Common themes, of course, can be recognized across the backcatalog of any established artist. In some ways, however, such signposts feel all the more prominent in Charles Burns’ work. The artist has maintained a powerful sense of stylistic consistency across his output—both in terms of his approach to aesthetics and storytelling—that lesser artist find difficult to maintain over the course of a single story.

In this third and final part of our interview with Burns, we discuss the influences—both conscious and otherwise—on his singular artistic vision and how they influenced both his most famous book, Black Hole, and his more recent venture into the world of film, Peur(s) du Noir—a dark and haunting work that fits in perfectly alongside his better-known work.

[Part One][Part Two]

Black Hole had a lot of single panel images that worked on their own.

Yeah.

Do you work from the images?

You know, it goes both ways. Primarily I’d say that my storytelling comes from writing, but sometimes there’s this really strong, iconic image, and the ideas are based around that. If you think about Black Hole, if you don’t have the woods, the story has a very different feeling to it. This environment, the way that it’s drawn, is very important to the storytelling.

But you’re not experiencing any Jim Woodring-like visions?

I try to pay attention to my subconscious mind and my dreams, but I’ve never really suffered from hallucinations.

I know your father was a scientist—was that part of the genesis of the story that inspired the short film?

Someone asked me that before, and I didn’t have an answer. I thought about it before, and now I do have one. You were talking about the bed that has insects in it. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, and at some point, I had this bed. It wasn’t like a regular bed—it was more like a couch.

Like a futon?

Yeah, maybe something like that, and the material inside when you sat down made kind of crackling sound. I had a strong imagination, and on evenings when I was trying to fall asleep, I would hear this crackling sound. I’m not moving, but I’m hearing this crackling sound, so of course I’m thinking there’s something in there, like insects.

Is there something specific to that story that lends itself well to doing an animated film, versus a comic?

The guideline was that it had to be in black and white, and that is was about fears of the dark. It’s a horror story and there was a certain length to it—between 15 and 20 minutes. This seemed like it fit. It was also just a matter that I wanted to go back to this story.

The fear of the dark is an incredibly central theme to the story.

Yeah, of course, and in every horror story, really. It was interesting too, working on it, that there were a lot of visual links between the stories. We didn’t know exactly what the entire story would be, but it was interesting to see all of the similarities.

Beyond the darkness, what other themes hold the pieces together?

There’s the whole fear of the physical body, which I always come back to [laughs]. There are just funny little things, like the specimen in jars.

That has to be one of the most terrifying concepts for a horror story—this idea of losing control of yourself. That played a huge role in Black Hole. It also plays a big role in the animated piece.

Yeah, absolutely. The guy wakes up and he’s tied up and has a little cut on his hand.

Yeah, and Black Hole, which has the people slowly turning into monsters.

Oh yeah, right, right. With Black Hole, there are so many things I like about that idea of transformation where someone can wear their clothes and hide their affliction, whereas, if someone has it manifest itself on their face, they can’t possible hide it.

And in those terms, Black Hole has its roots in very real diseases.

Sure, sure.

Did those play a role in the writing of the story?

Well, there are some things that are much more—you’ve got the idea of the girl that slips out of her skin. At that age, you’ve got the idea of wanting to transform yourself and becoming a new person. I like that idea. The extra idea—there’s Burroughs again. The whole idea of the talking asshole.

From Naked Lunch.

Those sort of things played a role.

Would you work on another one of these projects, if the opportunity presented itself?

I’d be interested in working on other projects, but again, this piece was so unusual, in terms of the freedom we were allowed. And also, a major motivation was working with the other artists I admired.

–Brian Heater

At its best, Peur(s) du noir is arguably one of the scariest films you’ll have the opportunity to see in theaters this year. The film, a collection of black and white animated shorts brought together by French producers Valérie Schermann and Christophe Jankovic, doesn’t embrace the ultra-violence and gore of the vast majority of movies than come through your local Cineplex. Rather, like the most compelling horror films, the animated segments confront the psychological, revolving, in some form or another, around the titular fear.

The film is a perfect vehicle for Charles Burns’s art. It’s quietly creepy, exploring themes or youth and fear of the body, all while retaining the artist’s iconic aesthetic in a manner that likely would have proven nearly impossible with more traditional animation, all of which no doubt owes a good deal to the fact that Burns played the role of both writer and director of his piece.

Burns’s segment, however, while successful, gives rise to some familiar questions about film adaptations of graphic novels, specifically the upcoming film version of the artist’s magnum opus, Black Hole. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discuss the project for which Burns has largely opted to remain hands-off.

[Part One]

I don’t know how you can speak about it, at this point, but there is a Black Hole film in production.

It’s out there and I think it’s announced that David Fincher is the director. There’s a new script that’s being written, as we speak, or maybe it’s done now, but my last contact was talking to the script writer who was going to Seattle.

To run around the forests?

Yeah. “You’ll want to take a left on (whatever the street was), and you’ll want to take a right on…” I did a little bit of that. There are a few references in Black Hole that talk about specific places that do exist in Seattle. He was going to do his own detective work. In the end, I gave him a few clues.

Was it ever suggested that you play a larger role in the script writing?

Not really. I guess I could have insisted and said that I wanted to write a script. They would have been open to that, I suppose. On the other hand, I really wanted to move on and work on different projects. For myself, it would have been just looking back and struggling to get something of my own up there. Even working on the animated film, being offered as much complete control as possible, even then it’s always going to be a collaboration. It’s close to my heart, but someone else is animating, someone else is writing those musical notes.

So, in a way, it’s almost easier for you not to play as large a role?

Yeah. I made that decision. I just wanted to put blinders on, move ahead, and work on different things, instead of trying to involve myself that much.

It took you a decade to get Black Hole out into the world. Is that part of the reason you so badly wanted to move on?

Yeah, that’s part of it. That was part of my motivation for working on Fear(s) of the Dark, as well. I was working on a single piece of obsessive work for so long, that I wanted to get out of my little studio and work with other people. I wanted to do something that was different for me. I succeeded at that, which is nice.

Why does it end up being such a lengthy process? Do you go back and edit yourself a lot? Does it just take a long time to do every page?

All of those things. One of the reasons is that I work really slowly—I edit myself a lot. I also start and stop a lot, because I have other projects. I have paying projects, illustrations and such.

And Black Hole was coming out as single issues.

Yeah. It was an issue a year for while there, it seemed like. But yeah, it was always conceived as as a complete book. It was written that way. It was like inching forward.

I assume the Black Hole will be live-action?

Again, I don’t know. The option says it can be whatever they want, so yeah, it can be puppets, for all I know.

Assuming for argument’s sake that it’s real people—reading Black Hole, the visual style is so important—do you think that it will lose something?

I don’t know. There’s some talk about trying to do some sort of movie magic to replicate that, but that’s just conversation. I don’t know if that will be done—if anything will be done. It’s Hollywood, so…

You have one of the most instantly recognizable styles in the medium. I can pick up an issue of, say, The Believer, and instantly recognize one of your pieces. How important was it to develop a clear style?

Well, it was just something that I gradually built on. It was not something I did intentionally. It was more just a matter of a certain look that I admired and was trying to figure out, going back to high school and junior high. I looked at certain things and wondered how they made those lines. I finally figured out that they used brushes to make those lines. I started trying to use a brush and went from there.

Do you ever have the desire to try out something radically different?

A little. What I’m working on now is a new comic, which is in color. That brings up a lot of really interesting ways of telling a story. You don’t have to describe the fact that someone has a pink shirt on. There are just elements that you can use as storytelling devices. And I’m also trying something new in the sense that I’m interchanging a couple of different visual styles in the story.

Are you doing the coloring yourself?

Yeah.

Does the fact that you’ve done black and white so long stem from early printing issues, or—

Early on there were a few things that had to do with printing limitations. In the case Black Hole, I just knew that the story had to be in black and white. There was just no question, with the mood and feeling. I love black and white. It’s hard to explain the work I’m doing now, but it’s based in part on Herge’s Tin Tin, which is a book that I grew up with. Color is a very important part of what that book is. So I’ve got a little bit of that Belgian bright, flat colors.

Both Black Hole and the animated shorts are black and white—they’re also horror stories, in some sense. Is the new story a different direction?

It’s not Black Hole, and again, it’s going to be hard to describe. It’s a little bit Tin Tin and William Burroughs [laughs]. How’s that?

So, an adventure story, with centipedes.

With opiates and hallucinations. There’s also a big dose of punk in there, too.

A lot of Burrough’s sci-fi stuff is sort of horror-based.

Yeah.

Is that still a big influence on what you’re continuing to do?

I guess so. There certainly some very horrific imagery in there. I just drew this green fetus creature that’s floating in dirty water. That’s what I just finished. That’s on my drawing table. So, yeah, there’s strong imagery like that. Not the entire story is like that, though.

–Brian Heater

When it was finally collected by Pantheon in 2005, after a decade’s worth of serialization, Black Hole confirmed Charles Burns’s place as the master of indie horror comics. Where many of his fellow graduates of Art Spiegelman’s RAW had long sinced forsaken the teachings of the tattered EC books on which they were weaned, there was something in the youthful psychological terrors which Burns could not abandon—or perhaps more accurately, would not abandon him.

The persistent existentialist horrors of Burns’s work are, if anything, only compounded by the artist’s brush work, which has long since become one of the most familiar styles in all of contemporary sequential art, instantly recognizable, the moment it pops up in some anthology or on the frontcover of McSweeney’s The Believer–its stark, shadow-heavy black and white an ever-present homage to the subtle terror of the earliest of horror movies.

That Burns should attempt one day to make his own horror film should come as a surprise to no one. The artist happily signed on to direct a segment for Peur(s) du Noir—Fear(s) of the Dark. The Guillermo Del Toro-approved collection of dark animated shorts has been making its way around the festival circuit over the past year.  The film is subtly frightening in a manner that most contemporary horror films forgo, too often embracing the shock of overt gore—a method that never seems to translate sufficiently in the world of sequential art.

Burns’s segment is the clear centerpiece of the film, and thanks to the subtle form of computer animation employed, which retains his style in a manner which would like be lost on more traditional animation methods, from the moment a character appears on the screen, there’s no doubt who’s behind the piece.

Burns, who has been traveling a bit to promote the film took time during a recent New York appearance to talk to us about Fear(s) of the Dark.

It’s got to be exciting to finally sit down and see the film in all of its animated glory.

Well, it’s funny, I saw it when it came out in France, last winter. I was over there for the premier in Paris. It’s one of those things I was working on for a while, and it’s finally coming here, which is nice.

I watched it last night, and the second it came on, it was clear which short was yours. We seem to be at a point in animation where the director doesn’t have to compromise his or her visual style at all.

That was the reason I wanted to be involved was the production company and what they wanted to do, which was make sure that there was no point where I was edited or my ideas were edited, other than to say something like, “is this a good idea, to do another zoom shot here?” Other than that, there was nothing as far as the content that was ever compromised. That was great. I think that was the production company’s whole approach, to allow each artist and writer to have their own vision intact.

Was animation something you had been interested in for a while?

Not really. It was something I had done as a kid, stop-motion, claymation, and things like that. But it’s not really something that I’ve kept up with, as an adult. There were plenty times where people would ask me if I had seen certain films. I have two daughters who went through their period of watching all of the animated movies, so I’ve walked past that. It wasn’t really something that I had kept up with, but I was interested in it in the sense of wanting to try something that was new—stepping into this world that I didn’t really know about.

In its most elementary sense, sequential art can almost be seen as a storyboard for animation. It seems like a fairly logical step to make.

Well, it was funny—at this point, I feel secure about writing comics. I’ve been writing comics long enough. It’s not easy, but it’s a domain I understand and feel comfortable with. So, when I started out, I came up with a storyline and wrote that out and broke it down into storyboards. All of that felt comfortable and familiar. But the minute we moved onto the next step, I felt like I was in deep trouble, because there’s an absolutely different sense about how a story is told when it’s moving. This is a very different process, which I quickly found out. That’s what was interesting too, was that there was an understanding that myself and other artists involved hadn’t done animation before. We hadn’t directed before.

Is that true of all of the other artists [involved in the film]?

Not all of them. Richard McGuire, who did the last segment—the other Americant—had worked with the directors before, and he may have even done other animated segments before—I’m not positive. So he knew the whole process. And I’d imagine some of the other artists, as well, but I’m not positive.

So that piece was written specifically to be turned into an animated short?

Yeah. Well, it was based on this real early story that I had done, right when I had started to write comics. It’s an embarrassing comic in that the drawing and the writing is bad, but there’s still part of the content that I really wanted to go back and re-examine.

There’s something inherently creepy about insects and beds and the things that crawl on us, when we sleep.

Right. Some stories come from a very simple image like that—insects inside this bed, crawling. What is the feeling of that?

I’m sure you gotten this before, but there are some visual moments that I couldn’t help but to compare to Black Hole. There’s the moment with the cut in the wrist.

 Sure. There are a lot of themes that come back, again and again. I never know how to explain that part of it. I always leave that to the critics to explain.

Having come from an early story, would you say that, in some ways, it was something of an inspiration for Black Hole?

Not an inspiration, so much as again there are just these little imageries and ideas that I keep coming back to, again and again.

[Continued in Part Two]

–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