Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelmanis an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker, where he made several high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth15 February 1948
CountryUnited States of America
I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.
Instead of yelling at a TV set, I get to talk.
With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.
I always had more allergies toward the superhero comics than the others. I thought those were aimed more toward the people who would beat me up.
A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.
No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.
I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.
Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.
I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update.
I know this is insane, but i somehow wish i had been in auschwitz with my parents so i could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.
What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.
I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.
Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.
To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.