A stalwart of the 1960s underground comics scene, Art Spiegelman is now making waves with his post-September 11th satire, 'In the Shadow of NoTowers', writes Donald Clarke
Art Spiegelman is too hard on himself. As a comic-book artist with a continuing interest in autobiography, Spiegelman has spent a substantial portion of his 40-year career satirising his own foibles and parading his own insecurities. In his most recently published major work, In the Shadow of No Towers, a series of musings on the aftermath of September 11th, he appears as a shrill paranoiac, cigaretting furiously as he frets about the coming apocalypse.
And sure enough, I recognise him instantly as I enter the Morrison Hotel: the same lank grey hair, the same creased face, the same thick funk of blue smoke. But he is much nicer than he lets on. He is chatty, funny and, most surprising of all, really rather jolly.
"Oh no," he disagrees, slightly taken aback. "It's just not in my nature to be happy." Spiegelman's work has certainly focused on the dark side of life. Although a stalwart of the underground comics scene since the late 1960s, he remains best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, which dramatised his father's experiences in Auschwitz by imagining Jews as mice (vermin in Hitler's eyes) and the Nazis as cats.
Maus alternates the events of the Holocaust with the author's attempts in the early 1980s to encourage his father to tell his story. It is clear that their relationship was not an easy one; the Vladek Spiegelman of Maus is gruff, unyielding and seems to have little understanding of his son's art.
"Yes, he wanted me to be a doctor," Spiegelman says. "As a career choice, comics were not even on my parents' map. Of course, that might have been what made it attractive: being totally outside the zone of parental desire and control." Spiegelman, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, has been drawing comics professionally since the age of 14 when he secured a job as a staff cartoonist on the Long Island Post. He agreed to attend college and was studying Art and Philosophy when the first of two major early traumas struck.
"What got me out of college was being sent to the nuthouse," he says in a disconcertingly jaunty tone. "I got away from the intense hot-house of my parents' house to college, where I majored in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and I just got the bends." In 1968, while Spiegelman was recovering from his breakdown, his mother, who was also a Holocaust survivor, killed herself. Four years later , he turned his reactions to the event into a short, moving comic strip for an underground publication. It is included in the first volume of Maus.
"For those four years I didn't know it had happened really," he says. "I mean if someone said, 'Where are your parents?' I would say, 'Oh my mother killed herself'. But I didn't actually remember any of the events. Then in 1972, catalysed by a major argument with my partner, I realised that I wasn't angry with her, I was angry with my mother. And it became this strip, Prisoner on the Hell Planet. And that has now become my frame of reference for the events."
Prisoner on the Hell Planet - austere, peculiar, blackly humorous - was a quintessential product of the underground comics boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though that movement has come to be remembered for its depiction of sexual perversity and high living, artists such as Justin Green, Robert Crumb and Spiegelman broke new ground in their investigations of the contemporary neuroses that remained off-limits to more sober media.
In 1980, Spiegelman founded Raw, a publication dedicated to furthering original comic-book talents. Among his protegés were Chris Ware, whose Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth recently won the Guardian First Book Prize, and Daniel Clowes, whose Ghost World was made into a hit movie in 2001. Considering these mainstream successes alongside Maus, one wonders if the medium has won the battle for respectability. But does he want to be respectable?
"In a way I do. I like comics and I'd like them to be around for a while," he says. "Over the past 10 or 15 years some kind of Faustian deal has been struck where book stores, museums and libraries have begun supporting comic book artists in the same way they might support poets. But even literary culture is a sort of marginal culture now. So we have perhaps found a place within the margins of a marginal culture. We have at least made it that far." Maus and the Pulitzer Prize which followed the publication of the second of its two volumes in 1992, secured a place in the mainstream for him. Further establishment credentials came when he joined the New Yorker as an illustrator. "It is very hard to change prejudices," he says. "But one gets more status, money and respect for just writing or just drawing than one does for doing both. So over the years I began to take the line of least resistance by writing essays or doing single images or covers for the New Yorker."
September 11th changed his attitude to his career. Spiegelman lives in downtown Manhattan and experienced hours of terror that day before discovering that his daughter, who attended school in the vicinity of the towers, was unharmed. In a recent interview he said the disaster made him feel he was wasting his time doing anything besides comics.
"Yes. Because comics are so labour intensive I began to slack off and do less of them. You have to believe that you will live forever to do a comic the way I do, because it's such a large amount of work. So, yes, one of my first thoughts afterwards was: you blew it guy, you should have done more comics." Almost immediately, Spiegelman began planning In the Shadow of No Towers.
Presented on 10 large pages, the strip is a loosely linked collection of meditations and rants on the subject of the al-Qaeda attacks. Among other things, it details his fear of a second atrocity, his concern at the rapid return of complacency among New Yorkers and his disgust at the US government's bellicose response to the crisis.
"For the first year afterwards I really believed that the world was ending," he says. "And books take ages. So the idea of setting off to do a whole book seemed like folly. On the other hand, while waiting for the sky to fall I felt I could get one page done at a time. So they were each done waiting for the sky to fall. It was born under that kind of duress. Western civilisation was about to crash. I haven't changed that view, but I believe it is crashing in slower motion than it was."
Already angry, Spiegelman was made even more furious when he discovered that no mainstream publication seemed interested in accepting material that dealt with the attacks in such a robust fashion. "I might have been able to get it published in the underground media, but the tone was not one you were allowed to strike in the mainstream media at that point. That has changed a little - though I think that is more to do with a looming election - the New York Times recently did a piece on me and printed one of the panels they had earlier rejected." That panel shows the artist dozing between a representative of the US government and a sword-wielding agent of al-Qaeda. The caption claims he feels equally terrorised by the two forces. Is this hyperbole? "No," he laughs. "The problem for me is that, though my work is often taken to be funny, I have no sense of humour. I wasn't jacking it up for comic effect. In a way, the trauma for me starts with the hijacking of the US government in 2000 and then gains giddy heights with the hijacking of those airplanes in 2001."
Spiegelman eventually - and this is an irony the creator of Maus rather enjoys - found a publisher in Germany. The strip also turned up in the London Review of Books and will appear in book form when he finds a suitable way to present it.
Does he see similarities between the themes of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers?
He pauses for the first time in our interview. "We were trapped downtown at the time and saw it all. I don't compare it to what my parents went through except that we both managed to stand on one of those fault lines where your own personal history and a generalised history open up a fissure and you find yourself in danger of falling in.
"I always had this notion from my parents, but had never experienced it personally: keep your bags packed, be prepared to leave. Everything that seems permanent is actually ephemeral and could vanish at any point."