Originally scheduled to deliver an outdoor lecture at Columbia University in early April, acclaimed comics artist Art Spiegelman instead gave the talk, "Comics Entering the Canon," indoorsdue to chilly weather, surrounded by neoclassical statuary in the rotunda of Columbia's Low Library. Considering Spiegelman's topic—how the comics medium is moving into the cultural mainstream—the move inside the library was appropriate.
Spiegelman is an artist-in-residence at Columbia's Heyman Center for the Humanities for the spring semester and recently completed teaching a weekly Columbia seminar on the history of comics out of his SoHo studio in downtown Manhattan. The evening's lecture was presented on April 9 and sponsored by the Heyman Center and by Columbia's American studies program.
Spiegelman recounted how this lecture grew out of talks that he gave on comics at the Collective for Living Cinema. He also pointed to the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 exhibition, "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," a show that hailed the work of comics-influenced gallery artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, but which angered Speigelman for its condescending view of comics. Speigelman said he even refused to allow MoMA to buy his work for their collection. Pointing to gallery artists that use comics as a source, he declared, "[Roy] Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."
In response to MoMA's "High and Low" show, Spiegelman delivered a lecture on comics at his studio to what he called that "most ineducable of audiences," about 40 curators from art museums. That lecture led to the "Masters of American Comics" exhibition, a show that examines 15 seminal American comics creators that toured the country from 2005 into early 2007. Spiegelman was included in the show and described his role as that of "an eminence grise." But he also said he didn't agree about the 15 artists who were chosen to be in the show. (Although Spiegelman did not say which of the "Masters" he would not have included, he did not mention two of them—E.C. Segar and Milton Caniff—during the lecture.)
Ultimately Spiegelman withdrew his artwork from the show's final stop in New York, where the exhibition was divided between the Newark Museum and the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. He explained at the lecture that it was important to have the whole exhibition in one place. (He also said he regretted describing the Newark section of the show as "putting half the history of comics into a witness protection program.")
Using a slide show to survey the history of comics, Spiegelman began in the 19th century with the "first graphic novelist," Rodolphe Topffer and Wilhelm Busch's early comics strip Max und Moritz. Later came American newspapers and "upscale" comics strips such as Winsor McCay's Little Nemo and Lyonel Feininger's Wee Willie Winkie's World, which he called "a nature poem made graphic." Spiegelman praised George Herriman's Krazy Kat for showing that a cartoon could be art, and speculated that Chester Gould's Dick Tracy "must have been as jolting as The Sopranos on television." He credited the "blank eyes" and "totemic face" of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie as an influence on his own Maus and said Charles Schulz's Peanuts "redefined what comics would become."
Spiegelman noted the work of Will Eisner and went on to describe comics artist and Mad magazine editor Harvey Kurtzman as "the artist who made me into a cartoonist." He described Jack Kirby, one of the most revered superhero artists of all times, as the artist "I had the most trouble with" in the "Masters" show. He said he was "chilly toward Kirby" until he began thinking of him "as a primitive outsider" and compared him to the outsider artist Henry Darger.
Although comics were at one point our "biggest mass medium," Spiegelman said that was no longer true, and he argued that comics "had to reinvent themselves as an art form or die." He credited Justin Green, a 1960s underground comics artist, for moving comics "toward the diaristic, and the confessional," and argued that artists like Gary Panter and Charles Burns should have been included in the "Masters" show. And he hailed Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) as "the most important comic artist who's working today."
During the question and answer period, Spiegelman was accused of pushing an auteur theory of comics, praising works written and drawn by a single creator and "denigrating" collaborations between artists and writers such as Alan Moore. Spiegelman replied that in the 1970s it was "urgent to remove comics from the shadow of genre," most notably superhero comics, which dominated the medium. He acknowledged that this has "colored my aesthetic." And while he commended Moore's work, he also contended that Moore was "by choice working in a genre when it's no longer necessary."
In fact, Spiegelman admitted that he simply does not like superhero comics. "My fantasies didn't run in that direction," he told the audience, adding that his "preferred fantasy" was embodied by Betty Boop.
