10 Things We Learnt From New Interview with Art Spiegelman

Maus: Still Casting A Huge Shadow More Than Thirty Years Later

♦ Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose Maus back in 1986 was a major part of what changed people’s perceptions of what a graphic novel is and could be, just turned 70. And Penguin just chatted to him about his career and more and here are 10 things we gleaned from him in that chat…

1. He started his own fanzine, Blasé, when he was just 13 years old: “The quality of it is not nearly as good as even other 13 year-old amateur cartoonists, but the amazing thing was to be in touch with a network of like-minded people. Before that I was just stuck with whoever happened to live on the five square block that I was growing up on.”

2. This led to his first professional work, for Topps, the trading card company: “I was about 14 and I called Topps – with no good logical reason – in order to see if there was any way to buy or be given a few of the small drawings done by Jack Davis, one of the holy trinity of the original Mad artists, so I could look at how his drawings are made on an original piece of paper. I don’t know how, but I got transferred to the head of the creative department, so I’m talking to him and explaining that I have this magazine and I want to be a cartoonist. He was really kind and said, ‘Well, why don’t you come down and bring your magazine, and we’ll swap’.”

3. The creation of Maus saw him return to something he had created many years earlier, he recalls:“I’d already done a three-page story for an underground comic anthology while living in New York in 1972, and it seemed like deeply unfinished business. I knew I had to go back to it someday. Those were the beginnings and stirrings of me as a cartoonist with a singular voice.”

4. He had a very specific vision for RAW, the magazine he edited with Françoise Mouly, from the start and it was a natural home for Maus: “I meet this woman playing hooky from architectural studies in France, and we hit it off. She was not sure what she really wanted to do, but as we talked it became clear that it had something to do with books; she wanted to make them, publish them, be them. So that led her to a printing course, and eventually we had a printing press in our four-storey walk up loft and that started us off…I’m just sort of lucky that it’s got grandfathered into a category that now exists called ‘graphic novels’, which didn’t exist back when Maus was being made.”

5. Maus continues to cast a huge shadow over him even though it is more than 30 years since it was first published: “It’s amazing to have something that landed so intensively well,” he says. “But no matter what I do, I will always have a five hundred pound mouse chasing me around. I do always feel that I’m in my own shadow.”

6. He is currently exploring a series of new projects including a secret project with Neil Gaiman and a new series of lithographs for a gallery: “It’s taking advantage of a life Maus offered me, which is that people say: ‘Oh, he stumbled on to something once, maybe we should let him try again! Let’s get out of his way and see what he makes!’”

7. He is also involved with a new magazine, Resist!, created by his wife and his daughter Nadja, which they came up with after the women’s march which took place after Trump’s inauguration:”Fascism has a lot of different guises, and ways of happening, and America has always had the schizophrenic insistence on individualism and a streak of authoritarianism both running concurrently for as long as I can remember. If it wasn’t going to kill us, it would actually be a pretty good television show.”

8. He is also supposed to be working on a new project called In The Shadows of Trump Towers but he is struggling to engage with it: “I’m too deep in the shadows. So far I feel defeated, as an artist, by Trump; I haven’t been able to figure out how to make him more ridiculous and contemptible than what a cartoon can do. It isn’t adequate to just laugh and say ‘bad hair, small hands’, because it’s so fucking dangerous. It’s like having a chimpanzee flying a plane. A malevolent chimpanzee.”

9. His career has included political cartoons and these are some of the things he is most proud of in his work: “It’s one of the accomplishments I’m prouder of, bringing the scandalous cover to the New Yorker. It started something, which Françoise is now involved with on a weekly basis as the art editor, making it very much an ongoing diary of the zeitgeist, and a provocative one at that.”

10. He is also very pleased with the legacy he has created all those years ago: “A certain approach to comics developed; I began to poke at what comics could be, teasing out a certain strain, and it really looked like I’d stumbled onto something genuinely new, and I’ve seen it have a real strong effect on other artists.”

Read the whole article here