Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelmanis an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker, where he made several high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth15 February 1948
CountryUnited States of America
With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.
One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.
I became comfortable with what I knew would be the process of trying to pick up the pieces of brain that were in the rubble and tried to make some mosaic out of the pieces and that that would be the trajectory.
No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.
I know this is insane, but i somehow wish i had been in auschwitz with my parents so i could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.
I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.
Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless
The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.
In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.
I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.
There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism.
Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are.
In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true!
I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.