Art Spiegelman #1: Introduction

February 20th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

Art Spiegelman, author-artist of MAUS and In the Shadow of No Towers spoke tonight at the Washington DC JCC to a packed crowd of about 250 about Comics 101.

I will be posting my notes from Spiegelman’s lecture in several parts. Here is the introduction.

As Nextbook fellow Erin Leib Lisitza introduced Spiegelman, he peeked out from behind the corner and approached the podium to fix the laptop (which later malfunctioned). “Don’t pay attention to the man behind the speaker,” he said to many laughs. He wore black jeans, shoes, a dark blue vest with a collared shirt and a tan blazer. Spiegelman is notorious for chain-smoking during his lectures (and has had many talks canceled by hosts who refused to allow smoking).

In her introduction, Leib Lisitza credited Spiegelman with “single-handedly wresting comic books from the toy bin,” and pressumably giving it more credibility amongst adults. One wonders what happened to Will Eisner (1917 – 2005) and a number of others who were working well before Spiegelman was born.

Spiegelman began with the caveat, “This is not a lecture, but a performance, because at a performance you are allowed to smoke.” He lit his first cigarette and noted while talking about 9/11 and comics, “It just seemed appropriate to spread the smell of death.”

It turns out, Comics 101 should have been at least a 400 level course, and until the projector backfired towards the end of his lecture, Spiegelman delivered a very high level history of comic strips, books and graphic novels, all the while interjecting his own one-liners with slides.

“I learned to read from Batman,” he said, adding that Scrooge taught him economics, Pogo taught him politics, several strips taught him about sex, and “ethics and everything else, I got from MAD.”

“I can tell you everything I know in an hour, because everything comes from comicbooks,” he said. But though he called comics art, Spiegelman said he did not mean the sort of comics-as-art that Lichtenstein explored. “He did no more or less for comic books than Warhol did for soup,” he said. Lichtenstein’s images were simply “mechanical dots and lines,” whereas Spiegelman said he is far more interested in “the leakage between panels.”

“Until very recently, comics have been able to fly by our critical radar straight into your brain,” he said. “We think in comics.”

In the next post, Spiegelman discusses the definition of comics and narrative and his work on September 11.

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