COMIX AS ART: THE MAN BEHIND THE 'MAUS'
Morrissey Breen
by J. STEPHEN BOLHAFNER
Published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, June 23, 1991, Page 3C NOTE: Another article from this same
interview appeared in The Comics Journal #145, October 1991.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LATEST ISSUE of RAW magazine, just out on the stands this month,
contains, among other things, the penultimate chapter of art
spiegelman's ''Maus: A Survivor's Tale.'' This is the work for which
art spiegelman (like e. e. cummings, he writes his name without
capitals) became the first person to win a Guggenheim Fellowship to
complete a work of cartoon art.
It was the most recent in a long line of recognitions for ''Maus,'' a
narrative of spiegelman's parents' experiences during the Holocaust,
using mice to depict the Jews and cats for Germans. The story is
related by spiegelman's father, and the main story is interspersed
with framing sections depicting the uneasy relationship between father
and son. Chapters of ''Maus'' have been published separately over more
than 10 years. The first six chapters were collected in book form in
1985, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Maus is
Serious Literature, High Art, intellectually challenging and
academically respectable, and it represents one side of RAW and
spiegelman's personality.
Spiegelman is also the man responsible for the Garbage Pail Kids
phenomenon, a set of bubble-gum cards featuring hilariously disgusting
spoofs of the Cabbage Patch Kids that were banned in schoolrooms and
denounced in Letters to the Editor.
That, of course, is the other side. Although he has worked to bring
comix (as he spells it) up to adulthood and into respectability, he
has deliberately chosen to work in a medium most people consider
childish and irresponsible.
Spiegelman got his start in the ''underground comix'' movement of the
late '60s, when several artists, mainly working out of San Francisco,
produced comic books aimed at the young adults of the counterculture,
featuring anti-establishment politics, crude language and scatalogical
humor.
Robert Crumb, perhaps the most famous practitioner of the underground,
provided the cover to the latest RAW. Bill Griffith, spiegelman's
partner in a magazine called Arcade, came up from the underground and
now syndicates his ''Zippy the Pinhead'' strip to 60 daily newspapers.
No one else from the underground, however, no one else from the world
of comics, has come as far toward making the lowly comic book an
object of serious regard as art spiegelman.
One of the things spiegelman has done is start, with his wife,
Francoise Mouly, a magazine devoted to new and unusual work in the
graphic story medium. This magazine, RAW, always highly regarded by
critics, has gone from a marginal circulation in its original form to
about 40,000 in its current trade paperback book format, published
annually by Penguin Press. The latest issue, the third under Penguin,
has been well received, which gratified spiegelman.
''The first Penguin issue, we got a lot of complaints,'' he says.
''RAW was originally a large format, like Life magazine, and when the
Penguin book came out it was a shock to a lot of people. They thought
it was a commercial decision by somebody at the book company to make
it smaller, make it look more like a book.
''But in fact Francoise and I had already decided to make it smaller,
with more pages, before Penguin called us.''
That decision had to do with the history of RAW as a concept, a
history that spiegelman says stretches back to the last days of the
San Francisco underground comix scene.
''Actually, the history of RAW starts with a magazine called Arcade, a
magazine Bill Griffith and I put out in the mid-'70s sort of as a life
raft for lots of people involved in underground comics when that whole
movement seemed to be sinking. It lasted a couple of years and was a
tremendous headache and a lot of work, and when it ended I swore I'd
never be involved with a magazine again. Then I moved to New York and
met Francoise Mouly, and she wanted to do a magazine and I said,
'Sure!' despite having sworn never to do it again.''
The first issue of RAW was published in 1980, ''Sort of as a one-shot.
I'd been doing various things, and I'd gotten offers from several
magazines, including Playboy, to edit comics sections for them. But
all of them had a particular idea in mind. They wanted comics sections
that would expand their idea of their magazine, and I had a very
different idea of what comics could be and do.''
So RAW was intended as a showcase, rather than a continuing
enterprise; 4,500 copies were printed, and everyone was somewhat
amazed how quickly they sold.
''After the first one,'' spiegelman continued, ''we were sort of
pushed into the second one by friends and people who wanted to be in
it. And after that we were sort of pushed into the third. And so far
we've been pushed right along for 10 years or so.''
The last large-format issue came out in 1986. ''Actually, we did kind
of stop then. It had become too predictable. We knew what it would
look like, what it would be. There wasn't any more room for growth.
But we still had this backlog of stuff. And a lot of it was long. In
the original format, some of these pieces would have taken up a whole
issue.
''So after a couple of years off, we decided to go back to it, but
make it smaller, with more pages, so we could use these longer pieces.
The original RAW concentrated on art, and the large format presented
that in a dramatic fashion. The current version is more a literary
magazine. And about that time Penguin called us up and said 'We'd like
you to do something for us.'
''So it worked out quite well. The scary thing was signing a contract
saying 'Oh, sure, we'll do one of these a year. No problem.' My new
contract says I can quit after each issue.''
It is likely, however, that spiegelman and Mouly will find themselves
''pushed'' into doing RAW for some time to come. They are already at
work on the next one, which will see the completion of ''Maus.'' The
Guggenheim money is just about gone, spiegelman reports, and it didn't
quite free him to do nothing but work on ''Maus,'' as it was intended.
''It just became impossible to disengage myself from certain things,
like RAW, of course. But it allowed me to say no to things. Like if
somebody called me up and asked me if I would draw lots of inner tubes
from some advertising material for tons of money, it was easy to say
no to that. I guess you could say a Guggenheim is 'just say no'
insurance.''
Although spiegelman's father died in 1982, he still continues the
contemporary segments of his father telling the story of their stormy
relationship. When asked if it was hard to keep this up after his
father's death, he said, ''Maybe there was a little difficulty at
first. Frankly, it's been so long ago I don't really remember. But it
wasn't a surprise. My father was ill even before I started the book.
''Maybe this is a way of maintaining the relationship with him. In
fact, in many ways I have a better relationship with him now than I
did when he was alive.''
What is most surprising, to those who know spiegelman only from
''Maus'' - which is not only serious but grim - is that the Garbage
Pail Kids do not fall into the category of things like drawing inner
tubes for tons of money to put food on the table. ''I was happy to
have done it,'' he says. ''Probably more people have seen them than
anything else I've done. And that's OK.''
Part of the reason for this lies in spiegelman's own inspirations,
although he hates being asked about his influences. ''I don't think an
artist is in a position to know, finally, what his influences are. I
mean, I was probably influenced by Dick and Jane books.''
However, he admits ''when I was a kid, what excited me a lot was MAD
comic books, and if I had to pick one person it would be Harvey
Kurtzman. MAD was my introduction to satire, to questioning received
opinion, and to avant-garde art. The Garbage Pail Kids were art
spiegelman's answer to the original MAD. If the parents and school
administrators hate them, well, that's the whole point, isn't it?
''Ultimately,'' says spiegelman, ''I think that the Garbage Pail Kids
were a great moral work.''
When the interviewer laughs, spiegelman insists that he is serious.
''It teaches kids to 'just say no.' Just say no to received ideas. To
things that are being peddled to them that they don't have to think
about, that they aren't supposed to think about.'' He was never
prouder than when a state official from West Virginia, explaining on a
morning news show why he was trying to get them banned in his state,
compared them to the old MAD comic books.
So spiegelman is still rebellious and fresh, even as the establishment
embraces him. The latest issue of RAW includes the only extended story
that George Herriman ever did in the old ''Krazy Kat'' comic strip,
another cartoon work that has been unanimously accepted as ''serious
art.'' The story line features a concoction called ''Tiger Tea'' that
Krazy brews from super-powered catnip. Dangerous stuff. Nearly
everything in the magazine, in fact, from the metaphysical discussion
on the evolution of Mickey Mouse that begins the magazine, to the
illustrated life of Gustave Dore that ends it, would probably be
viewed by certain people as dangerous.
And that, spiegelman would say, is the highest compliment you could
pay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments? Questions? Drop me a line
This page has had visitors since 09/01/2000
This page was last updated: 09/02/2000
Steve's Reads (Home)
This Week's Read Last Week's Read Previous Reads
Cerebus Sandman Love and Rockets
Interviews Reviews Comics & Comic Books
Good Comic Books Good Comic Magazines Alternative Comics
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The words on this page and others maintained here are © J. Stephen
Bolhafner.
Images in this webspace or pages linked here are all © their
respective creators
Feel free to add add this page as a link, or to copy any of the links
to your own page -- just don't copy the words themselves without my
express permission, or I shall be forced to send my lawyer over to
beat up your dog.