Be a Nose
By Art Spiegelman
McSweeney’s

During an interview last year, I asked Art Spiegelman, “how much do you work?” It was, I suppose, a slightly (just slightly) more tactful way of saying, “what do you do all day?” Tact or no, it surely wasn’t the first time the artist had been asked the question.

All of the standard (and largely deserved) genius talk aside, Spiegelman has become, perhaps, somewhat infamous for a sporadic approach toward book releases. Maus’s two volumes were released in 1986 and 1991, respectively. Save for his work for the New Yorker and a kid’s book in 1997, that was the last any of us heard from the artist until 2004’s In the Shadow of No Towers.

Spiegelman answered my question honestly, if not especially satisfactory. “I’m writing things,” he explained. “I’m taking notes. Sometimes they coalesce, sometimes they don’t and then there’s just a lot of grunt work involved in every project.” If the preface to Be a Nose is to be believed, the more accurate answer is, “turning scraps into art.” Envelopes and matchbooks and phone books. The artist’s explanation in this case, however, is not an attempt to justify exactly how he whiles away his waking hours, but rather to explain why he doesn’t keep sketchbooks.
This may seem like a slightly futile act, in light of the fact that it’s an introduction to a three-volume collection of Spiegelman’s sketchbook work, but, as anyone who has ever read through, say, Chris Ware’s work in the space can tell you, sketchbooks are, among other things, an opportunity to celebrate an artist’s insecurities and various other neuroses. By that measure, Be a Nose succeeds wildly.

The name itself is an allusion to the futility of being a cartoonist. As Spiegelman explains in a sketch in the collection’s second book (simply titled “A”), he’s found something of a kindred spirit in the murdering protagonist of Roger Corman’s 1959 comedy-horror Bucket of Blood, who screams out the collection’s title attempting to fashion a nose out of a block of marble. “That’s what drawing comix is like…starting with a word in your head and desperately tring to turn that into a ‘word picture.’ ”

An even more blunt example comes earlier in that same volume, a self-portrait featuring a tiny, withered Spiegelman cowering inside a prouder, taller version of himself, bearing the caption “megalomaniac with an inferiority complex.”

Such neuroses manifest themselves more positively in “Nose,” in the form of a creative restlessness. Drawn during the height of Raw, these works bear the influence of the magazine’s artists like Charles Burns and Gary Panter on their sleeve. Contemporary fine art has also clearly left its share of influences on the work, the most diverse and colorful of the three books, which looks like the work of a different artist on nearly every page.  If “Be,” the first of the three books, drawn in 1979, is the work of an artist attempting to find his style (while hinting at what would later become Maus) drawing upon contemporaries like Robert Crumb, then 1983’s “Nose” displays the desire to graduate beyond that.

Together, these three books prove a schizophrenic journey into the mind of its creator, but that, after all, is the point of releasing a sketchbook for mass consumption (well, as mass as a $29 McSweeney’s sketchbook could possibly be). This is a collection of unfinished concepts and abandoned ideas—the creative scraps that, only on occasion, grow up to be a nose.

–Brian Heater

In much the same way that that old stock faux-intellectual question of “what is art” played a major role in earlier installments of our conversation with Art Spiegelman, much of this fifth and final part of our interview delves into the concept of unintentional fictionalization.

It’s a key concept, to be sure, given the artist’s role at the forefront of the autobiography of movement in independent comics, a role best personified by books like Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, and to a degree, in certain selections from his newly revamped anthology of early work, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!.

Spiegelman argues, I think accurately, there’s essentially no such thing as complete non-fiction, especially in the incredibly subjective world of autobiography, a concept he illustrates using a powerful example from Maus.

In this final part, we also discuss what made Spiegelman leave The New Yorker, the birth of Raw, why he isn’t an “artist’s artist,” and what role, if any, he played in that now infamous Obama cover.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three][Part Four][Heeb Feature]

When people mention your name, there’s generally one book that comes to mind. Do you feel that the re-release of Breakdowns will shed some light on work that hasn’t been as recognized as that title?

I don’t know. I think more people have read Garbage Pail Kids than will ever stumble onto Maus.

But this early work is that of an “artist’s artist,” as they say.

Well, artist’s artist generally draw better. I’m not sure that that’s my greatest skill. I don’t know. I feel very awkward as this book is coming out. Sometime earlier today, I was thinking about how it’s strange that this is the most personal work I’ve ever done. Not just the ’78 Breakdowns, but the new work that was added. It’s not just because it’s autobiographical. In that sense, Maus is insanely personal, dealing with my relationship with my father and my own Jewishness, and it is, but I never had to deal with the kind of feeling of vunerability that I have with the Breakdowns book.

Similiarly with the No Towers book, which would seem, I think, very personal. It’s about my freaking out about September 11th, and moving off onto all of the personal and political paranoias that came with a near-death experience and post-traumatic stress disorder. I was screaming about stuff that is now also normative—“these people are lying to you and they’re going to hurt you.” Those things weren’t sayable back in 2002, when I was working on these pages. By the time the book came out, it was okay to say them, and I didn’t feel as vulnerable. Here I don’t know what to say about the book. It’s the core of how I think, and it’s dealing with some fairly raw feelings, but those are not the problem, especially in the introductory strip, are presented.

You bring up the word “raw,” which has proven pretty important to your career, over the years. Was it you who hit upon the word?

It was my word. I just wanted a three-letter title like Mad, and Raw seemed like the opposite of cooked. I’m not interested in stuff that’s slickly presented.

When I think of slickness in comics, it tends to be a visual trait. Are you speaking primarily about the way things look on the page?

Well, Raw had both. It had stuff that was really polished like Gil Schwartz’s stuff, and it also had Gary Panter. That’s two different poles of how someone would present work, but both of them are “raw” in the sense that there’s a place where you can hang on to. With really slick, there’s nothing to hang on to. Really sick to me is Alex Ross. Slick on every level, but as result, has almost no tensile strength that you can hold onto. It’s about the surface.

You need a foothold, a place to start, to dig into,

To dig into, yeah. And hopefully there’s actually something there to dig in to. Raw includes a certain kind of vulnerability. When I was using it now, that’s what I meant.
Even in The New Yorker, I hate to make a submission. Even that phrase, the word “submission.” You stick your neck out, and someone’s allowed to chop it off. That’s what it means to bow before the king. I don’t do that really well, so I’ve tried to find places where I don’t work with editors, I work with enablers. That allows me to think things through. I’m a rather harsh editor of my own work.

That’s how you get to see so little of it, and I have a really good editor in Francoise. She’s been trained by the best—I showed her all of the stuff! But she’s really good at it. She’s really fast, she’s really sharp, and she works well with artists. So I have that kind of editing, and there’s occasions where I’m working with people who are great. There are ways of finding a better solution quicker than you can on your own. It may be ironic to talk about being weary of editors, considering that I’ve been one, so much of my life, but good editing doesn’t involve castrating stuff so it’s ready for public consumption. It involves making the work more itself.

I’ve seen conflicted accounts of why you left The New Yorker.

Yeah, well, it’s not true that I left in protest. I left in a wail of pain that I had to deal with that didn’t allow me to get interested in anything except what I was obsessed with. And it didn’t involve finding a more sophisticated way of showing what I needed to show. I think it was after that the editor ran this editorial about why he was a reluctant hawk. That really upset me, but I think it was after.

I read a quote from you somewhere that was something along the lines of, “I wish I was there so I could quit now.”

The thing was that someone called me from an Italian newspaper, and either because of a language barrier or the usual human thing of hearing what you want to hear—

Being a journalist…

Yeah. It just got turned into another version of the events, that I stormed off in protest of the events of the magazine. The magazine was quite good to me. I just couldn’t do what I needed to do at the magazine. I couldn’t parcel out part of my brain and let it be rented out for someone else’s needs. It sounds more heroic to walk off in protest.

Have you ever?

Oh, I used to quit the magazine once a month when I was working for Tina Brown. So I guess that was kind of like walking off in protest.

Was it for similar concepts of censorship?

Yeah, it was them not wanting—see, for me, in an introduction that no one will read, because versions only came out in French and Italian, it was an experiment in DNA grafting, to see what the underground sensibility and The New Yorker sensibility would be like, if they were intertwined. It was an interesting experiment, and it led to some things that even opened up what The New Yorker could do now with the Obama cover, but it wasn’t a natural fit. There was only a certain part of my brain that could act civilized, and the rest was moving onto something else. I kept trying to find the places where we could be more in contact, but it was getting to be more of a strain, ad after September 11th, that got to be impossible.

Is Francoise still in charge of the covers?

Yeah, she’s the art director of the magazine.

So she played a large role in the Obama cover?

Yes.

Did she come to you with it, before it went to press?

I saw it before it got printed.

But she didn’t consult you?

I’m trying to remember. There was a moment where—there discussions about what might happen to the cover. I kibitzed, which is my favorite role in the world, but it wasn’t my doing, except by earlier example, by opening that up as a territory for covers to go in.

In terms of both politics and autobiography, do you have definite lines that you won’t cross?

They’re not really definite, but there are probably things I wouldn’t—you know, I’m not really here to hurt anyone else. I can’t always be as kind to myself, but it’s not a place to settle scores. This is why it’s hard for me to make fiction. I’ve tried over and over again, but I haven’t been able to do it in a way that I can be comfortable with. On the other hand, once you try tell the truth, it’s easy to lie. It’s almost inevitable. Every time you try to tell something true, the simple act of telling it…

Turns it into fiction?

Well, it turns it into work. Remember I was talking about art giving something form? Well, when you’re giving something form, you’re lying, because life is much too unwieldy to hold onto these shapes that you have to get to do something—to flow narritively. Even when when a journalist quotes your words, they’re not going to leave all of the “uhs,” and tracing back and restarting a sentence five times.

Thank God, right?

Yeah, but you’re giving it a form, and once you’re giving it a form, it’s so much more fluid than that way thought works, and that’s lying.

So, creating art is fictionalizing?

No. I mean, I think of fictionalizing as yanking things specifically out of reality and making a beautiful lie.

So, fictionalizing is lying on purpose.

Maybe. Why should I put this scene in a hotel in Chicago, rather than a hotel in Orlando? For me, it becomes playing without a net. If I know where something took place, I might have to go back and find out that you weren’t really in Laramie, Wyoming, you were in Montana. I might have gotten it wrong, but I don’t feel the inevitability, so I try to locate myself somewhere specific.

A cabin on Mars.

Yeah, well, that was the right answer. But even in Maus, all of this stuff that gets put in the book, in order to indicate how I had to do that kind of shaping, in order to compensate for that kind of shape. This is coming up, because one of my new projects is Meta Maus. It’s about being able to do a definitive interview in a book that has lots of sketches and outtakes and alternative drafts and notebook entries and research photos. It’s about making one final lump out of it, before I can clear it out of the studio.

The parts that I was talking to the interviewer about, a couple of pages in Maus that talk about discussing the orchestra in Auschwitz. In that sequence, I ask my father about it, and he says, “I don’t remember any orchestra.” And I say, “no, no, no, this is very documented (and it certainly is). There was an orchestra in Auschwitz, did you ever hear it?” “No, I only heard shouting and screaming. I don’t know about any orchestra.” Now I could have either left that exchange out—although I forced the exchange in to show it exactly as it is. Or I could have shown that sequence as something where I don’t show an orchestra or I can have it take place in the present, where we’re just talking, but the way that those three panels take place is first you see a row of prisoners walking, with a row of prisoners behind them. Then my father says, “I don’t remember any orchestra.” “Oh no, it’s very well documented.” So then you see the picture again and they’re marching, and the orchestra doesn’t exists, which implies that I didn’t have to show the orchestra, but you see a cello standing up. And then you see the wall that they’re walking past is set up like a musical staff of horizontal lines.

Now, no one’s going to slow down and understand that one their first reading, which is why I prefer re-readers. But that whole thing was  about the kind of choices that had to be made, while making Maus, like, “so am I going to go with my father’s deposition, no matter what he’s telling me, and just present that as objectifying it as panels?” or, as a chose to do, will I synthesize what I understand with what he told me, to figure out what things look like and presumably were? What I ended up doing was, in places where the information was what he saw, I stuck with what I got from him, but in places where I was just trying to locate a situation that ultimately has a shared triangulated reality, from hundreds of witnesses and photographs, I’d go with that, in order to get the story told.

All of those decisions can be unpacked in those few panels, so it’s not like every time I would have to extrapolate something, I didn’t set up a flashing neon light in the background, saying, “warning, this isn’t exactly the phrase he used.” But those kinds of things got formed in the way that Maus got through to tell the necessary story that needed to be made.

–Brian Heater

The real impetus for the my discussion with Art Spiegelman was the upcoming release of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. First issued in 1977, the first incarnation of the book was an anthology of the artist’s pre-Maus (though, confusingly enough, the original edition carried the subtitle “From Maus to Now,” thanks to the inclusion of an earlier prototype of his Pulitzer-winning book). The new edition of the book is about 2/3 larger than its predecessor, thanks to a new graphic introduction and a backwards-looking afterword essay.

With that in mind, in seemed only right to delve as far back into the artist’s professional career as we could possibly go. In this fourth part of our interview with the artist, we open with a discussion of Spiegelman as a 12-year-old cartoonist, why he was never cut out for the dailies, and the birth of the autobiographical comic book.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three][Heeb Magazine Feature]

You started drawing professionally fairly early on—15, I think I read somewhere.

I got paid for the first time when I was 15. But I was doing cartoons from time I was 12. I was getting published in the school paper, and I started my own little bad version of Mad Magazine, when I was 14. And I was working for other little fanzines when I was like 13 or 14, so it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to become a dentist after all.

Bill Griffith was really the only one from your circle who got the syndication job, making it into all of the papers. Was that a goal, early on?

Oh, I don’t even think it was a goal for Griffith. It just sort of came along, and it was like, “that’s fantastic.” I had actually been offered a syndicated strip when I was in high school. I went to this vocational school called the School of Visual Art and Design, over on second avenue and 52nd. It was a school that taught advertising art and design. It wasn’t like what’s now LaGuardia and was School of Music and Art, which taught the fine arts.

Industrial art.

Yeah, industrial art. I wanted to go because it had a cartooning department, and I couldn’t imagine anything way cooler than that. You had to pass a test to get in. So I’m in that department, and I think in my last year of high school, one of the assignments was to do a week’s worth of strip samples, and then, much to our surprise, a guest came in who had graduated from our school when it was still called The School of Industrial Arts, who was an editor at one of the syndicates.

He looked at the stuff the kids did, and he called me over and said, “I’d like to groom you for syndication.” So I was supposed to do the strip for another week. It was about the Mad Hatter and a beatnik termite—characters that I had created for my strip. I was into my second week and was really excited about this, but some time into the second week—you asked me about my early self, he couldn’t draw, but he wasn’t stupid—I realized, this would be a fate worse than death. This was the second week. What happens in the fifth year? And so, it helped me figure out what kind of artist I didn’t want to be, so I never went back to the getting groomed for syndication business.

When did autobiography really start factoring into things?

Well, it was really one artist’s intervention—Justin Green. Justin was one of the gang of cartoonists that I was hanging out with the time, and he started doing almost frighteningly personal comics. Most significantly was something called Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. That was like a revelation. We were talking recently, and he called it, “an act of public self-immolation.” He turned his life into little confession booth panels, and it was almost scary to see how far he’d go. He had a drawing style more inspired by the ads in comics than by the Superman comic around it, I’d say. I found it shockingly interesting, and so did Crumb. And though Justin modestly credits Crumb for this auto-bio thing, he showed me which panels he refers to, and it’s not that. This is a longer conversation than you may want to have, but Justin invented, for all intents and purposes, what we now think of as confessional autobiographical comics.

It was part of what ramped me up to do a specific kind of work, and he figured into all of this important stuff for me. The first real autobiographical thing I did was a three-page version of Maus that appeared in a comic called Funny Animals that he was editing. At some point, I was crapping out, because I couldn’t find anything worthy of the occasion. A book that Crumb did the cover for—this was really important. At the time—and I think I mentioned this in my post-script—he sent me some amphetamines in the mail, which I guess is the job of any good editor. I never took them, but I found the card—the amphetamine had crumbled—in the past couple of years, while working on Breakdowns. So I still have the card with the drawing he’d doodled on it, and the tape where the amphetamine was.

So he prodded this strip into existence, also by the example of the kind of stuff he was doing. And then, oddly enough, the really important autobiographical piece I did at the time appeared in small form in Maus, but is really given its due here, is the one about my mother’s suicide, and that was drawn in his studio, because he had just moved to bigger digs and I had just moved to San Francisco, so I took over his old apartment. And he who was superstitious and a bit crazy, was helping me get my place set up and would say things like, “you can’t turn the drawing table that way, it faces the Mission Delores church” and “you don’t want to have the table facing this way, you’ll get the rays from the sun on your table.” It’s an early version of Feng-Shui or something. So he figured in that very directly. It was a really important discovery. I’m amazed that it didn’t exist before, but I don’t think it did. There are precursors that would include things like some of Jules Feiffer’s strips from the 50s, but no some much Crumb until Justin. There may have been things happening on other parts of the planet. I don’t know the full trajectory of Japanese comics. But as far as I’m concerned, it was just him. That moved me very far toward allowing the full brunt of self entering into the comic.

So you didn’t take the amphetamine?

I didn’t.

How large of a role were drugs playing in your work at that time?

At that moment, not so much. But a few years before they had so much of an impact on my life that they almost stopped me from being a cartoonist. I was a full-time pyschonaut, or whatever you’d call it. So it was fun and interesting and I learned a lot—I learned how to get myself into a mental hospital. But I can’t say that the work that was in Breakdowns came except while I was repairing myself from that certain activity.

It seems to bear the influence of work that was influence by psychedelics.

Really?

There’s a clear Crumb influence on some of the pieces.

The imagery is certainly built on a style of cartooning that Crumb brought back into the world, which had a lot of cross hatching and detail. It’s the opposite of the Charles Schulz revolution. I was definitely a child of my time, but I don’t think of that as psychedelic. Psychedelic has more to do with the paisleys, curves, and surrealist stories, maybe.

It’s interesting, the contrast specifically between the two pieces in the Funny Animals comics. Yours is dealing with a really heavy issue and Crumb’s is, as ever, dealing with that Crumb id.

It’s terrific. You know, I have some more id driven pieces than what’s in that script. You know, maybe I just have more specific ideas about what I mean by “psychedelic.” On the other hand, this may be drawn like the world of underground comics that it came from—what you’re open to now is this thing called “Cracking Jokes,” and I think what I did there was nothing near what any of them were about, which is to make an essay in comic form. The subject of this is something that’s more likely to appear in prose, which is an essay on what humor is. Why do people laugh? I read all of these books on it, to distill it into four pages, and you know, the work in here is kind of influential. It’s hard to talk about, and I’m kind of embarrassed. I know I’m going out into the world and I’m supposed to figure out how to sell myself. Scott McCloud, if that’s meaningful, said that this is what allowed him to do his Understanding Comics.

You mentioned during a talk [Post-Bang] that Jack and the Box was almost Freudian on some level.

“Cracking Jokes” led directly to [Jack and the Box]. The first panel has a footnote and includes a jack in the box. The jester’s hat looks like a limp dick, which is exactly why jester’s hats were invented, incidentally, and it says, “a child’s jack in the box presents a joke in its primitive form. A momentary surprise proves to be harmless. A child learns to master its fears through laughter.” So that’s actually—if I needed an introduction into Jack and the Box for grownups, I think that panel with the limp dicks would do the trick. And if you’ve ever watched a kid play with a jack in the box, it involves repetition, until you overcome that jolt where it feels threatening, and I wanted this book to functioning like a jack in the box, in the sense that you finish it and start it again. To make a good comic for six-year-olds, it invites not just reading, but re-reading. And maybe that’s the other common denominator in these two books. As Breakdowns comes out into the world, I realize that I’m not looking for readers of Breakdowns, but re-readers.

People that read it in its original form?

No, no—I don’t care when you start. The first time you read it is like you’ve smelled the rose, but you haven’t got to chew into the sandwich, or whatever. One is entering into a territory. Once gets a notion of where things are, one can start reading it for a second, third, or fourth time. These works are really condensed and dense, and involve what is now a little less alien than when it was first made, because of the leaps in premises. If you’re going to look at this—I’m sorry, I’m gonna sound like a nut—but there wasn’t a Watchmen before there was an “Ace Hole, Midget Detective,” and there wasn’t a “Don’t Get Don’t Around Much” and the heady intellectual stuff from Chris Ware, where they’ve acknowledged their debt to one specific strip or another. They all do great work that I admire, but it’s something to find a way to make an utterance for the first time, which is what leaves me proud of the work done in here. It’s really hard to say, because you’re never supposed to say that about your own stuff. Someone else is supposed to do it.

I think you’re at a point now in your career where its okay to say that about yourself.

Well, I’m trying to signal to you that I’m trying to say something that’s accurate and not, “man, that guy’s on some kind of nutty ego trip.” It’s not to say that the work is as great as that of any of the names that are coming up, but this is an utterance, an utterance that has never been made before. Most of them came from different places. In the same way that the drawing styles between them will shift, the reasons for making them have as well.

[Concluded in Part Five]

–Brian Heater

No one’s ever accused Art Spiegelman of oversaturating the marketplace. In fact, one of the major criticisms levied against the artist has been his relatively meager output. Of course it’s never wise to rush an artist, but, in spite of years spent working for the New Yorker, the cartooning world had good reason to wonder why it took the artist nearly a decade and a half to craft the followup of Maus’s second volume, the relatively skinny mediation on 9-11, In the Shadow of No Towers.

In 2008, however, it seems as though Spiegelman is making up for lost time. The year has already seen the release of his first Toon Book, Jack and the Box; his remastered anthology, Breakdowns; and the upcoming McSweeney’s sketchbook collection, Be a Nose.

In this third part of our interview, we discuss the process of writing his first children’s book, and how exactly Spiegelman spends all of his time.

[Part One][Part Two][Heeb Magazine feature]

Between McSweeny’s, your Toon Books entry, and Breakdowns, you’ve got more going into print than ever before.

Certainly in book form I’ve never had anything like this. But for somebody who isn’t prolific, if I look at what I’ve got at any given time, it’s not exactly life of Riley here. It’s not as focused as it might be, in terms of comics work.

It’s got to be particularly rewarding to have a new book come out, though.

Oh, I love books.

There was a fairly large gap between Maus and Towers.

There was. Although I did a book that was published in Italy, but not here, of my collected New Yorker work. And there were essays and drawings, but no other book until now.

Do you require some very intense motivation to actually put out a book?

Well, I don’t like to waste trees. I know I’m not going to win any Guiness Book of World Records for pages produced—I think Tezuka has it sewn up. It’s just that it’s got to come up to a certain interior standard.

Is the bar set by the work you’ve released, or is it more of an internal editor? Did Maus set the bar for all of your subsequent work?

Maus has certainly had an impact on what comes after. Maus itself was a result of the same convoluted internal machine that this is, and before that, the work in Breakdowns was the same way.

But are you afraid of release something that won’t have the same emotional resonance as Maus?

Oh jeez. Maus was kind of this crossover hit. It’s like a blues musician who is played on every AM station. So I don’t expect that what I produce now would be that, but there is a period where I didn’t want to do anything that would get in its way.

When you were still promoting it?

No, like after it was finished, all the world wanted from me was a fucking Maus movie or Maus 3. I had to tell people that the war ended and my father died, and that’s that. On the other hand, I didn’t feel that my next move should be anywhere in that terrain. First of all, I certainly didn’t want to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books. And I like to be a moving target. I think you’d be hard-pressed—though I can explain it perfectly—to find out what Jack and the Box and Breakdowns have in common. They don’t look the same, they feel rather different, and I’m maybe one step too close to it to know if you could, without my name on it, recognize that they were both from me. But I don’t necessarily try to find that one thing. If anything, I’m more likely to do something other. For example, when I finished Maus, the next book I did was The Wild Party [grabs the book].

Sounds like a Peter Sellers movie.

It was something I had wanted to do, before Maus. I had found it in an old bookstore. It’s a poem from the 20s called The Wild Party. It was book length poem that was long out of print. It had been banned when it was first published, and I liked it a lot. I figured that I would illustrate this poem. Somewhere along the way, I had met William Burroughs, and he said it was a book that made him want to be a writer, so it had that blurb on the back cover. But this thing is all jazz age hot and sexy in a way, and is very much of its time.

I tried to make jazz age pictures that were very much of that period. I got really interested in the layout and got really interested in what it is to illustrate a book, because illustration ain’t the same as making comics, by a long shot. I was only supposed to make 12 pictures for the book, based on the original arrangement with Pantheon. I think it must have well over 60, and I got interested in what happens in page design and the flip, and what you see when you’re going through it as a book. Decorative, sexy, and ornately drawn are not adjectives that come to mind when thinking about Maus, and this was the project after, so yeah, it’s been important to me to be a moving target of some kind.

[Grabbing a copy of Jack and the Box.] One of the reasons why this work is so fascinating to me is—right around the time I started heavily getting back into comics–

When was that?

Must have been around 2000—I was just entering college. Actually, you were a professor at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz.

I had been there for another lecture and created some kind of a ruckus by only being willing to come back only if I could smoke, and Santa Cruz is not the best place for that. I got off that plane for the second visit, and I’m greeted by a newspaper headline on the local paper that says, ‘He’s Gonna Smoke ‘Em if He’s Got ‘Em,’ and there’s protestors waiting for me. The first time was literally right after Maus got the Pulitzer Prize, so it must have been ’92.

Right around 2000, or so—and this still seems the case to some degree—we saw a lot of headlines along the lines of “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore.” It’s become a cliché now, with the popularity of the graphic novel.

We did this thing called Little Lit. it was a Raw-like anthology for “kids of all ages.” So the posters we did for that were, “Comics, they’re not just for grownups, anymore.”

It’s turned around a bit, recently—Scholastic is doing some great stuff, as is First Second, and obviously Toon Books—but do you feel that, in a way, it was a bit unfortunate that, as it became for more acceptable to sell comics to adults, there seemed to be fewer and fewer comics for kids?

Yeah. The lack of comics for kids started around the same period when Dark Knight, Watchmen, and Maus came out. It’s too bad. The economics of comics don’t make them the natural that they were, when I was a kid. It was much more of a natural to spent $.10 on something, stick it in your back pocket, and then throw them away, than it does to spend $4 on a story that’s 28 pages and continues on for 500 issues. But here it feels like a frontier.

Francoise [Mouly, Speigelman’s wife and co-found of Raw] is fighting this battle and I’m cheering her on. Basically, the Toon project is different than, say what Scholastic is doing. Scholastic and a lot of what I see around is trying to find stuff to reignite the 12 years that used to be reading comics to start reading comics again. This is so hard that I tried to discourage Francoise from doing it. This is designed for kids who are just getting the notion of what it is to read, so, six- and seven-year-olds. There have hardly ever been comics for six- and seven-year-olds, per se, and the ones that I could find, weren’t really so good. There are, on the other hand, comics that weren’t meant for older kids, and bookish kids, ironically learned to read from them, despite the reputation that they had for promoting illiteracy.

When I was trying to figure out what this alphabet was, I literally learned to read from Batman. And the reason why is that I couldn’t figure out whether this fuck was the scariest guy I’d ever seen, or whether he was a good guy. So, just on that really binary stupid level, “is this scary creature a good guy or a bad guy?” could only be determined if I could decode the squiggles. And then, right after I learned to read, it went from Batman, which wasn’t really what I loved to Little Lulu and Donald Duck, which are among the most brilliant comics I’ve ever read.

This is, in a way, even more traditional than Batman, but I have some early memories of reading the comics section in the newspaper. It’s an object that always seems to be lying around within reach when you’re a kid, and the first thing you cling onto is the part with big pictures and fewer words.

Yeah, so with Toon Books, Francoise is working with inner-city kids, trying things out in script form. It’s one step short of wordlist. When I did it, I wanted all the restrictions I could find, so I went with wordlist.

To test yourself?

Well, when I said there’s something that these two books have in common, it has to do with wordlists, in the sense that most of my comics are built on severe limitation. First off, there’s the limitation that I just ain’t as skillful as other cartoonists. But well beyond that, giving myself a way to approach something like “I’m going to do this, and all of the boxes have to be the same size,” or “each page has to have a beat that falls before the last panel,” or “no captions.” Whatever they were, it’s a way to understand the structure of what I’m making.

Using a wordlist of the words kids are supposed to know by the end of first grade is pretty restricting, but what Francoise found out while doing this thing, was that at one point she ran into this psych professor who said there’s a reason why I learned to read from comics and Francoise in France learned to read from comics, and because all of the crap I had around the house that the kids destroyed, damn it—I sacrificed my comics collection—they learned to read from comics. And the reason is, when you learn to read, it’s not like some mechanized voice out of 2001’s Hal robot says, [in robot voice] “would baby like some milk?” it’s [in baby talk voice], “oooh, would baby like some miiiilk?” So, there’s a lot of expression, a lot of gesturing, and a lot of pointing.

And those things actually give context to these otherwise gibberish-like sounds that us apes make, and get the kids to understand that there’s a code, and you can break it, with all of those brain cells that you’ve got. And similarly, comics, with the facial expressions, the gestures, and the objects, are inviting something analogous to learning speech, and as a result, it actually is much more fluid to learn from all of that choreographed picture-making, rather than illustration and text that “see Dick run. Run Dick run.” Yeah, I see him running. I don’t need to have that same thing in the text. But if they’re saying, “why are you sad?” You want to know why he’s sad, he looks sad. It’s a much more connected process, in terms of mastering language. So, that was inspiring for me, trying to work for something that basic and trying to make it not stupid.

Some of it has to do with the visceral power of an image, versus a page full of words. This issue came up recently with the cartoons of Mohammed.

Yeah. For one thing, babies can recognize a “Have a Nice Day” face smiling, before they can recognize the person that’s their mother. So that cartoon of a happy face, which I’ve read somewhere, but I’m not positive that it’s true, was actually created for psychological experiments. It’s an indication that we’re actually wired to understand high-definition images. If you remember being back to a baby, it’s not just that cartoons are aimed at kids—cartoons attract kids. We actually have early wiring that lets us figure that out before we can figure out shapes on a TV screen.

Their being simpler?

Yeah,  they’re stripped down. It’s much easier to understand a large frown than a slight twitch on Robert Downey Jr’s face, or something, and like you were saying, those tiny bursts of language are much more like the way that you use words inside your brain before you start spitting it out. It’s like the essence of language. You think in a combination of words and pictures. That’s one of the things that makes comics so important.

[Continued in Part 4]

–Brian Heater

I struggled for a bit to choose a suitable title for my Art Spiegelman feature for Heeb. It had to be something that both sufficiently summed up the central theme of the piece, and really, Art Spiegelman’s career in general. Ultimately I happened upon—or possibly settled for—“Art 101,” (though, for the record, the print version of the piece ultimately just borrowed its title from that of Spiegelman’s most recent release, Breakdowns).

Toward the end of the first part of our interview, Spiegelman sums up what he considers the most important achievement in his long and storied career as succinctly as one could possibly hope, saying, “I think I was part of this swell taboo-busted gang of artists, but there was this one taboo that I needed to walk to the edge of and over. It made me move outside the terrain that was a wonderful realm of psychedelic wooliness. That was the taboo of a cartoonist calling himself an artist.”

Through the strips that would become Breakdowns, through RAW, through Maus, and through his subsequent output, the dissolution of that artificial wall separating the sequential artist from the world of high art has been one of the driving forces behind Spiegelman’s work.

In this second part, the artist takes a fittingly professorial approach toward defining art, going so far as asking me that dreaded Introduction to Art question, “what is art?” The question itself may be elementary, but as anyone who has been tasked with answering it can attest, the answer is anything but.

[Part One]

Are there cartoons that aren’t art? Where do you draw that line?

Yeah, don’t you think? What’s in the newspaper?

Is it still some kind of art? Is it “low art?”

No, fuck the low, high thing. But what does art mean? What is art to you? Sorry to be so professorial, but when we talk about “high art” and “low art,” we’ve got to start with that stupid college question: “what’s art?”

It’s a fair question. Some sort of creative pursuit, I suppose.

Maybe, but people can be creative about ads that compare Obama to Paris Hilton.

We’ll, I suppose if they’re well-made…

So, art is craft? It’s about whether it’s well-made or not? In college, this sucked. I spent an entire semester where basically all of my grad-student teacher could come up with for us, after trying to Socratically teach for a session was just that “art is anything anyone claims is art,” and that’s almost useless.

But is it untrue?

Yeah. I think. It can be true for one person. Let’s say you’re stuck in a cell, and all you’re left with was a Frito-Lay ad. Maybe you’d imbue it with enough meaning to conjue up the rest of civilization from it.

And maybe someone comes along and co-opts it as “outsider art.”

That’s where it stayed, until I was going to the dentist with my daughter, a few years back. She must have been a freshman or sophomore at Stuyvesant. Just as I’m about to take my turn in the chair, she says, “poppa, what’s art?” “I’ll get back to you, I have to go the dentist’s chair.”

You’ve got some time to think.

But it was better than that, since I won’t even get my teeth cleaned without laughing gas, I spent the next hour with nitrous-oxide clamped to my nose, trying to figure out what art is. On the way out, I said, “what did you ask me, again?” “I asked you what art is.” I said, “art is anything that gives form to one’s thoughts or feelings.” And I think that’s a better definition than the one I got in college.

Is that entirely different than the one you got in college?

The one in college was, “anything you call art is art.” If someone takes a bicycle seat and puts it up on a wall—this is you’re giving something form.

Bringing something into the world?

It could be. Could be as simple, perhaps, as taking a toilet seat at putting it on the wall, as they say in Art 101. But it also, more specifically, is finding a way to communicate the business and horror of being alive to someone else. That’s a heady endevour, and at the time, I believed in it thoroughly. Back in that 1970s work, this was the work of an atheist trying desperately to find something to believe in and deciding, maybe it’s art.

It seems like much, if not most, of your work is driven by some horror or another, be it the holocaust or 9/11.

Yeah, somewhere along the line I said—and I think it’s come back to haunt me—“terror’s my muse.” I think it’s in the No Towers book. It was certainly true for those two pieces of work. Breakdowns is dealing with something else, although it certainly deals with personal horror as well. It’s no catalyzed by terror. On the other hand, I don’t work when I’m happy. I’m usually marshaled at gunpoint to the drawing table and told to not get up until I’ve come up with something. So, that much is true, but on the other hand, there’s very little happy art that I take great stock in [laughs].

How much do you work?

I have no idea. I’m here every day and I work every day, but I’m not sure how much I work.

What do you spend most of your time doing in your studio?

Looking at pornography—no, I don’t know. I’m writing things, I’m taking notes. Sometimes they coalesce, sometimes they don’t and then there’s just a lot of grunt work involved in every project. I did all of the graphic design work on the new book. I looked at what I needed for paper, I wrote copy about the book, to give them something to write it that I approved of. One of the things about comics is that you get to be a control freak and actually make it stick. It’s much harder if you go into the world of movies. I answer e-mail, that takes a long time. I can’t really account for my hours, but I know that I’m working at something most of the time.

Do you have someone, be it an editor or publisher, who’s pushing you to get projects out the door?

Not exactly. Right now there’s a laundry list of stuff I’m supposed to do because I’ve thrown myself at the hands of a public relations arm of Pantheon—“would you write an essay for The Wall Street Journal, would you draw this picture X, Y, or Z?” but that’s not my usual mode, these days. It’s more internally driven at this point. The economic thing wasn’t certainly a big motivating factor when I was younger. “Can you draw this refrigerator?” “I could. How much do you pay for drawings of refrigerators?” But it doesn’t lead to my best work.

It’s easier to create when the gun’s pointing down at you though, right?

Situations end up having their own logic. Once you say you want to do a book, you can put it off for a couple of deadline rounds, but not forever, and when I want to intervene into making a cover or something for The New Yorker, there’s usually a shelf-life to this. “Oh, you want some stuff about the election?” Fine, but I can’t really hand it in in May, you know? There’s logic to the kind of stuff you take on, like right now I was working, in part, on something for McSweeny’s magazine. They just published a sketchbook of mine for their new issue [grabs the new issue].

There are three books and one of them is a facsimilie of a book that I did last year. And then they told me that they’d like to put out a deluxe version of this. I said, “what does that mean?” They said, “you can make it bigger or hardcover, but we’d like to put it out as a McSweeny’s book, rather than just with the magazine.” There wasn’t much I could do with this one. A hard cover would be nice, but what if we did something with two of my other sketchbooks. They’re all different sizes. So now we’re working on something which is really swell: three sketchbooks, each a different size, held together by a strap. To make that happen, there’s a lot of graphic design and production decisions. I made covers for some of these, I have to write something about the sketches, I had to christen the project, and all of that was swell, but they want to have it out in February, because that was just based on their book prodeuction schedule, which means that I’ve got to do it in the next few weeks no matter what, because that’s their schedule. It doesn’t come through the economic door, exactly, but it does have its own logic system.

That series of books is called Be a Nose. There’s a movie called Bucket of Blood that Roger Corman did in 1959. It’s about this guy named Walter Paisley, who sweeps up the coffee shop that the beatniks hang out in. He’s really kind of dimwitted and wishes that he was an artist like the other people in the coffee shop, because then he’d get the beat chicks. He’s trying various things. He’s going home to be a sculptor when the move starts, and he’s sitting in front of this giant lump of clay, after he’s swept up the coffee shop, and he’s going, “be a nose! Be a nose!” He can’t make it be a nose, he throws a knife at the wall, the knife ends up killing a cat, it’s put in plaster, and it becomes his first successful sculptor, called ‘Dead Cat,’ the girl says “groovy” or something, when she sees it, and that thing of him socking this clay, trying to make it have shape, is the best description of my work process that I’ve ever seen on screen. “Be a nose! Be a nose!”

So, which of these books is your dead cat?

[Laughs] I think they’re all corpses of some kind. I think the first drawing in this book [opens up the sketchbook] is about trying to bring these things back to life. The first book will be called Be, the second, A, and the third, Nose. That will be the next thing I’m working on.

[Continued in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

A few months back I was asked to conduct an interview with Art Spiegelman for Heeb Magazine. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. Spiegelman had worked for some time as a visiting professor at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz—despite this, however, and the fact that we both operate in occasionally overlapping circles in the relatively small New York comics scene, the opportunity had never really presented itself. In fact, interactions with the legendary artist have been non-existent, save for the occasional elbow brushing at some New York-area cartooning social event. For some time the artist has remained perched high atop a list of elusive interview subjects, just waiting for the moment to present itself.

Of course anyone with even a passing interest in the world of sequential art knows Spiegelman, at least by reputation. Every piece extolling the academic potential of the art form penned at some point in the past two decades has featured the artist with some prominence. And, despite the fact that he continues to grimace at the mere mention of the now ubiquitous phrase “graphic novel,” there remains some doubt that it ever would have achieved such widespread usage, were it not for the artist’s 1986 magnum opus.

The opportunity, as it happens, presented itself in the form of Breakdowns, the newly reissued collection of Spiegelman’s pre-Maus work. A more ideal moment with which to familiarize the populace with the artist’s canon beyond his most famous book would likely not present itself any time soon. This, coupled with the recent release of the artist’s first children’s book, Jack and the Box (released on Toon Books, the new children’s comics published house launched by Spiegelman’s wife and New Yorker art director, Francoise Mouly) and the upcoming McSweeney’s collection of Spiegelman’s sketchbooks seemed like something of a perfect storm for an artist notorious for a publishing schedule that is sporadic at best.

Any writer who has penned a piece of comics for a mainstream publication, however, knows the drill—never assume foreknowledge on the part of your audience—even with an artist so universally loved as Spiegelman. This, naturally, puts us at square one, in terms of questions—slightly problematic for Cross Hatch readers no doubt already well-versed in Spiegelman’s oeuvre.

Fortunately, however, I was assigned an hour with Spiegelman in his lower east side studio—ample time to broach topics aimed at both the unfamiliar and the indoctrinated. The hour, as it turns out, ran even longer, clocking in closer to two. Spiegelman spent the time chainsmoking and wandering back and forth between our table and his studio’s massive bookcases a half-dozen times, unshelving books from his backcatalog to illustrate various points about his work and his unwavering commitment to quality book design that has defined his work from those early days of Raw, up through the aesthetically creative packaging of Breakdowns.

What follows is not the Heeb article—that’s available online (albeit in its shortened print version—soon to be replaced by the original that runs three times that length). Rather it’s the first part of our unaltered conversation. It would have likely proven a touch alienating for a more mainstream publication, but I have no doubt seeing it in a rawer form will hold at least some appeal for Cross Hatch readers.

With that in mind, I present the first part of the Daily Cross Hatch interview with the legendary Art Spiegelman.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Breakdowns.

I have. Pantheon sent a galley.

You know, I’ve been trying to discourage them from sending galleys or PDFs, because the physicality is a big part of the book, in this case.

I’ve never really been able to read comics in PDF form.

I can’t either—I’m supposed to do my proofreading from them. But here, very specifically, the book is divided into three parts, so there’s this front area. And then there’s the old Breakdowns book as the second half, published on paperback coverstock. That makes a very physical barrier. When you’re looking at a PDF, it’s one more page of 0s and 1s. The same thing’s true in back, where the second section ends. The book is very demarcated.

The galley that I have is also standard graphic novel size.

It’s downsized? Oh jeez!

The final version seems almost unwieldy, in a way. What’s the ideal position for reading a comic?

Well, lying back and putting it up, but this isn’t a heavy book. But it’s the same size that the original Breakdowns was, and I couldn’t imagine having it come out any other way. And also, without being made out of cardboard, it’s the same dimensions, more or less, as the No Towers book and of Raw Magazine.

Why was the No Towers book made of cardboard stock?

You know, it was never going to be a book.

Was it a special issue?

What it was was that those pages were being done when I was waiting for the world to end. I really didn’t expect those pages to ever be gathered together. And then the zeitgeist quieted down a bit and I calmed down, I thought it could maybe be a portfolio. I just figured I’d make a portfolio on something better than newsprint.

But still mass produce it?

Mass? I expected maybe a few thousand, and mostly through comic shops—Diamond or something. Pantheon was game to do it as a book. When I presented it as a ten page broadsheet size book, though, they said, “we love you Art, but we can’t do that.” They said, “find a way to make it a book.” And the problem is that, doing it this way, which you called “big,” which is half the size of those pages, is the artwork would run through the gutters, because it was one large free-form layout. Doing it that way would mean that part of the page would always get lost in the middle and I would have to fudge it that way, and that just didn’t seem nice. But there are some really good production people in The New Yorker and one of them, who comes from generations of printers said, “you need to make a baby board book.” He explained to me that those are full sheets glued to other full sheets, so when you open them up, it’s really fullsheets.

‘Baby board’ meaning that they’re made of the same material as books for toddlers.

Yeah, baby’s first book [gets up to grab a copy of No Towers]. Otherwise you would lose type in the middle. Now it’s something that looks like the World Trade Center. The good thing about a book like that is that they could have done that first section and it would have been fine. But then I thought it would be nice to do the second section—the second tower, comics from the last century.

[Pulls out an old copy of Raw] In the first volume, we wanted the images to be—it was a graphics magazine. The problem is, when you presented long stories, it gets kind of pricey for self-publishing. So at that point, when we wanted to do things like print 30 page stories, we were rather out of our league.

[Turning to a Fletcher Hanks strip in Raw.] Wow, he’s come back in a big way.

Raw introduced a lot to the world. No tooting my own horn, it just did.

We’re finally catching up.

That seems to be true to me about a lot of the whole comics scene. I’m glad. It’s finally not a cry in the wilderness, but a whistle in the park.

Aside from the newfound appreciation for Fletcher Hanks, what other aspects of the graphic novel would you point to?

Oh, well I’d say, I think in certain circles, Gary Panter’s well-considered, and Chris Ware’s well-considered, and I hear that Mark Beyer has some sort of a legendary following, and this newcomer, Charles Burns has developed some sort of appreciation. The very specific artists that were introduced in Raw, certainly, but beyond that, there’s a lot. This was presented as an object. Every issue, there were things happening. That informs a lot of what come to be in the world of graphic novels, that the book is actually a tactile, physical thing that you can hold.

Ware does that, certainly. Jimmy Corrigan is a brick of a book, but aren’t we sort of moving away from that, now that everything is moving online? They start online and go into print.

But they go into print. The thing is that print actually is the natural home for comics. That may even be why comics are doing so well in bookstores. From what I hear, only religious books and comics books are doing well these days—maybe for different audiences, but presumably Robert Crumb’s illustrated bible will print the two together.

And, of course, Jack Chick.

[Laughs] This is actually something I thought of whil making Breakdowns, as well. There’s this new technology. On the one hand, it has the tendency to eclipse old technology, like trees.

Photosynthesis.

Yeah. But on the other hand, there’s also the fact that there are some things that are irreducible about a form. You can take a movie and show it on a TV screen, but until you get a super-duper large TV screen that feels as big as the vest pocket movies you sometimes go into, it ain’t the same thing, if the person made a real movie.

But there’s something to be said for the genius of Charles Schulz, who created something to be read small.

He took advantage of what was available to him, yeah. He made something that looks great there and may even look good on an iPhone. I don’t know. I’ve never really read Peanuts that way. But the thing about technology is that it makes books like this more possible. I could have never done a book like this version of Breakdowns in full-color, without my handy dandy computer over there. And yet, the things that happen once its made into a book are very specific to itself. It may be the swan song for the printed book, though I doubt it. And yet, it’s a great song as it’s making its way out the door. These are the most beautiful books I own. I wouldn’t buy an art book made in 1930, compared to an art book made now. The printing color was so approximate.

Other than as a fetish item of because it’s out-of-print now.

Yeah.

But everything’s back in print now!

Well, it’s either in print or online.

That seems to be the primary purpose for Fantagraphics’ existence, these days, getting everything in the world back in print.

And they’re not alone, Drawn & Quarterly and some other companies are doing it too.

How large of a role did you play in putting the new book together?

A large one.

Was it hard to look at this old stuff?

It should be, shouldn’t it? No, I think now it’s long enough ago that I take it for what it is, but I’m probably now even inordinately proud of it. When we’re talking about what Raw made possible—I never even finished that catalog of things—this made Raw and a lot of other things possible as well. It was pretty anomalous work when it came out, but I look back at it and go, you know, “pretty good. You were ahead of your time, kid.”

There was certainly a movement happening at the time, but do you feel that you were apart from that, in some respect?

Well, I was certainly running to keep up with my betters and elders, but at a certain point, something really possessed me. There was a point where it was hard for me to articulate what was important to me about that work and what allowed it to be important elsewhere. I think I was part of this swell taboo-busted gang of artists, but there was this one taboo that I needed to walk to the edge of and over. It made me move outside the terrain that was a wonderful realm of psychedelic wooliness.

That was the taboo of a cartoonist calling himself an artist. Not like a craftsman. That was required. But to say, [in Leave it to Beaver voice] “there’s this stuff called art, and it’s actually pretty good, y’know!” was considered intellectual and stuff and pretentious. I suppose that kind of thing can happen, but taking it seriously and going for broke involved crossing that line, and saying, “I love comics and I love cartoons, but I want to report on how reality works for me, what I see, what I think, what I feel, and I don’t want to be limited to the kind of wonderful and crazy casualness that comes with the territory.” This was go-for-broke work, at the time when I was at my most cracklingly sane and intense. I’m proud of what I was able to make, in that state.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

[Art by Frank Cammuso]

Before his reinventing himself as a children’s book author through Toon Book properties like Otto’s Orange Day with Frank Cammuso and the Dean Haspiel collaboration, Mo and Jo Fighting Together Forever, Jay Lynch was a driving force in the Chicago’s underground comics movement of the early-70s, publishing Bijou Funnies, which brought the comics world pioneering works by the likes of Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, and, of course, Lynch himself.

In the interim years, Lynch has worked on a wide range of projects, both comics and not, including the Spiegelman-created Wacky Packages series for Topps, and its successor, The Garbage Pail Kids. The artist also contributed to Mad, shortly after the return of counter-culture cartooning legend, Harvey Kurtzman.

In this final part of out interview with Lynch, we discuss working on Mad, whether today’s children’s books are a bit too safe these days, and the battle to stay afloat financially.

[Part One] [Part Two]

Do you think that children’s books have become a bit too safe?

Hypocritical? Well, it’s like a regular children’s book publisher will say that you can’t have the main character die—unless you’re Shel Silverstein.

His work was also a product of a different era. It would be interesting to see if he’d be able to get away with that now.

Well, Shel Silverstein’s books can be read by adults or kids. The Toon Books, possibly too. Actually, Art wrote some of the dialogue when they’re fighting and they say snappy things.

Do you find that you tend to work better when you’re collaborating on something?

Yeah. I think of myself as more of an editor than a cartoonist. The end product is better. Like, if I do a rough, I can put 2,000 people in one panel, and whoever draws it can draw 2,000 people. But if I were to draw it myself, I’d only put 50 people in it. So I think the end result is better. It all comes from Kurtzman’s Mad stuff. Kurtzman would do the rough, and Elder or Wood would be required to intensify it.

You’ve done some work for Mad, as well.

Relatively recently. Whenever it was that Kuyrtzman came back to Mad—I guess it was in the late-80s.

Did he play a role in bringing you on-board?

No, I just thought it would be—I never tried to work for Mad, because of the old idea that Kurtzman should have gotten a better deal. What happened was, Bob Stewart, who used to work at Topps, became Joe Orlando’s assistant, and I did a Mad stylekit. And I pointed Monty Wolverton out, because Monty draws just like Basil. They didn’t know that.

That’s his son?

Yeah. They started using him, and I wrote stuff for him. I wrote about three or four articles in the 80s, but it’s hard to do stuff for Mad, because you do it and it’s a year between the time you do it and when it’s printed, and it’s hard to predict what will be known in a year.

Especially in terms of the magazine’s pop culture satire.

Now I can do Obamalot. But what if he’s not elected?

You’ve since stopped working for Mad?

Well, it’s speculative. You write something, and maybe they’ll use it, maybe they won’t I’m in a position where I have to constantly do stuff to get money.

So what are you working on right now?

This very second, I’m drawing an old Wacky Package character for some guy who paid me $300.

So it’s a lot of commissioned personalized artwork?

Yeah, a lot. I did about 200 in the last three years. And I did a t-shirt for some kid’s Bar Mitzvah. On my Webpage, it says I’ll draw a piece of art for $300. I do that and some of the people get Mineshaft to print them, and then they’re original art, as well that’s worth more because it’s printed. Let’s talk about the new Toon Books book. I get royalties off of that.

Dean mentioned that if the book does well, he’d be happy to do a sequel. You’ve definitely left the door open for a part two. Is that something that would interest you?

Oh yeah. So it’s good that we can’t kill of the characters [laughs]. Yeah, there could be sequels now. It’s like twin superheroes. They’ve learned to get along, so next time they can learn something else.

–Brian Heater

His latest work, a collaboration with Act-I-Vater, Dean Haspiel, is hardly Jay Lynch’s first foray into the world of children’s entertainment. The book, Mo & Jo Fighting Together Forever, is Lynch’s second for Francoise Mouly’s Toon Books imprint. It’s also the latest in a long line of output aimed at children, including Garbage Pail Kids packs, My Little Pony sticker books, and lyrics for kids songs—a far cry from the latter day output of many of his late-60s underground comics contemporaries.

In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discuss the state of children’s books, X-men’s sales figures, and why his days drawing Duckman comics will also make him think of OJ.

[Part One]

Do you find that interest in your work tends to come in waves?

There’s certainly more interest in old underground comics than there was seven years ago. I don’t know, I kept all of my underground comics stuff out of print, because no one has really—I started an autobiographical comic that I wrote and Ed Piskor drew.

That appeared in Mineshaft, right?

Yes, that was serialized in Mineshaft. We don’t get paid for Mineshaft, but I like it. When we did underground comics, we made good money. When we started, Bijou was the third title, so there were only like a dozen titles. One of our titles would sell about equally with what Mad Magazine sells today. In the 60s, Mad sold 3 million a month. Our books would have printings of about 50,000. So today Mad is under 200,000. We’d sell out the reprints. Now for comic books, it’s not something you do for money. The X-men, now, is the biggest selling comic, and it has a smaller circulation than most of the underground comics.

Is that a result of the marketplace being flooded?

Yeah. And also, it’s sold in the shops. No one ever really goes to the shops, except collectors. That’s why I haven’t really done any comics. I drew a Duckman comic for Topps, about—when the OJ thing was happening.

The mid-90s.

Yeah. When OJ was on the car chase. I remember when I was drawing Duckman, OJ was on the TV, being chased. I guess that was like the early or mid-90s.

When you’re working on something like Duckman, how closely do you have to study the source material? Do they make you watch all of the episodes?

No. Stefan Petrucha wrote the thing. They sent me a style kit. Sometimes I’d write it—that’s mostly what I’d do, draw roughs, and other people draw it.

When you’re actually doing the writing, what are you using as source material?

Well, most of the sticker albums are based on movies or episodes of TV shows. Oh, that was a good job—I had to read every Goosebumps book that there was. I had a three-foot high pile of Goosebumps books to do a Goosebumps trivia book with questions about the stories.

Do you have a particular favorite non-comics job that you’ve done, over the years?

Non-comics? I wrote a comic in the 60s which was like a poem. And a band called The Boogers covered it on a album with songs for kids. Country Joe and the Fish wrote one, too. That will be out in a month, or so.

Let’s talk more about the superhero book, Mo & Jo. The first thing is to get a moral and then write the book.

It seems that, in the case of that book, the moral is pretty well stated in the title.

Yeah, that was Francoise, or maybe Art, who came up with the title. I called it something like “Major Mojo.”

Were there things that you wanted to put in, which were deemed not age appropriate?

No. Well, I think the hippo balloon was originally a Thanksgiving Day parade, so it was a turkey balloon, but that would have made the book seasonal, so they changed it to a hippo balloon.

You’ve done a bit of work for kids at this point. Would you say that you’re pretty well accustomed to what will and won’t fly for certain age levels?

Yeah. Well, there’s some stuff that you can’t have in kids books. No one can smoke, no one can die, and there can be no fire. Although a lot of the old classic things like Snow White and the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Sleeping Beauty, the prince goes blind, and in Cinderella, they cut off the queens feet. Pecos Bill, they went over the whole film and took away his cigarettes.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

Jay Lynch was there at the beginning. As the head of Bijou Funnies, he published some of the most significant underground pioneers of the late-60s, including folks like Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson, Art Spiegelman, and Justin Green, while gaining notoriety in his own right as an artist in his own right, thanks to titles like Nard ‘n’ Pat.

With that in mind, the context for our conversation feels a touch strange. When I call him at his home in upstate New York, the artist is eager to speak about his latest work, Mo and Jo Fighting Together Forever, a collaboration with Act-I-Vate artist, Dean Haspiel. It’s Lynch’s second book for young children under the Toon Books umbrella.

The connection between Lynch’s early career and his current children’s work is rather rather easily unpacked, however. Toon Books head (and New Yorker art director) Francoise Mouly approached Lynch to join the fold of her soon-to-be launched publishing house three years ago. The collaboration eventually resulted in Otto’s Orange Day, release by the company, earlier this year.

But Otto was hardly Lynch’s first work for children, the artist having spent a significant portion of his career working on contract for Topps—works like Wacky Packs and The Garbage Pail Kids—alongside fellow underground legend (and Mouly’s husband), Art Spiegelman.

We spoke to Lynch about Spiegelman, superheroes, and his days spent slaving away at in the My Little Pony mines.

Did Francoise approach you to do something for Toon Books?

Yeah, pretty early on. It was like three-and-a-half years ago. She called me up with the idea. And I wrote the Otto book, and it was supervised all through its writing by these people from school boards. I’m not sure exactly which ones, but I think it was Maryland and maybe Pennsylvania. So the book has things that they learn about in phonics classes. It has their vocabulary words and stuff like that, but it’s cleverly disguised.

Was that something they were attempting to do with all of the books, early on, or was it more to help you along with your first time writing for that age group?

Well, for many years, I worked for a company called Diamond Publishing (they don’t actually have anything to do with Diamond Distribution). This is a company that makes sticker albums. So I wrote a lot of licensed character sticker albums for kids about My Little Pony and Transformers and The Simpsons and Archie—anything that was a hot license. So I did do a lot of writing for kids, but not of my own characters. So she showed me Frank [Cammuso]’s book. Frank I knew of from Max Hamm. So, all the time I was writing the book, I thought that Frank would be drawing it. Frank gave his input and stuff, and I don’t know, it’s cute…

Do you think that Francoise approached you, based on this prior experience that you had had, working with kids’ books?

Um, I guess, yeah. Well, she approached Geoffrey Hayes at the same time, because he had kids books out.

So in a way, it was something that you sort of happily fell into.

It wasn’t my idea. It was fun to do, though.

But it’s not something you’re interested in centering a career around, at this point?

Well, I just wrote a song for a kids record. But I’m too old—I already had a career. Shel Silverstein wrote kids books.

Did you do any artwork for these books?

I actually drew the musical notes in the beginning of the book, when Otto sings. And I did the lettering on the note that Aunt Sally wrote him, but that’s only because Frank was out of town, and they couldn’t reach him [laughs]. I did roughs of the whole book. That’s how I submitted the book. But I don’t draw as cute as Frank, so my cats come out looking more like Fritz. So I just did that for facial expressions and positions and stuff. That was just the first draft. Frank added a more dynamic movement to it.

Are you drawing still?

Oh yeah. I draw constantly. We did the Wacky Packs and the Garabage Pail Kids for Topps, and then I revived them, a few years ago, so I’m constantly drawing pictures of Wacky Packs for fans who pay more than Topps does for the real ones. I do stuff for Mineshaft Magazine, as well.

At what point did you join Topps?

1966.

And Art was already there, at that point?

Yeah. They hired Art when he graduated—he actually worked there when he was still in high school, and then they hired him the summer that he graduated high school.

How much freedom did Topps give you?

Well, when making a new series, we had pretty much complete freedom. When it became successful, then they’d start to go over it and change things.

In terms of Diamond, working with licenses like My Little Pony and The Simpsons—

Well, with Diamond it was all licensed stuff, so it had to be approved by the license holders. The Archie comics looks exactly like an Archie comic.

Is it tough to work within such strict parameters?

Well, I don’t do it anymore, except once in a while I do it for Topps. But no, it wasn’t they paid me. It was like a 9 to 5 job. I was the editor of their sticker albums for six years.

Since they revived Garbage Pail Kids a few years back, is that still a significant chunk of your income?

Wacky Packs is. That’s doing really well, and there’s a Wacky Packs book that reprints the ones from the 70s, where Art wrote the forward, and I wrote the afterword. That sold out of the first printing. That came out in May and the Otto book came out in April.

And the book you did with Dean just came out.

You can buy it on Amazon for the last month or so, but it was just officially released over the last weekend. With Dean I didn’t do roughs. I just wrote it and he drew it. He was more familiar with the genre than I.

The superhero genre.

Yeah.

There’s a somewhat artifical divide that we draw between indie comics and superhero books. Was it a genre that interested you, as far as writing?

Well, when I was a kid, I like The Spirit and Plastic Man, because they were self-contained. And also, the way that [Jack] Cole and [Will] Eisner drew had kind of a sense of humor to them. I was never really into Superman, though. It was Francoise’s idea to do a superhero book. When I go to the library where I live, in upstate New York, they tell me that kids gravitate toward manga and superheroes, so this may be a way to reach those who would only look at a superhero book.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater

Released earlier this week by The New Press, Brown professor Paul Buhle’s Jews in American Comics could have easily been yet another rehash of a long line of academic treatises on the subject of Jewish-American involvement in the creation of the superhero, most recently exemplified by Danny Fingeroth’s Superman Disguised as Clark Kent.

Fortunately for us, however, Buhle considers himself something of a peer to artists like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. A spiritual descendant of Harvey Kurtzman and his ilk, the realm of capes and tights never really did all that much for the author.

Instead, the book maps the role of Jewish creators from the early days of syndicated comics through the innovations brought forth by EC/MAD, and ultimately through the explosion of the underground and its subsequent repercussions.

For a more complete review of the book, check the most recent issue of The New York Press. After the jump you’ll find a full—if short—interview conducted with Buhle for the publication.

What sort of history do you have, writing academically about comics?

I would say modestly—I began by publishing Radical American Comics in Madison, in 1969, which is the third of the underground comics to appear. The first two were Crumb’s Zap Comics solos. Then, in the 70s, I published a theoretical version of a fanzine called Cultural Correspondance—1975 to 1983. That is digitized now. In the 90s, I wrote a fair bit about Spiegelman and Ben Katchor, my pal, and any number of artists, some of whom I interviewed in the 70s for Cultural Correspondence, The Village Voice, The Nation, and any number largely Jewish publications.

Leaping forward to 2003, I had a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how comics have now become a subject of academic interest. That was much circulated and much—not exactly attacked—but everyone whose name wasn’t mentioned was crabby about it, you understand. There wasn’t much of a scholarly trail then, and anyone who published an online magazine that has since gone out of business thought that he deserved an important mention.

I have another scholarly piece in Reviews in American History and another piece in Marxism Reexamined and a number of other journals. I’ve tried to do two things at once: establish a sort of scholarly dignity for non-fiction comics and recover what non-fiction has done in the past, like this guy, Jack Jackson, who did a history of pre-state Texas and was highly regarded by the Texas historical society, before he died, a few years back. Also at the same time, I’ve tried to suggest what could be done now, and why it was important to do comics on valuable subjects, without being didactic, because that follows the track of my students who read less every year—and many of them want to read comics.

You seem to largely take as your focus alternative cartoonists like Crumb. Is that a direct result of having come out of that tradition?

No, really, a lot of it is based on my growing up reading Mad comics, before it became Mad Magazine. When it became Mad Magazine, it wasn’t as good, but it was still sort of Jewish liberal and New York reaching out to me, in the middle of Illinois, which was appreciated, but also, Classics Illustrated, which we always called “Classic Comics.” That was the place I where I first read my classics. Since my sister, who is four years older, taught me how to read after kindergarten using those books, comics always had a really warm spot in my heart. Mad comics, because it was so wonderful about showing what was stupid and hypocritical about the coporate world, it was sort of like my book of knowledge. I wrote a high school paper as a junior about Harvey Kurtzman. I got a B from a teacher who liked me, but always thought that comics were degraded, as almost everyone did think.

I feel now that they have an exhaulted purpose that is only now beginning to be understood, and the comic artist, with the rarest exceptions—Spiegelman is almost the catchword, until Alison Bechdel came on the stage, and my new friend, Linda Barry-there are less than 10 that have ever been given the credit that they deserve. They’ve rarely been able to make a living. I think that I’m they’re champion, I would cheerfully say.

Is it a coincidence that the first person considered to have broken down that wall between academia and comics—Spiegelman—is a jew?

No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s a strange thing, and the very first underground comics full-scale exhibit will open in Madison, in April at the University of Wisconsin. I wrote the essay in the catalog, and I noted that, in the underground comics world of the Bay Area, Jewish comic artists were not numerous. They were there, but they were not numerous. That’s because it was not in greater New York, the way that the comic industry was. But that migration eastward, after that phase ended, circa-1980, suggested that, in the greater New York publishing world, that Jewish artists probably would have been the ones who would have written vastly disprortionate amounts, compared to the common artist.

You touch on the superhero books coming out of New York in a chapter, but don’t really dwell. Does it have anything to do with the fact that it’s a well-tread area?

That’s a really good question, and someone who criticizes me on that is probably well-founded, and I have no right to be crabby about it. I really stopped reading superheroes when I was about 12. I was a little too old to start reading Marvel in the 60s. I didn’t take to them. I didn’t think that they represented a new phase of art. The art seemed very stylized, and also, I have to say I was always looking for that progressive New Deal-ish message that always seems to be in Mad Magazine.

I found Sgt. Fury to be more the tone of comics, and I know that has changed in the last 20 years—I was just looking at a writer who said that the artists want to write critically about the Iraq War, but they find themselves strapped to publishers who are still in the “celebrate the conquering heroes” mode in the mainstream. Although that may be over in ways I can’t see, I feel that the world of underground comics is so much my generation. There are so many people among them who are very good friends of mine, including Crumb and Bill Griffith—the only one who could make it into the dailies—that these are the ones that my heart went to. Plus those people in mainstream get $300 a page, and they don’t even have to ink. They have health plans, unlike my pals who have none of those things and are scraping along. So again, I feel like I’m their champion.

How integral is that concept of being an underdog to the success of the Jewish role in comics?

I think it’s integral to comics from the very first moment they appeared in the daily press in the 1890s, and not particularly Jewish. But it’s also true that my late friends, the Hollywood blacklisted artists, when they found out that they couldn’t portray struggling workers related to unions, they found another underdog who they could truly sympathize with, whether it was Katherine Hepburn as a woman or a poor orphan and on and on—some of them ended up doing animal features, with the same kind of underdog attitude. Animation was full of the same thing—mice against cats, cats against humans. You’re littler, but you can take on the giant, if you’re more clever. That resonates in a lot of Jewish culture, especially Jewish culture that’s not connect with the merchant or the Rabbi, but is out of that circle of influence.

Fitting then that it’s targeted toward children, in so many cases.

Well, that’s right, too, of course. I suppose on our weak side, we all wanted to be Superman or for girls, Wonderwoman, but that’s the immature way out—”I want big muscles, so I can punch people out.” But, by the time you get to be 12 and you realize that you’re not gonna be one of those guys with big muscles, you’ve got to figure how else to get along in the world. Then you’ve got to use your wits, and again, that goes to a certain Jewish affect, which was there, is there, and, in my estimation, will go on being there, no matter what the income levels and all of the other things that go along with that.

–Brian Heater