The potential danger in any book that collects interviews with a single person from disparate sources is sheer repetitiveness. But Art Spiegelman: Conversations, compiled and edited by Joseph Witek (University Press of Mississippi, cloth $50, paper $20), escapes that trap. Through these interviews, ranging from 1979 to 2006 (including one conducted by PW’s Calvin Reid), Witek presents an oral autobiography of Spiegelman.
Over the course of the book readers will see how Spiegelman moved from comparative obscurity as co-editor (with his wife Francoise Mouly) of the experimental comix anthology RAW to international acclaim as the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/artist of the graphic novel Maus, and how his opinions and attitudes changed as a result.
Moreover, the interviews in Art Spiegelman: Conversations also record the seismic shifts in American comics and their role in mainstream culture. In his introduction Witek notes that when Spiegelman began publishing his cartoons in the early 1960s, “comics as a form of popular art in the United States were well on their way to cultural obsolescence,” but “forty years later...the concept of comics as a serious art form for adults is widely accepted,” and he credits Spiegelman, through Maus, as the key figure in bringing about this revolution.
To see how far the medium has come, look at the book’s first interview, from 1979, in which Spiegelman states that “not that many new people” are entering underground comix “and that’s a sure sign of decay.” He points out that most of his underground colleagues “are having a hard time of it” making a living. Spiegelman loves what he calls “this despised form,” but says that “I found myself speaking to fewer and fewer people” with his early experimental comix. To attract a decently sized audience, Spiegelman felt he had to do a project with a more conventional narrative: the result was his groundbreaking Holocaust memoir Maus.
By the second interview, conducted in 1980, Spiegelman and Mouly have just founded RAW, their experimental comix anthology magazine, which he calls “a place where new people can work.” Spiegelman tells interviewer Dean Mullaney, “If we only had 5,000 readers but they’re the right 5,000 that’s great.”
Maus got all that and more. Readers may be amused by Spiegelman’s worries back in 1986 that Steven Spielberg had stolen his thunder by portraying persecuted Jews as mice in the animated film An American Tail. A generation later, Maus has proved to have more lasting impact by far.
Yet back in 1986 the first flurry of mainstream attention to graphic novels quickly faded, and the pessimistic Spiegelman could “see the whole thing dying on the vine.”
But in 1994 Spiegelman tells an interviewer that RAW “isn’t needed in the same way” since alternative comix artists can now be published elsewhere.
Spiegelman confesses his surprise at Maus ‘s success, saying he had thought he would remain a “cult artist...who would get discovered after he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty.” He also admits to a “wariness” that Maus was becoming part of “official culture,” declaring that “Comics were never meant to be studied in school.”
By 1997 Spiegelman warily approves of the “support system” of “respectable culture”—museums, academia, publishing houses—that he believes will enable comics to survive as an art now that it is no longer a mass medium. Moreover, by 1999 Spiegelman notes he has become “the evangelist for serious comics” and teaches about comics himself. In several interviews he describes the slide show on comics history that he gave for “the ineducable, which are museum curators” in the early 1990s, though he did persuade one of them, eventually resulting in the groundbreaking “Masters of American Comics” exhibition two years ago.
In 1997 Spiegelman says that some days he feels that the comics medium, based in print, is doomed. and “I feel like the last blacksmith.” Two years later Spiegelman compares the audience for “serious comics” to the market for poetry: not enough to make money.
With the new century, the situation radically changes. Moving with changing times, Spiegelman tells Witek in 2004 that he is increasingly doing his artwork on the computer: “I had to give up having originals; it was a heartbreaker.” In the final interview, conducted in 2006, Spiegelman admits that “much to my happy astonishment” comics have become so culturally respectable that being a cartoonist “is like being a small-scale rock ‘n’ roll star.”
Previously having likened the coming fate of comics to that of stereopticons, Spiegelman may have even gone to the opposite extreme, asserting that “graphic novels seem to be at the center of the culture.”
Art Spiegelman: Conversations delves intriguingly into many other topics, such as Spiegelman’s aesthetic strategies in Maus and his attempts to cope with his newfound fame. But the heart if this book is the saga of how this pioneering alternative cartoonist and his chosen medium together achieved a level of success he had never imagined they would.
As readers may assume from its title, Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes by Christopher Knowles (Weiser Books, $19.95) recounts the familiar evolution of the superhero genre, from its forebears in ancient myths and early 20th century pulp fiction though the Golden and Silver Ages to the likes of Watchmen. But the book is something of a Trojan Horse. Knowles contends that the roots of the superhero genre as lie in theosophy (with its belief in humanity’s evolution into a higher form), the occultism of Aleister Crowley, and even Freemasonry. “When Superman stands for ‘truth, justice, and the American way’, he is also standing for the Masonic way. It’s almost impossible to separate the two in a definitive way,” writes Knowles, as if he had proven that anyone who upholds justice must be a Mason. Not only does Knowles fail to make a persuasive case for his theories about the genre’s occult origins, but he repeatedly shoots himself in the foot with wild overstatements. According to Knowles, “One particularly interesting Superman cover (#74) pictures Luthor looking exactly like Crowley in his prime,” standing on “an inexplicable checkerboard floor” that reminds Knowles of a Masonic lodge, while firing a ray from a phallic-shaped machine that is “perhaps an unconscious nod to Crowley’s bisexuality.” Whether there is any evidence that artist Win Mortimer or editor Whitney Ellsworth were Masons or ever heard of Crowley is a matter Knowles fails to address. Towards the book’s end, Knowles argues that, having been exposed to movies about the X-Men and Harry Potter, “How much longer will young audiences be satisfied with the ordinary? How long before they demand increased or supernatural powers for themselves?” It’s much more likely that a new generation will demand more serious critical studies of the superhero genre rather than this book.
