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Portrait of the cartoonist as a charming extrovert
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By Lila Hanft, Staff Reporter
Art Spiegelman and Michael Kimmelman riff on the cultural status of cartoons
“Tonight I play the part of the neurotic cartoonist,” quipped Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, from the stage of the Cleveland Public Theatre (CPT). Brandishing the first of many cigarettes that evening, he intoned, “Let the smell of death permeate the air.”
“As it so often does,” Michael Kimmelman, seated beside him, murmured dryly.
Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, played both straight man and moderator on May 18 for the two-hour dialogue with Spiegelman on the topic “Pen & Ink” at SPECTRUM: The Lockwood Thompson Dialogues.
(To accommodate Spiegelman’s compulsive smoking, the event was relocated from its usual venue to CPT where an actor can, by state law, smoke onstage.)
SPECTRUM is a public art project that combines technology, art, and the spoken and printed word to generate “innovative, unexplored, and provocative dialogues.” Launched by the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and Cleveland Public Art (CPA) in 2005, the program is funded by a gift from the late Lockwood Thompson, a local attorney with a passion for modern art.
Despite that high-concept description, conversation between Spiegelman and Kimmelman was probably much funnier than anything performed in local comedy clubs, and brainier than any lectures held on local college campuses. Unlike his alter ego in Maus, Spiegelman is an enthusiastic extrovert who speaks with passion and humor about his chosen métier. The two men touched upon how comics challenge ideas about high and low art, what fascinates Spiegelman about the genre, and how his work fits into the larger landscapes of art history and comics.
To illustrate his points about the form and function of comics, Spiegelman projected images of his own work and others on a large screen behind him. The Jewish roots of American comics was a frequent touchstone for both men. “Comics are known to be a Jewish medium. They’re an extension of the rag trade,” he quipped.
Offering no disrespect to “Cleveland’s favorite sons” (Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the Jewish Glenville High graduates who created Superman), Spiegelman said that the problem with superhero comics is that they “confuse a genre (superhero stories) with a medium (cartooning).” But as Spiegelman proved in Maus (the story of his parents’ survival of the Holocaust) and In the Shadow of No Towers (his experience of 9/11 and its aftermath), comics can be an able vessel for any kind of story.
Spiegelman is a passionate advocate for his medium. In a world where the painter and his one-of-a-kind masterpiece is considered to be the top of the art hierarchy, he says, the cartoonist and his work n multiple images on a single page meant to be reproduced as often as the market can bear n is at the bottom. Actually, he amended with a laugh, “I used to think that the comic writer was at the bottom of the hierarchy … until I met a tattoo artist.”
Spiegelman presented a tour of high (and low) points in the evolution of comics. Done well, he said, comics are a uniquely compelling way to convey information of all kinds. “Everything I know about feminism, I learned from Little Lulu,” he quipped.
As for his narrative technique, Spiegelman noted that “comics work in bursts of language,” which is how the brain works. “We’re wired to read comics. They go straight through the eye to the brain.”
He spoke of his own pursuit of a “seamless” comic in which the movement between panels and through time is so intuitive the reader doesn’t notice it.
“I’m interested in Gotthold Lessing’s (18th century German dramatist, critic, and philosopher) idea that poets and writers have the provenance of time while painters have the provenance of space,” he explained. “Anything that mixes the two Lessing called a ‘mongrel art’ n which is exactly what comics are.”
Mongrel or not, Spiegelman feels that the intersection of story and image is what makes the comic so powerful. He pointed out that we use the word “story” to talk about both narratives and buildings, and says both usages derive from a medieval Latin word that also refers to a series of stained glass windows in medieval churches “about a superhero who turns water into wine.”
“Also a Jew,” Kimmelman interjected.
During the question-and-answer period, Shaker Heights resident Lauren Berger, a senior at Hathaway Brown who had read Maus for English class, asked Spiegelman why he gave the Jews mouse faces.
“Hitler’s notion of Jews as vermin offered a metaphor close to home,” he explained.
One audience member asked why he didn’t write funny, uplifting cartoons like “Marmaduke.” Spiegelman replied gently, “That’s just not my muse. When I’m feeling happy, I don’t need to work.”
Spiegelman also pointed out that he doesn’t draw daily cartoons because his primary interest is in telling stories. When he was writing Maus, “I thought, ‘a comic book that needs a bookmark n cool!’”
lhanft@cjn.org
“Tonight I play the part of the neurotic cartoonist,” quipped Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, from the stage of the Cleveland Public Theatre (CPT). Brandishing the first of many cigarettes that evening, he intoned, “Let the smell of death permeate the air.”
“As it so often does,” Michael Kimmelman, seated beside him, murmured dryly.
Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, played both straight man and moderator on May 18 for the two-hour dialogue with Spiegelman on the topic “Pen & Ink” at SPECTRUM: The Lockwood Thompson Dialogues.
(To accommodate Spiegelman’s compulsive smoking, the event was relocated from its usual venue to CPT where an actor can, by state law, smoke onstage.)
SPECTRUM is a public art project that combines technology, art, and the spoken and printed word to generate “innovative, unexplored, and provocative dialogues.” Launched by the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and Cleveland Public Art (CPA) in 2005, the program is funded by a gift from the late Lockwood Thompson, a local attorney with a passion for modern art.
Despite that high-concept description, conversation between Spiegelman and Kimmelman was probably much funnier than anything performed in local comedy clubs, and brainier than any lectures held on local college campuses. Unlike his alter ego in Maus, Spiegelman is an enthusiastic extrovert who speaks with passion and humor about his chosen métier. The two men touched upon how comics challenge ideas about high and low art, what fascinates Spiegelman about the genre, and how his work fits into the larger landscapes of art history and comics.
To illustrate his points about the form and function of comics, Spiegelman projected images of his own work and others on a large screen behind him. The Jewish roots of American comics was a frequent touchstone for both men. “Comics are known to be a Jewish medium. They’re an extension of the rag trade,” he quipped.
Offering no disrespect to “Cleveland’s favorite sons” (Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the Jewish Glenville High graduates who created Superman), Spiegelman said that the problem with superhero comics is that they “confuse a genre (superhero stories) with a medium (cartooning).” But as Spiegelman proved in Maus (the story of his parents’ survival of the Holocaust) and In the Shadow of No Towers (his experience of 9/11 and its aftermath), comics can be an able vessel for any kind of story.
Spiegelman is a passionate advocate for his medium. In a world where the painter and his one-of-a-kind masterpiece is considered to be the top of the art hierarchy, he says, the cartoonist and his work n multiple images on a single page meant to be reproduced as often as the market can bear n is at the bottom. Actually, he amended with a laugh, “I used to think that the comic writer was at the bottom of the hierarchy … until I met a tattoo artist.”
Spiegelman presented a tour of high (and low) points in the evolution of comics. Done well, he said, comics are a uniquely compelling way to convey information of all kinds. “Everything I know about feminism, I learned from Little Lulu,” he quipped.
As for his narrative technique, Spiegelman noted that “comics work in bursts of language,” which is how the brain works. “We’re wired to read comics. They go straight through the eye to the brain.”
He spoke of his own pursuit of a “seamless” comic in which the movement between panels and through time is so intuitive the reader doesn’t notice it.
“I’m interested in Gotthold Lessing’s (18th century German dramatist, critic, and philosopher) idea that poets and writers have the provenance of time while painters have the provenance of space,” he explained. “Anything that mixes the two Lessing called a ‘mongrel art’ n which is exactly what comics are.”
Mongrel or not, Spiegelman feels that the intersection of story and image is what makes the comic so powerful. He pointed out that we use the word “story” to talk about both narratives and buildings, and says both usages derive from a medieval Latin word that also refers to a series of stained glass windows in medieval churches “about a superhero who turns water into wine.”
“Also a Jew,” Kimmelman interjected.
During the question-and-answer period, Shaker Heights resident Lauren Berger, a senior at Hathaway Brown who had read Maus for English class, asked Spiegelman why he gave the Jews mouse faces.
“Hitler’s notion of Jews as vermin offered a metaphor close to home,” he explained.
One audience member asked why he didn’t write funny, uplifting cartoons like “Marmaduke.” Spiegelman replied gently, “That’s just not my muse. When I’m feeling happy, I don’t need to work.”
Spiegelman also pointed out that he doesn’t draw daily cartoons because his primary interest is in telling stories. When he was writing Maus, “I thought, ‘a comic book that needs a bookmark n cool!’”
lhanft@cjn.org
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