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Tag: art spiegelman

Published August 29, 2019

Art Spiegelman on Golden Age Superheroes

The Guardian has an essay by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman on the events that shaped the original ‘golden age’ superheroes and their creators, and why these characters still resonate with readers and movie-goers:

The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic – almost god-like – secular saviours to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the great depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war. Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy by projecting themselves on to invulnerable heroes.

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

Apparently a version of this essay was originally intended to serve as the introduction to a Folio Society collection called Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949, but was rejected for not being ‘apolitical’.

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Published April 16, 2015

Françoise Mouly on Voice

francoise-mouly-photo-sarah-shatz.

Grace Bello interviews the always interesting Françoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker and founder of Toon Books, for Guernica:

I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books—whether they be books of comics or books of literature—is a window into somebody’s mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it’s so specific. It’s a new way to look at the world. It’s as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary’s skin, you do get a sense of what it’s like to be that person. It’s a kind of empathic response when you’re reading it.

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Published December 20, 2013

Art Spiegelman: The Horror of the Blank Page

Artist Molly Crabapple interviews (and draws!) Art Spiegelman for Vice magazine:

Because of Photoshop we all know that photographs lie every second that they open up their mouths. You can’t really trust a photograph. It could have just as easily been a photoshopped collage. So, it’s probably more plausible to trust an artist. You get to feel whether you trust them or not… Artists tend to have to reveal more of themselves even when they try to be as scrupulous as Joe Sacco. It has a place insofar as concentrating on something has a place. We’re living in an ADD universe. The computer encourages that second-to-second dopamine rush as you go from click to click. What’s valuable about comics and print is they actually are a venue where you end up spending time.

Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective runs November 8th – March 23rd at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

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Published November 18, 2013

Art Spiegelman: The Antibodies of Satire

Art Spiegelman talks to Tablet Magazine’s literary editor David Samuels about the retrospective currently at the Jewish Museum in New York, Mad magazine, and, inevitably, Maus.

While not exactly critical of Spiegelman, it’s one of the feistier interviews I’ve read with him recently:

Now, if you’re talking about nationalism, then you have to get to Duck Soup within a couple of seconds. And that impulse predates WWII, and it’s an outsider’s perspective on a culture, and there are still plenty of outsiders to this culture, and things will come from that still, I believe. That’s one point.

The other point, which is more to the point perhaps, is the impulse—I see it through Mad, because it’s the one that’s imprinted on me. Mad made the resistance to the Vietnam War even possible. And that seems really, deeply true, not just some kind of wise-crack true. Because the ’50s felt incredibly monolithic. The early ’50s was an incredibly oppressive place in America, very iconically represented by a decent-enough liberal chap named Norman Rockwell. It’s when we got this ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, it’s when we had our crazy McCarthy moments, we had all of these things happening, and yet there was room for a very effective antibody, which was this kind of self-reflexive, self-deprecating, angry response to the homogeneity from people who weren’t thoroughly homogenized in our culture, i.e., Jews. It led to something very fruitful, and we still have the aftermath of it, both positively and negatively.

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Published September 13, 2013

Françoise Mouly: In Love With Art

Jeet Heer discusses the work Françoise Mouly and his new book, In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman, with Dave Berry at The National Post:

She’s open to the wider world in a way that was very rare for North American comics, which was a very provincial scene. But combined with that is not just the European comics themselves, but the European fine art tradition, which she had been educated in and made her very responsive to certain types of art. That’s very distinct from North America, even in the undergrounds, which were much more rooted in satire and lowbrow comedy and pulpishness. The other thing that she brought to the table is a sense of design, which is very rare in comics to that point. There was no one designing magazines and books in that format. Even people who believed in mature comics, they didn’t have that. Fantagraphics, their comics in the ’80s, even though the content is great, when they put it together in a book, they have no idea how to design that kind of product.

In a lot of ways, that sense of design really made the whole idea of the graphic novel possible. The distinguishing thing of the graphic novel isn’t just the length, but that it’s conceived of as a book. In the ’70s and ’80s, people thought that if you had a 64-page Hulk story, that’s a graphic novel – better paper, but all the same design elements as the regular comic… what made Maus and the other books that she did seem like bookstore material, library material was her book design sensibility. Everybody who’s doing interesting comics since then has learned from that.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an excerpt from the book about the now iconic 9/11 New Yorker cover created by Mouly and Spiegelman:

It was a true example of collaborative art. Many of the hallmarks of Mouly’s tenure as New Yorker art editor can be seen in the 9/11 cover, including a direct engagement with current events—an enormous tonal shift in New Yorker cover history. But the cover doesn’t deal with this tragedy in the didactic manner of, say, a political cartoon, but rather through artful means: using subtlety and ambiguity, strong design, a compelling use of color (or in this case, a memorable absence of color) and the distillation of experience (rather than ideas or ideologies) into an iconic image. The dialogue between Mouly and Spiegelman was also typical of the strongly collaborative way she always has worked with, and continues to work with, her artists.

In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman is published by Toronto’s Coach House Press, and if you are in Toronto this evening, Françoise Mouly and Sean Rogers will be in conversation Jeet Heer at Revival on College Street, starting at 7:30pm

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Published August 30, 2013

Art Spiegelman: Mixing Words and Pictures

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviewed at NEA Arts Magazine:

It never occurred to me that comics were anything other than worthy. They were in fact among the most worthy endeavors I could imagine. They were how culture got introduced to me, more than through other media…. I always assumed they were a container big enough to hold whatever I could hold.   

Spiegelman’s somewhat delayed book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps will finally be widely available in September. (Full disclosure: Co-Mix is published by Drawn + Quarterly and distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)

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Published May 17, 2013

Something for the Weekend

They Call it Madness — Jess Nevins  reviews the H.P. Lovecraft collection The Classic Horror Stories for the L.A. Review of Books:

Lovecraft was not the best of his era in any of the genres he wrote in. Clark Ashton Smith was a better stylist. Algernon Blackwood wrote better horror. Olaf Stapledon wrote better science fiction. Yet it is Lovecraft who has been canonized with a Library of America edition, who has provided the source material for academic writings, comic books, and even game shows like Jeopardy, and who has been assimilated by capitalist culture to the point that there are plushies made of his characters.

One would never have guessed this fate for Lovecraft at the time of his death in 1937…

Nevins has been heroically annotating all of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill and, most recently, compiled notes to the very Lovecraftian Nemo: Heart of Ice (pictured above). But before you get sucked in, be warned: the annotations have a kind of Borgesian horror all of their own.

(And while were on the subject of Lovecraft and comics, you could do worse than picking up I. N. J. Culbard’s adaptations of The Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward published by SelfMadeHero)

Also at the LA Review of Books, Michael Nordine on enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick:

Malick has the rare distinction of becoming a celebrity — at least in part — for rejecting the notion of celebrity. At a time when we’re given a direct line into our favorite stars’ streams of consciousness via the social media avenue of our choosing, the 69-year-old continues to let his films speak for themselves. When he was nominated for Best Director at the 1998 Academy Awards, the picture that appeared onscreen was of a chair with his name on it; at last year’s ceremony, a different on-set photo from the same production was used. Each new project of Malick’s is said to come with a contractual stipulation that no photos of him may be used in the film’s promotional materials. No matter: people have repeatedly proven able and willing to create an image of their own. That this picture is incomplete at best and may well be wholly inaccurate matters little. Now more than ever, it seems we still can’t conceive of a famous person who doesn’t want to be famous, and even caricatures are more satisfying than a note reading “not pictured” in the celebrity yearbook.

And finally…

David Berry in conversation Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly at the National Post. Here’s Mouly’s take on RAW:

Basically, there were no venues for comics, and I just thought, “Well, I can do it myself.” The idea was to show people what actually could be done … that it wasn’t so much a style that was one answer to where comics should go, but was more that each person had their own voice.

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Published February 1, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

The cover for Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander designed by John Gall.

The Invisible Man — Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, reviews Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus for the LA Review of Books:

[T]here is something obsessive about MetaMaus, which says as much about the price of success in the contemporary literary marketplace — and its attendant culture of celebrity authorship — as it does about its subject. When a book like Maus makes a big impact, we often condemn its creator never to move on to new projects. MetaMaus give evidence that Spiegelman has endured a fate not unlike that of Ralph Ellison after he published Invisible Man in 1952. Like Ellison, Spiegelman has rightly earned enormous praise, and, also like Ellison, he has become his own best interpreter. But just as Ellison produced no major work after Invisible Man other than the unfinished, posthumously published Juneteenth…, Spiegelman has yet to produce a work of comparable depth and sophistication to Maus.

The Road — Julie Bosman on the future of Barnes & Noble for The New York Times:

If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”

…Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

See also: B & N won’t sell books from Amazon Publishing and Amazon’s Revenue Slumps.

And finally…

The fascinating first article in a year-long series on the inner-workings of Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press by Mark Medley for the National Post:

A significant amount of time is spent discussing paperback editions of books that recently came out in hardcover. “Right now, we’re seeing the market is really and truly paperback and e-book,” [publisher] MacLachlan says. “So, we have some hardcovers that we thought would [sell] in the fall that haven’t gone as well as they should. And so, rather than wait a whole year to reintroduce the book into the marketplace, let’s do a paperback edition sooner than later.”

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Published December 5, 2011

Monday Miscellany

As mentioned earlier, I was in Vancouver last week and I wasn’t able to post as regularly as I would have liked to. So to make up for Friday’s missing links, here are a few things of interest to start the week off…

Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings) discusses his latest work, Optic Nerve #12, and an unfinished graphic novel with Comic Book Resources:

When I finally sat down to work on my next comics project, I felt obligated to attempt a real “graphic novel.” I was looking at these giant tomes that some of my peers were working on, and I felt really envious of that kind of achievement. It also just seemed like that was the direction everything was moving in, and my old habit of publishing short stories in the comic book format was already an anachronism. So I pursued that for awhile, doing a lot of the kind of preparatory work which is actually the hardest part for me, and the whole time I had these nagging thoughts like, “Do I really want to work on this for ten years? Do I want to draw and write in the same way for that long? Does the material really merit that much of an investment?”

Hard Won — Yet another review for MetaMaus in The New York Times:

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching “Maus” at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents’ collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers’ unlimited resources, when “every scrap of information I needed for ‘Maus’ was so hard-won.”

With It — Michael Farr, author of Tintin: The Complete Companion, talks about Tintin and discusses five books related to Herge and his creation at The Browser:

If you didn’t meet Hergé, you wouldn’t realise how funny he was – he saw the humorous side of almost everything. He was visually terribly aware, he didn’t miss anything which he saw. He was in his seventies then and I was in my mid-twenties, and I think that’s the reason why he agreed to see me. Younger, a French-speaking British journalist, I was slightly exotic and that intrigued him. Hergé was terribly young for his age. To use an expression that was used more then than now, he was very “with it”. When we got talking about music, he asked me what my favourite Pink Floyd songs were.

You see all this in the books. In many respects, Hergé is Tintin himself.

See also: Hal Foster, art critic and author of The First Pop Age (i.e. not THAT Hal Foster), on pop art at The Browser.

And finally…

Art critic Robert Hughes on his first visit to Rome, excerpted from his new book about the city, in The WSJ:

It was being gradually borne in on me by Rome that one of the vital things that make a great city great is not mere raw size, but the amount of care, detail, observation and love precipitated in its contents, including, but not only, its buildings. And it goes without saying, or ought to, that one cannot pay that kind of attention to detail until one understands quite a bit about substance, about different stones, different metals, the variety of woods and other substances—ceramic, glass, brick, plaster and the rest—that go to make up the innards and outer skin of a building, how they age, how they wear: in sum, how they live, if they do live.

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Published November 18, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Terror! — Amis on Don DeLillo and his new book The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories in The New Yorker:

DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds. As Eric Hobsbawm has said, terrorism is a new kind of urban pollution, and the pollutant is an insidious and chronic disquiet. Such is the air DeLillo breathes.

It’s Only One Book — A great interview with Art Spiegelman about his new book MetaMaus at The Comics Journal:

[Maus] took me thirteen years to do without any map of how to do it. No matter what somebody says now about graphic novels, this was made without any instruction manual. I didn’t know how to make a comic that was built to be reread, and that held up as it got reread, and be built over such a large span of time. There wasn’t something for me to look at. I guess there were long mangas out there, but I wasn’t that into them. They weren’t translated back when Maus was made. So I didn’t have any way to structure this, and structure is so basic to how I perceive. So I’m stuck with something that took a lot of me to make. So what can one do after it without either betraying it or capitulating to it? It’s an ongoing struggle.

Optimistic — An interview with Toronto’s indie comics heroine Annie Koyama at Comic Books Resources:

I was never under the impression that anyone was getting rich publishing the kinds of books and comics I chose to do but hopefully by staying a certain size, you can at least sustain the business and continue to break out new artists. I’m still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, but it’s nice to see others out there taking risks on new talent too.

Because I wasn’t saddled with preconceived notions of how things worked, I of course made some mistakes but I was also freer to carve my own road. In Toronto, where I’m located, most of the art bookstores have closed but we have one of the best and most supportive comic stores anyway, The Beguiling. I would still personally rather read a book that I hold in my hands, but you cannot ignore the digital content that’s available to anyone now. So, for now, I remain optimistic.

And while we’re on the subject of comics:

An obituary of comics historian Les Daniels, author of Comix: History of Comic Books In America, in the New York Times:

 Mark Evanier, a comic-book writer and historian, said that before Mr. Daniels, “nobody thought to write the history of the industry,” adding that “back then, it was a sloppily run, disposable business that no one thought would exist for long.”

“He was a guy that publishers hired to come in and figure out the histories of their own companies,” Mr. Evanier continued, “and he produced major works upon which all future histories will be built.”

See also: Tom Spurgeon’s more expansive obituary at The Comics Reporter.

And finally…

The Creative Review previews Polish Cold War Neon, a new book by photographer Ilona Karwinska. Putting it on the Christmas list…

 

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Published October 19, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis.  A must-read:

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:

“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”

The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:

I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.

See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:

Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.

 

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Published October 12, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Art or Death — Art Spiegelman on books, comics and technology at Publishers Weekly:

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you’re traveling, it’s fine.
None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

See also: Jeet Heer reviews MetaMaus for the Globe and Mail:

One way to explain the achievement of MetaMaus is to imagine a great architect like Frank Gehry offering a guided tour to one of his classic buildings, opening up the original plans, explaining the solutions he came up with for each problem. Such an act of self-exegesis is immensely rewarding, even if the creator’s genius is as enigmatic as ever.

And, on the subject of comics… A short interview with Alan Moore in Metro:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Immersion — Author Neal Stephenson talks about writing and his new novel REAMDE at Full Stop:

I would say that people who like to engage with the details of the historical era or the technical concepts might find [my] books especially rewarding to read. For me it’s a pretty straightforward thing—you know, what readers are paying for, what they’re buying and what I’m selling is a particular kind of experience: essentially one of getting immersed in another world. And it could be a very different world (as in a science fiction book), it could be the history of our world, or it could just be a story that takes place today, like Reamde. And a way to do that — a way to create that feeling of immersion and get the reader feeling like they’re really there — is to supply a lot of details that convey a feeling of immediacy.

See also: REAMDE reviewed by Laura Miller for The Guardian.

And finally…

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit talks about his latest design documentary, Urbanized, with Print Magazine:

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really common sense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure.

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