Art Spiegelman #2

February 21st, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

In part one, Spiegelman spoke of chain-smoking and learning to read from comics. In this installment, Spiegelman talks about Nancy, Batman and stereotypical comics. (All images are generously provided by Bruce Guthrie. See his site.)

After arguing that people inherently think in comics, Spiegelman described how, in an effort to avoid working, he once looked up comic strip in the American Heritage Dictionary. The definition was uneventful, but the side of the page showed an image of the comic Nancy, which Spiegelman called “the most read comic strip” in the 40s. But Spiegelman was quick to point out that the widely read strip didn’t necessarily reflect a quality strip. “It was a lot more work to not read Nancy than to read one.”

Spiegelman refered to the “inscrutable obviousness about Nancy” in discussing a strip of Nancy purchasing a silhouette, in which the strip breaks forms down to minimalist components (a paint can sitting next to a spilled can, so viewers can identify the paint, a very short scaffhold so that it fits in the strip, etc).

Next, Spiegelman launched into a philosophical-philological discussion about storytelling, which he identified as coming from an etymological source of Christian images. Storytelling, then, has to do with Jesus and stained glass, because “it was before they had newsprint.”

Spiegelman then turned to In the Shadow of No Towers. “I regret I hadn’t done more comics when I thought I was going to die,” he said of 9-11, when he and his wife were running towards the falling towers as everyeone else ran away, looking for their daughter (she was okay).

The drawings that became “In the Shadow” were originally intended as a means “to try to understand what happened to us,” not as a book. Spiegelman showed an image from “In the Shadow,” where a couple sits uninspired on a couch watching television on September 10. All of a sudden the 9-11 pictures come on, and their hair stands up with fright. In the next panel (it is hard to tell what day it is, because the calendar has become an American flag), they are asleep with their hair stuck in the same position.

Spiegelman’s history of comics continued with a 1940s Batman strip that uses arrows to show readers how to proceed from panel to panel. Spiegelman mocked this structure in a piece in which he used arrows everywhich way, leading readers around and around in circles. “I like the idea of ending a page in the middle,” he said.

The discussion then turned to comics and stereotypes. Although Spiegelman stressed comics are “just lines on paper folks” (with a sidetracked discussion of a Rainhardt-like Playboy strip with “abstracted balloons talking,” which were “time turned into space”), he also addressed the old way of learning to draw cartoons of using a sort of dictionary of stereotypes: coons, kikes, Indians and gypsies. “A type of image everyone already has in the back of his lizard brain.”

He showed an anti-Semitic German drawing. “Pop quiz: Which one’s the Jew?” he asked.

Stay tuned for more.

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