."
Mr. Spiegelman's range is typified by two current projects. He and his wife, Françoise Mouly (art editor of The New Yorker), are the editors of "It Was a Dark and Silly Night," the third in a series of Little Lit cartoon books for children (published by HarperCollins). For the past year Mr. Spiegelman has also been drawing a dark — and sobering — comic strip about 9/11. Called "In the Shadow of No Towers," it has been appearing in The Forward, the Jewish newspaper, and in periodicals throughout Europe.
For the Little Lit series the editors invite cartoonists and authors to improvise on a theme. The prescription for the new book was simply to begin with the words "It was a dark and silly night."
It was, Mr. Spiegelman said, "an insane dare." For Lemony Snicket and Richard Sala, a little girl named Lucretia hears a knock on her door and discovers a yeti, which she tries to trail through the snowy wilderness. In the story by Neil Gaiman and Gahan Wilson, children have a ghoulish party in a graveyard. R. Sikoryak is open-ended, leaving blanks in his tale to encourage reader participation.
In contrast to the childlike wonder of the "Little Lit" series, "In the Shadow of No Towers" is deeply political. In an early strip Mr. Spiegelman set the tone with a drawing of himself compulsively retelling "the calamities of September 11th to anyone who'll still listen." He is also pictured at his drawing table, Osama bin Laden hovering over him with a bloody scimitar and President Bush aiming a revolver in his direction.
At the time of the terrorist attack, he said, he was so depressed that he decided not to begin any long-range project. "If I thought in page units," he said, "I might live long enough to do another page," and that might eventually lead to a book. In imitation of comics at the beginning of the 20th century, he worked on a large canvas, the size of a broadsheet newspaper, which allows him to sneak in side remarks, like an attack on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for banning smoking in public places.
As with all of his work, drawing "No Towers" is a very slow process, taking five weeks for each installment. He spent 13 years on the two volumes of "Maus" (published in 1986 and 1991), in which he depicted Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
"It's hard to explain why these drawings that everybody thinks you scrawl on the side of a math test should take so long to put into shape for publication," he said. "I think it's useful to think of them as haikus," as acts of distillation. There are, he said, "so few words you can fit into a balloon."
With "No Towers," as with "Maus," he is marked by his audacity. "I didn't realize I was breaking so many taboos when I was doing `Maus,' " he said. Speaking about taboos turned him to The New Yorker, where for several years he was a regular contributor and consistently courted controversy. In the middle of the Crown Heights racial conflict in 1993, he drew a New Yorker cover of a Hassidic man kissing a black woman. When Good Friday fell on April 15 in 1995, he commemorated the day with a cover of an Easter bunny crucified by tax forms.
For some time Mr. Spiegelman has also been working on the libretto for an opera, "Drawn to Death." The subject — no surprise — is a history of the American comic book, something about which he is an authority. His studio is filled with books on the subject.
"Comics were beginning to become far more varied in the 1950's," he said. "Then came this moment that's the centerpiece of my opera: the Senate hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency that resulted in the most draconian code of what could be published. That knocked out all comics except the funny animal comics and the superheroes."
Looking back on his own comics history, he said that he discovered Kafka when he was 11 (and living in Queens): "That's when my childhood ended. Oh, a story about a guy who turns into a cockroach." That is also when he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. By the time he was 15 he was being paid for his drawings. As he said, "There was no stopping me."
From 1966 to 1986 he was a creative consultant for Topps, designing novelty stickers for "Garbage Pail Kids" and other products, and also worked as an artist and editor on underground comics. He remembered showing his father one of his first comics: "His only response was, `From this you make a living?' "
After Mr. Spiegelman met Ms. Mouly in 1975, they started Raw Books and Graphics and published his cartoons and work by others. That eventually led to "Maus. " Because " Maus" was such a success, it was, he said, both a blessing and a curse, something he was expected to repeat.
"Maus" showed that comics were not, in Mr. Spiegelman's words, "scurrilous subliterature that caused illiteracy." Because they had become respectable, they could no longer be called comics and were renamed graphic novels. "This," he said, "was a way of talking about comics without being stuck with pejoratives. People began seeing that it was possible to make these long forms for a constituency other than adolescent males. Over a decade or so, a number of very serious comics found their way into bookstores," in special sections devoted to graphic novels.
Asked if children should be encouraged to read comics, he said: "Everybody could read comics. There are some that will absolutely hold their own with any other" form of literature. Looking ahead, he said: "Comics have the opportunity to find out what they can do better than movies, better than prose. I think anybody who liked what I did in `Maus' had to acknowledge that it couldn't have happened in any other idiom."
Whatever he does, it is obsessively personal. "I live inside my head, inside a room away from other people almost all the time," he said. "I get narcissistically centered in my work. Film, theater and certainly television require large groups of people working together. At their purest, comics can be made by one, even if multiphrenic person."
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Spiegelman in his SoHo studio. His current projects include a children's book and a 9/11 reflection.
Posted: Wed - October 15, 2003 at 03:42 PM