It's hard to overstate how influential Art Spiegelman's work has been, both on the form of comics and on the industry. With Breakdowns, Maus, and In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman taught his fellow artists about what he calls the "grammar" of comics, and he taught the larger book world about a new kind of literature that could grab national attention, illustrate painful and personal subjects, and win a Pulitzer Prize.
Pantheon's expanded re-release of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!, Spiegelman's seminal anthology of his own strips, recreates the original book almost exactly, but it does so within the pages of a larger volume with two additions by the author: a lengthy introduction and an afterword. The former is a tightly-compressed autobiography; the latter an essay on the context in which the book was originally written and published.
With two Spiegelman projects in the pipeline this month (Breakdowns and upcoming kid-centric Jack and the Box, $12.95 from RAW Junior, Oct. 21), Publishers Weekly talked to the author/illustrator about learning to read comics by reading comics, how head shops give us great art, and why his next endeavor won't be a graphic novel.
Publishers Weekly Comics Week : So what made you decide to do “Breakdowns” as a book-within-a-book?
Art Spiegelman: Well, I realized when Pantheon offered me the chance to put Breakdowns out again, it wanted some context. And I said, I'll write an introduction, and, ultimately, what that led to was putting the book off for two years. [laughs]
PWCW : So the autobiography is the introduction?
AS: Yeah, and the introduction tries to help a reader learn how to read the introduction, as well as my other work. I used the rhythms and acting I learned how to do in Maus to get engaged with characters and the gestures, so that one could get into them and begin reading them.
In the original book there's an endpaper that we didn't include in this edition. I think of these three parts as an incredibly long endpaper, and it allows the older book to become an artifact within the larger volume.
PWCW: You talk a lot about the "grammar" of comics. Can you elaborate on that?
AS: Sure, in fact, let me tell you about one of my favorite overheard “No Towers” moments [Spiegelman wrote In the Shadow of No Towers after the Sept. 11 attacks]. I was at a bookstore watching a couple reading it, and the woman said, “Why did he do it as a baby board book?” And the man said, “So our president would read it.”
When I was starting out, the cutting edge of "where comics was at" was to make pamphlets with cheap newsprint and just change what was in them. And I really needed to see the context, so I made a large-size book, one that was hardcover. It was the beginning of my trying to understand what part graphic design played. Raw magazine was in the same format as Breakdowns, and I really needed Maus not to look like a comic book.
So, at the same moment I'm doing this really complex book that I'm hoping adults will reread, and I'm doing a book for very young people that I hope they will read and reread as well. The same things that obsessed me when I was in my 20s and my early 30s have continued to obsess me—how do you use the structure and the form? There's that page with the arrows that go around [recently reprinted in The New Yorker]—that was really about how to use the structure of comics to really make something happen.
PWCW: You're clearly interested in all the different tools, too. I noticed you included that one strip that's just an ode to the cool things you can do with Zip-a-Tone ["Zip-a-Tunes," a strip drawn on a single sheet of the now-archaic Zip-a-Tone textured paper].
AS: Yes, now we're dealing with technology! [laughs] It's like teaching people how to keep their gramophone needles sharp.
PWCW: It is cool, though, because you don't get the same effect as you would with a computer.
AS: Or you could, but you'd just be imitating an outdated technology. Now you hear about computers making books obsolete.
PWCW: Bullshit.
AS: Yeah, bullshit! Computers are making it possible to make the most beautiful books anyone's ever seen.
PWCW: How else have comics evolved, from your perspective?
AS: Well, comics is one of the few parts of the book industry that's growing while the rest of the book industry turns to shit. The printing, the paper, and the size are part of the essence of the book. I include format very early on—I include the drawing style, the rhythms, when I'm starting a project.
When the underground comix bubble began popping, Bill Griffith and I started doing Arcade, the underground comix revue, in a quarterly magazine-sized comic that was trying to be a life raft for what comics were. With underground comics, there was a point—as you'll soon see with graphic novels—that there was a glut. You'd buy something and say, oh, this isn't very good. And a lot of these were sold in head shops, which were the core of the distribution, and then those started closing down.
PWCW: So some of your influences are obvious—Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, cubism, etc. Who else really had an impact on your work while you were writing the stories in Breakdowns?
AS: Well, I was making that book when I began looking at painting. The ubists became really important to me, and the Germans. Oh, dem Germans! Max Beckmann, and Grosz and Otto Dix... And in my slob-snob way, I could relate to what they had made, because they were making comics. As far as comics themselves were concerned, I think [EC artist Bernie] Krigstein was really instrumental in taking my own work seriously. It was "Master Race," from Tales Designed to Carry an Impact! I think it was the last title they released before Psychoanalysis and the Comics Code re-infantilized everything. ["Master Race" is an influential eight-page story by Bernard Krigstein from one of the last titles put out by the ill-fated EC Comics.]
PWCW : Is it hard to look back on some of the really intense stuff you were producing as you raise your kids?
AS : No, they're very tolerant of my weirdness. I've made my whole comics collection available to them, and if they're not ready for something they're like, Eh, later for that. Once I made a mistake, though. I let Masha look at Barefoot Gen. It's a book done by a survivor of Hiroshima, and I just didn't think that through. She had nightmares.
PWCW: What is this book you're doing for young people you mentioned earlier? I liked Open Me, I'm a Dog.
AS: This is called Jack and the Box, and it's aimed a little older than Open Me, I'm a Dog. Where Maus was trying to make things as clear as possible for adults, Jack and the Box is for children. Both are trying to make things clear for people who have no way of apprehending comics. With the age we're talking about now...see, the thing about kids is you put 'em on your lap, you open a book, and you read to them. And there's this other level, just above, when your kids are abandoned to Dick-and-Jane idiocy. They don't try to make those books complex. So the Jack and the Box book is pretty complex. It's just very clear.
PWCW: Even in Breakdowns, you have a lot of really simple drawings that get more and more complex, like that one spiral scribble that becomes the focal point of the entire opening.
AS: Well, the thing about Breakdowns was breaking things down to their essences, and that's a downward spiral scribble, which is the essence of the personality drawing it. And it's also the middle symbol in the last word of the title [the "word" is cartoon cursing - check it out on the lettering on the cover of the bookhere, and look at Spiegelman reuse it for the pratfall in the central image]. That's what I mean about looking and reloooking.
What makes all this stuff come to life ultimately is that they're not just-scribbles , though I use that as the self-effacing credo of us cartoonist types. I use it as the narrative compulsion in that long introduction, and the compression that composes the little short bits that make up Maus. They're not just about my memories, they're about how memory works in general—things butted up against each other, memories that were catalyzed by looking back on my work of 30 years ago very specifically. And in the reading of that introduction, I think, you get all of the secret language of comics that is the subject of the 1978 book.
PWCW: What's your next project going to be?
AS: I can't really talk about what it will be yet, because I'm only two months pregnant or something. One thing I'm sure of is that it won't be a graphic novel.
PWCW: Why not?
AS: Well, even though I'm considered one of the dads of the form, right now I want a paternity test. A lot of stuff now is just much too long. I can understand the economics of that, and I can even understand the pleasure on the reader's pleasure in taking a nice long warm bath. But Breakdowns could have been a 1200 page book, if I had really wanted to draw it out. You need to compress.
PWCW: So, 30 years later, who do you see working today who's really interesting to you?
AS: Well, there's the usual suspects—Chris Ware, Dan Clowes...Kim Deitch is a national treasure. Any list like this is going to leave of 30 of the people who are important to me. Charles Burns and Gary Panter are both at the top of their game. Jason's work gives me the same pleasures I got from comics when I was a kid. I'm very interested in what's happening in Kramer's Ergot and Mome, and there's this young upstart named John Stanley. I'm getting more and more interested in his stuff.
I even like the stuff I hate. I'm interested in comics that make things known—so much is now possible.
PWCW: I notice you follow the great graphic novel tradition of ending your groundbreaking book with a lengthy apology for not making it better.
AS: If we had better self-images, we wouldn't have become cartoonists in the first place.