In The Shadow Of No Towers by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon), 42 pages, $27.95 cloth. Rating: NNNN
Art Spiegelman interviewed by SETH as part of the International Festival of Authors Brigantine Room, Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay West), Friday (October 22) at 8 pm.
Rating: NNNNN
New York City — Comic book guru Art Spiegelman is plenty of things, but “nice guy” probably wouldn’t top the list. Ask him to smile for a photographer and he frowns. Ask him to look serious and he breaks into a grin. Ask him to please stub out his cigarette and get ready to duck.
“Mayor Bloomberg went and confiscated every bar, restaurant and public place from me,” he sighs, puffing passionately on the first of many cigarettes.
Note the pronoun. Me, not us.
“So my New York City is essentially my studio.”
We’re in the first floor of that SoHo studio, and along with a cloud of blue smoke, it’s filled with all the contradictions that make up Spiegelman himself.
It’s messy and unkempt but at the same time methodical, the hundreds of zines and comics in his library organized by country and language. Copies of his controversial covers for the tony New Yorker rub spines with the edgier avant-garde comics and graphics-oriented Raw Magazine, which he co-founded in 1980, nurturing generations of comics artists. Stacks of his groundbreaking books Maus and Maus II, in a dozen different languages, rest on a desk a few feet away from a Where’s Waldo doll.
It’s a fitting high-meets-low-art setting for a guy who’s largely responsible for giving literary cred to what was previously seen as a juvenile pastime.
In the Maus books, published in 1986 and 1991, Spiegelman recounted the story of his parents’ experiences in the Holocaust, depicting the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats. Blasphemous? Hardly. The special Pulitzer Prize he was awarded helped usher in acceptance of what are now known as graphic novels.
His latest book, In The Shadow Of No Towers, contains his response to the events of September 11, 2001. The hefty, oversized tome includes 10 broadsheet-sized plates depicting his impassioned, insightful and horrified reactions both to the terrorist attacks and to what he calls “the hijacking of the hijacking” by the Bush administration.
One of the most controversial images in the book consists of Spiegelman in a Maus mask, two figures hovering over him one a bin Laden type brandishing a scimitar, the other a Bush-like character wielding a gun. Referring to that image in simultaneous reviews, Time magazine called him a moron while Newsweek labelled him a genius.
It was Spiegelman’s shrill tone that frightened editors of many left-leaning magazines and newspapers that previously had courted and published him. After 9/11, no one, not even the New Yorker where he was a staff artist and writer for 10 years would touch the work.
“Shrill?” he shouts. “Listen, if I had been making Maus in 1943, it would have been pretty fucking shrill!” He calms down. “At the time, I honestly didn’t feel I was going to be around to see any sort of book made at all. You can’t say “The sky is falling!’ while wearing a monocle.”
The fact that he couldn’t find a mainstream American outlet for the work saddened but didn’t surprise him.
“In the wake of September 11, at least on these shores, the news media abdicated their responsibilities. They either wanted access to power or were guilty of misguided patriotism or were afraid of being seen as unpatriotic if they were critical. As a result, this was a lonely place for a while.”
In the end, he ended up publishing the work in a German weekly called Die Zeit, as well as an American Jewish publication called The Forward. Jews and Germans together: talk about ironies. Other European publications eventually picked up the work.
“They were my own coalition of the willing,” he smiles. “The funny thing is, in Europe my opinions weren’t on the fringes. I was considered a slightly thinner Michael Moore.”
The new book, which Spiegelman calls more “novel graphics than graphic novel,” can itself be seen as having two towers. The first consists of the 10 plates, the second of archival Sunday comics from the early part of the 20th century. Immediately after 9/11, Spiegelman found himself drawn to them for consolation.
“The whole incident made me re-examine what was permanent,” he says thoughtfully. “We thought those stupid towers would be up there forever. And here were these comics that were created by people who figured they would be fish wrap 24 hours later.”
For the book, he singled out specific images that carry sinister or ironic implications for a reader today. In one, a boy named Nemo and his racial stereotype of an African companion are manoeuvring through a tiny version of Lower Manhattan, chased by another boy who knocks down several towers. In another, a character named Abdullah the Arab Chief accidentally causes a tower of acrobats to collapse.
“Look!” he exclaims. “That could come from the pen of Susan Sontag.”
It’s not a coincidence that his book tour for No Towers coincides with the lead-up to the American election. At an interview and book signing at Washington Square Park, he doesn’t hold back his anger at Bush, although he won’t call it Bush-bashing.
“That makes him sound like some gay guy who got caught in an alleyway a victim as opposed to a victimizer,” he tells the crowd.
“The thing is,” he says the next day in his studio, “we’re living in an incredibly dangerous moment that requires a regime change. If going out and talking to people can change things, great. It sure feels better than yelling at my TV set on a nightly basis. That’s why the tour intentionally goes up to November 1.”
He pauses.
“In hindsight, I wish I had fought for social justice for 25 or 30 years rather than for the legitimacy of comics. Considering how successful I’ve been with comics, maybe I could have done more good if I’d picked a bigger target.”
His bags are packed, and in a few minutes a cab will take him to the airport. Midway through our interview, though, his 12-year-old son, Dash, comes to the studio to say goodbye. They don’t hug or even touch. I sense something from Speigelman: an awkward attempt at tenderness? His speaking voice goes higher. In Maus, he explored his own ambivalent relationship with his concentration camp survivor father.
“Thanks for coming by,” he says to his son. “I’ll give you a call.”
Later he tells me he’s tried not to make the same mistakes his father made with him.
“But I find I’m making new ones and the same ones,” he says. “In some ways it was a lot easier for me to have a daughter. I never was a daughter, I never had a sister. I didn’t have that as a paradigm. Here, there are all these currents that run below my surface that have to be dealt with.”
Spoken like a person who maybe wants to be a nice guy after all.
