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Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics

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Art Spiegelman: conversations, edited by Joseph Witek

Ranen Omer-Shermana a University of Miami,

Online publication date: 03 June 2010

To cite this Article Omer-Sherman, Ranen(2010) 'Art Spiegelman: conversations, edited by Joseph Witek', Journal of

Graphic Novels & Comics, 1: 1, 88 90 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/21504851003798728 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504851003798728

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work. However, by placing comics within a wider cultural network of contexts and disciplinary knowledges, Gabilliets important and necessary study opens up possibilities to move beyond Bourdieu to engage with other theoretical models such as Darntons communication circuit or Friedrich Kittlers (1990) concept of discourse networks or Franco Morettis (2005) adaption of world systems theory to literary evolution. From here we might really be able to conceive The Order of Comic Books. References
Beaty, B., 2007. Unpopular culture: transforming the European comic book in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chartier, R., 1994. The order of books: readers, authors and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth Centuries. Translated by L.G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. Darnton, R., 1982. What is the history of the book? Daedalus, 111 (3), 6583. Groensteen, T., 2007 [1999]. The system of comics. Translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kittler, F.A., 1990 [1985]. Discourse networks 1800/1900. Translated by M. Metteer and C. Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McCloud, S., 1993. Understanding comics: the invisible art. New York: HarperCollins. Moretti, F., 2005. Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.
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Tony Venezia Birkbeck, University of London a.venezia@english.bbk.ac.uk 2010, Tony Venezia

Art Spiegelman: conversations, edited by Joseph Witek, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2007, xxiii + 318 pp., US$50 (hardback), US$20 (paperback), ISBN 978-1934110-12-6
Book Review Journal 2150-4865 2150-4857 RCOM of Graphic Novels & Comics Vol. 1, No. 1, Apr 2010: pp. 00 Comics,

One of the great strengths of this eminently useful collection is that it encompasses so much development (19762000); another is that it reveals so many distinguished aspects of Spiegelmans career, enabling him to speak to us as artist as well as cultural critic. Throughout, he comes across as ferociously animated and intense (which may be fuelled in part by his notorious nicotine habit). As one interviewer, left feeling bruised by his encounter with this occasionally difficult artist, observes: Talking to him, you are sucked in by his obsession, and by his humor, just as once you have opened his books you cannot close them. His intensity is unnerving and exhausting (p. 125). Today it is hard to believe that the Pulitzer-winning Maus was initially rejected by over 20 publishers: sometimes really gruffly and perfunctorily, and sometimes with soulsearching agony, because an editor really liked it but couldnt figure out how on earth to put such a book out (p. 303). It is fortunate that the ensuing fame of his magnum opus both elevated the work of other graphic novelists and created a tremendous demand for Spiegelman to participate in numerous interviews. Indeed there seems to be a symbiotic relation between these, as Witek relates: [Spiegelmans] many public utterances have helped to create the cultural climate in which he can create the kind of comics he wants to make (p. xv). Even for those long aware that Spiegelman fashioned Maus on the labour of hours of often painful audio interviews with his father Vladek, some of the details of this arduous process in which he struggled to capture the survivors cadences and speech pattern in the reduced medium of captions and balloons, as well as other efforts to corroborate and

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understand his fathers story (such as spending a great deal of time in Polish towns and locales where his parents frantically sought shelter) may prove enlightening. Intriguingly, we learn that the genesis of this project actually sprang from an earlier notion to do comic strips about black oppression in America using cats and mice (p. 91). Eventually, Spiegelman concluded that this was a ridiculous venture in that I just didnt know enough about the situation to be anything other than a liberal wimp with good intentions, but not enough underlying knowledge ... to do any meaningful work. I realized that my own background included material of oppression which could be more directly applied (p. 91). Frequently, the reader runs up against surprising aspects of Maus publication history and reception; for example, it seems that Spiegelman had a significant conflict with his international publishers over his refusal to violate the ANCs boycott of then-Apartheid South Africa. There is also a marvellous exchange with Lawrence Weschler over the Polish resistance to publishing a work in which, after all, Poles are portrayed as pigs. He eventually won a Polish official over with a rather convoluted explanation in which he portrayed the Nazi dream of the Thousand-Year Reich as a sort of animal farm ... Jews as rodents ... to be destroyed ... Poles as pigs ... while not to be coddled, werent to be indiscriminately destroyed ... Neither status was enviable, but its a distinction worth noting nevertheless (p. 233). In the end, Spiegelman expresses satisfaction that Maus succeeds in making readers aware that if it is about anything ... its a critique of the limitations the sometimes fatal limitations of the caricaturizing impulse (p. 233). Of course, before his days of mainstream attention, Spiegelman had long been active in the underground comics scene and many of these interviews offer lively accounts of that time. Those interested in Spiegelmans passion for the visual aspect of comics will appreciate his thoughtful reflections on comics history and the architectonics of the work of his fellow cartoonists (he is a generous and critically insightful guide to the work of his antecedents as well as to younger contemporaries like Chris Ware and Dan Clowes) as will others more concerned with the artists complicated relationship to the trauma of 9/11 or the Holocaust. Editor Joseph Witeks own penultimate contribution, an interview conducted in 2004 at Spiegelmans New York City apartment, is useful for its clarifying focus on many of Spiegelmans enduring preoccupations, notably his struggle to transcend the unproductive high art/low art distinction. It may be said that, more than any living alternative cartoonist, Spiegelmans entire career, from the days of RAW and the underground scene (East and West coasts) to the present, represents the utter uselessness of such reductive oppositions, which due to his and many others triumphant achievements, have been proven utterly pass. Unfortunately, these conversations only rarely address the controversial In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelmans anguished response to terror and George Bushs America. But what is included is absorbing: in a short conversation with the Forward, he describes walking on the streets in full view when the planes struck on 9/11, the trauma that lasted for months. It surprises to learn that he had actually abandoned comics in recent years (because they were too hard) but in the aftermath of the attacks, felt a moral responsibility to liberate the artist within, a commitment to which he has remained steadfast: I made a vow as we all huddled safely that day, in the shadow of no towers, that I would draw comics again (p. 237). Spiegelman asserts that his acclaimed New Yorker cover, featuring the Twin Towers as black-silhouetted absences was channeled, rather than created. Especially memorable is an interview for Italys Corriere Della Sera in which Spiegelman describes the reasons for his hasty departure in protest from the New Yorker in the early years of the Bush era: From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if Ive been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island. I no longer feel in harmony with American culture, especially now that the entire media has become conservative and

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tremendously timid. Unfortunately, even the New Yorker has not escaped this trend ... [while] I am more and more inclined to provocation (p. 264). He reproaches the magazine for marching to the same beat as the New York Times and all the other ... media that dont criticize the government for fear that the administration will take revenge by blocking their access to sources and information (p. 264). As these and other remarks suggest, it seems that Spiegelman has been impressively unwavering in his principles even when it demanded the loss of a substantial and largely appreciative audience. Witeks wide-ranging collection will surely be invaluable for any reader seeking a useful guide to Spiegelmans artistic and political consciousness. Moreover, it will be appreciated that many of these illuminating exchanges are enlivened by representative illustrations (some relatively rare) gleaned from various phases of Spiegelmans astonishing oeuvre. Ranen Omer-Sherman University of Miami rosherman@miami.edu 2010, Ranen Omer-Sherman

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