Spiegelman on comics

KATHARINE HAMER

On the first warm night of the year, with sunlight streaming in through the back door of the auditorium at the Centre for Digital Media, Art Spiegelman addressed a capacity crowd to explain, among other things, the genesis of Superman. "Basically," said Spiegelman, "these two young Jewish guys tried to sell a comic strip about an uncircumcised übermensch who flies and can lift cars."

Growing up in 1950s New York, Spiegelman's Jewish education was often more cultural than religious. He developed an early obsession with comics after discovering Harvey Kurtzman's MAD magazine, which he begged his mother to buy for him.

"I studied MAD the way some kids studied the Talmud," Spiegelman told his Vancouver audience last week. "It was a magazine that basically showed the underside of Norman Rockwell America."

Spiegelman was in town to help launch Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibit KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Videogames + Art, which he co-curated.

Most famous for the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus – which cast Jews as mice and Nazis as cats to tell the story of his Holocaust-survivor parents – Spiegelman is also a renowned lecturer on the history of comics.

"Comics really are a kind of co-mixing of words and pictures," he said, noting that, in a way, the art form stretched back over centuries. "It's like the picture-windows in churches, showing Jesus – you know that superhero who turned water into wine? I don't remember what else he did – you probably know better than me, based on my background."

Spiegelman explained that early cartoons were launched as a way to sell more newspapers, drawing in not only younger readers but also an immigrant audience. "They were like Vaudeville on paper," he said, adding that strips like Hogan's Alley and The Katzenjammer Kids "usually ended with an explosion. They were seen as incredibly vulgar [by the middle class]."

Jews are inextricably tied to the history of cartoon art, whether as some of its most famous creators (Kurtzman, Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Charles Schultz) or as viciously stereotyped subjects. Spiegelman showed his audience a Nazi-era split-panel cartoon featuring renditions of two characters. One was tall, muscular and blonde; the other, hunched, leering and big-nosed. "Pop quiz," prompted Spiegelman, "Which one's the Jew?"

It's the kind of stereotype Spiegelman tried to turn on its head with his 1993 Valentine's Day cover for The New Yorker, showing a Chassidic man kissing a black woman, at a time when racial tensions between the two groups in the city were at their peak. "They were both equally pissed off at me," said Spiegelman, remembering a New York Times editorial about "the Jew with the lascivious lips" and a black pastor complaining about the objectification of black women. The best response to the image, for Spiegelman, was a letter from a young girl in Pennsylvania: "She thought it was really great that, for Abraham Lincoln's birthday, there was a picture of Abraham Lincoln."

Spiegelman is fiercely political and a dedicated proponent of free speech. He said he was angered by his government's appropriation of New Yorkers' experience after 9/11. "The event was hijacked," said Spiegelman, "and turned into a war recruiting poster while I was still trying to understand what happened to my neighborhood."

He created a series of large-format strips about the event, which, at the time, only the European newspapers would print ("The American media," said Spiegelman, "were terrified of being seen as too liberal.") They were later compiled into a 2004 book, In the Shadow of No Towers.

Spiegelman also took on the issue of the so-called "Mohammed cartoons," which caused outrage and widespread violence in the Muslim world when they were printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006. He wrote a piece for Harper's magazine, entitled "Drawing blood: Outrageous cartoons and the art of outrage." The issue was banned from Indigo Books in Canada – an ignominy Spiegelman shared, he noted wryly, with Mein Kampf.

Lately, he's been turning his attentions to a series of childhood recollections to be called Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!. A lot has changed since Spiegelman started out. "When I was coming up," he observed, "to say you were a cartoonist was to guarantee you wouldn't get a date."

But he said the world of comics had to change with the times. "A medium that is no longer a mass medium has to become art or die," he conceded. "Comics could easily have become so peculiar that it would be like someone still interested in scrimshaw." Instead, comics, in the form of graphic novels, have emerged as the world's fastest selling genre of books.

KRAZY! runs until Sept. 7 at the VAG. For more information, visit www.vanartgallery.bc.ca.

Katharine Hamer is a Vancouver writer and editor. Her website is www.literaryparamedic.com.

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