Art Spiegelman, as everyone should know is the author and artist of Maus I & II for which he won a special Pulitzer in 1992. Along with R. Crumb, he has been part of the underground comic book scene, having started Arcade and Raw with his wife Francoise Mouly and worked for twenty years for Topps Gum Co. creating Garbage Candy, Wacky Packages and the Garbage Pail Kids. Mr. Spiegelman talked with us during a recent book tour publicizing his most recent project Open Me…I’m a Dog (Harper Collins), a children’s book. 

K.M.: Why a children’s book?
A.S.: Because I have kids so it seemed a natural outgrowth of reading other people’s [children’s] books. I could do that better. I have been reading children’s book even before I had kids because it was a safe place where you could have words and pictures together and I like kid’s books. I was kind of being facetious by saying I could do it better, it was part of the mix so I might as well do it anyway. 

K.M.: What children’s books do you enjoy?
A.S.: William Steig, Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak and there is a guy named Chris Van Allsburg. 

K.M.: How old are your kids?
A.S.: Nadja is 10 so she is past the age of the book, she’s somewhere between the dog book and Maus. Dash reacted perfectly-he’s convinced the book is a dog. He liked it. 

K.M.: Do they like comic books?
A.S.: Yes K.M.: Nadja cycles through phases. Tales of the Crypt. Goosebumps. DC horror comics––those we’re the comics that caused juvenile delinquency in the 50’s. Dash loves comic books. We read comic books together. 

K.M.: You must have a great collection?
A.S.: All over the house. Unfortunately mine won’t make it to another generation because kids are really hard on comic books. 

K.M.: This isn’t the first thing you’ve done for kids, you did the Garbage Pail Kids for Topps.
A.S.: Yes, I worked directly for kids. Now I work through the intermediary of the parent’s lap–– that’s what is interesting. I had to talk to kids through and with grownups which is different. When you talk to kids––you talk about snot and stuff. When you talk to the kids through the grownups, you have to talk to both of them. 

K.M.: This book is different.
A.S.: Yeh. I wanted it to be for both members of the family, I don’t like the ones that are really for grownups so the grownup can pretend to be reading to the kid. 

 K.M.: I have a friend whose daughter was into the Garbage Pail Kids and he was really grossed out by them. Where did you got the ideas for the images?
A.S.: It was the sensibility of Mad comics, really twisted me up when I was a kid and I was just paying back the favor to another generation. 

K.M: It wasn’t a bad LSD trip?
A.S.: No, it was really growing up with this subversive thing that Mad Comics offered, in it early stages especially, it was a mathematical formula from the culture that was around me. 

K.M.: It had a strong appeal, it was very popular A.S.: Absolutely. The thing that made it really popular is that it was forbidden–– it was kid pornography. 

K.M.: But you got it past, it was distributed widely. A.S.: Yes, there was a great underground circuit that existed in every candy store. Like so the old malt shop which is gone now. It’s all specialized in comic book stores. 

K.M.: Your experience with Topps wasn’t completely positive, there were some negative experiences.
A.S.: Mainly it had to do with following my idol Harvey Kurtzman, the guy who started Mad Comics, too closely. He lost the rights to Mad, I lost the rights to Garbage Pail Kids. I learned one lesson, in the corporate world the root word of bonus is bone. I felt like I killed this massive dinosaur and all these vice presidents met to toss a bone to the artists. 

K.M.: You never used the experience as a subject.
A.S.: No, I might 

K.M.: It seems like that would be a vindication A.S.: As crazy as the bubble company was it was the closest I came to the real world. I never worked a day in my life so…. 

K.M.: Work in the sense of?
A.S.: In the sense that I never worked in an office. My wife, who works for the New Yorker and it has all the madness of office life––horrible––I’ve been spared that an entire lifetime. The closest I had was Topps. 

K.M.: You just sent your stuff in?
A.S.: No, it depended on what part of my life. I lasted there forever, it was from the time I was 17 to 37. I was traveling around in a van in the 60’s and I’d get an assignment from them. I’d draw it on my drawing pad in the back and then tell them what post office box to send the check. That lasted about 6 months. Then when I lived in New York I would go in 2 -3 times a week depending on what arrangement I had. 

K.M.: Did that experience influence your drawing in any way?
A.S.: It was very useful. I liked it. To this day I’m a very slow artist but fast concept sketch artist. Also for better or worse I’m aware of markets and sites and slots. Like Raw magazine. I learned from a combination of having done it the way it didn’t work with Arcade magazine and from my Topps experience. I had to find a way to niche this thing even it wasn’t going to make huge profits 

K.M.: Did you want Arcade and Raw to be profitable?
A.S.: No, we wanted to be able to survive. Arcade had the problem of being distributed like an underground comic. The way an underground comic was distributed was like Zap 1 would come out and Zap 2 would come out a year later, a year or so after that Zap 3 would come out and they would be on sale forever. Which was great but Arcade was trying to be a quarterly magazine and it was being distributed like a yearly. The head shops after awhile were begging us not to put out anymore because they had Arcade I and then they had Arcade 2. Eventually they had six Arcades and they couldn’t assimilate that way. We never figured out a magazine distribution that worked so when we did Raw we had to figure out––we wanted to do it large size, because of the art and at the time there were a lot of New Wave magazine out––so at least there was a way to sell it. We can put it with the New Wave magazines. With Arcade, it could be next to Mad but it wasn’t the same audience. 

K.M.: Have you see the way cool display box for the dog book?
A.S.: It’s really nice. I’m as fond of the display box as I am of the book. Because what I had to do for Topps was I designed the boxes they came in. The quarter box of stickers. A stand up thing. For the dog book all it is a main picture of the dog on the book and a bone that says read me, feed me, take me home and there’s a tail on the back that wags. Its very obscene hard sell with the dog waving for attention. K.M.: You were part of a very underground scene and there doesn’t seem to be an underground scene today. A.S.: Its still happening. The center of gravity moved from San Francisco to Seattle. 

K.M.: I don’t seem them in the same way as what you were trying to do.
A.S.: The print runs are smaller. 

K.M.: The subject matter is different. With R. Crumb and other comic book artists there was a lot of sexual content.
A.S.: Still sort of true. Crumb still does comics. There’s Julie Disette. Even in the heyday. even the best selling comics had sex and drugs. I think Chris Weir and Dan Clowes are directly connected [to the underground]. 

K.M.: What do you think about younger comic book artists?
A.S.: I’m in touch with them. In fact one of my new gigs is working for Details magazine. 

K.M.: Yeah, I heard about that. What are you doing for them?
A.S.: I’m editing comics features where the artists are acting as reporters. So Peter Kuper went to the Burning Man event and came back with a sketchbook of strips. 

K.M.: You’ve done that with the New Yorker. Are you still working there?
A.S.: I’m still doing stuff for the New Yorker as an artist. 

K.M.: But not overseeing the comic art?
A.S.: No, well my wife is there. She’s the cover art editor but not for my covers since its a conflict of interest. I was originally hired as a contributing editor at the New Yorker as well but after the third time I quit…. 

K.M.: Why?
A.S.: There was always an issue with something I was asked to do that wouldn’t get used, like the cover was too weird. 

K.M.: Like what?
A.S.: Like the cover I did about the O.J. Simpson trial. The verdict is out and I get an emergency call asking me to do something for the cover of that issue. I said I would rather sit this one out since I just had problems with a cover I had done before. 

K.M.: Which one? The Hasidic Jew?
A.S.: No, one more recent, the crucified Easter Bunny. But then they insisted that I do it so I said I’ll give it a shot. I came up with something I really liked but Tina Brown’s problem was she needed to have something pretty strong because the verdict came out and she had a double issue on home furnishings are something like that; she would have to wait after everyone else so she needed something to arrest attention which is why she was flagging me down for this. I handed it in, she saw it in rough sketch form and she said this is great. The image was a bloody gloved hand holding some playing cards, and the top card was a king/queen card and the card facing up was the O.J. of spades with minstrel, Al Jolson lips and the opposite was the KKK of clubs which was a L.A. policeman with a Klu Klux Klan mask on and behind that was a credit card and the caption was “Gender card beats race card unless player holds Gold card.” I get it done in record time–– I really had only a weekend. I was feeling relieved and proud that I had made it happen then I get a call –– “Sorry Art but were not going to be able to use it.” “Wait, I remember talking to you on Friday night, I remember asking you are you sure, are you really sure.” “Yes, but I showed it to Skip Gates and he didn’t think it was in good taste and he has an article in the issue.” I said wait a minute you didn’t ask me if his article was in good taste. So it got published instead in the Nation magazine. I got a call from a paper in New York called the New York Observer asking about the New Yorker cover. The first sentence of the article is something like I come from the Underground Press and most of my editors were cokeheads but I never had anyone as materialistic as Tina Brown and it went downhill from there. So at that point I thought it was over but my contract said I was a consulting editor but since I had to consult with Tina Brown, I couldn’t have the title since I had to consult with her. I’m on a draw which means I do a certain number of pages per year so it didn’t change things economically just the category. 

K.M.: I’m interested in why you are connected with the New Yorker and Details because in some interviews I read, you were critical of mass culture; these are magazine that try to reach the greatest number of people.
A.S.: I don’t have a problem, as long as they publish work worth publishing. 

K.M.: Do you want to change what kind of information gets through?
A.S.: What information and how information gets out. They [The New Yorker] did a few great picture reports like the Fashion issue where they had a sketchbook report about sweatshops by Sue Coe. They had another issue where early on when the Branch Davidian thing was happening Gary Panters, a cartoonist who is from the Waco area was sent down to do a sketchbook report. Those are great. I went to Reichstag in East Germany where some gypsies had been forced out. 

K.M.: Are you going to continue producing similar material for the New Yorker?
A.S.: I can do it myself for the New Yorker or for Details. Actually my situation is lucky – I’m an exempted case–– I’m not considered a cartoonist anymore. 

K.M.: What are you considered? A social commentator?
A.S.: Yeh. I guess. 

K.M.: Because of Maus?
A.S.: Yes, I walked through another doorway. 

K.M.: It that what you want to take on?
A.S.: I want to be a commentator but here the New Yorker was doing this and it seemed like every magazine should be doing this because what happened really was photoshop came along. and as a result at this point nobody can say that photos tell the truth not that they ever did. But the kind of the presumed objectivity of what a photograph is–– it’s one more style of interpretation––it could be a drawing, it could be a photo. A photo doesn’t have more weight. For example if your a writer and you write in the third person, it’s presumed to have more weight and objectivity than if you write in the first person and similarly before the invention of the camera artists, were reporters and actually newspapers would use artists to cover the Spanish American War. 

K.M.: But you don’t primarily want to be a political artist?
A.S.: But I like the idea and I think magazines should have that as part of their mix. I really like editing as well as writing and drawing. 

K.M.: You have talked about how there are very few comic book artists that can write and draw and you can do both.You have said that you wish Maus had some company on the shelf. A.S.: At the time Maus was successful bookstores had a section called graphic novels but the problem is Maus took 13 years to cobble together and by the next publishing season you weren’t going to get 500 books in this category. It takes a long time, so what happened was repackaged Marvel comic books would come out––really lame books by people who didn’t know what they were doing. It wasn’t good and now after 10 years since Maus came out there’s an accumulated body of work that’s come out. I can think of City of Glass but I haven’t seen anything else. I know you did The Wild Party. A.S.: It has happened. There is this thing called Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer (Ben Katchor) , and there’s a book about comics called Understanding Comics–The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Then there’s The Playboy and I Never Liked You by a guy named Chester Brown. They read well. Then this guy Dan Clowes has Ghost World, a collection of his stories coming out. Well, how many did I mention–8? Well, if there were 16 novels in the world it would still be a very rarefied thing. It takes a long time to accumulate enough mass so you can put it in that form. 

K.M.: You have talked about Maus, how it drove you to the psychiatrist’s couch, you might have been joking but you mentioned it stymied you in terms of creativity.
A.S.: I’m working, but I’m not working on a long comics novel. Anything else is fine. 

K.M.: Will that be true for awhile?
A.S.: For the immediate future. Right now I’m doing short pieces, comics for magazines, short essays, editing and doing covers for the New Yorker. That’s keeping me really busy and I’m also putting together an anthology of my various comics and drawing lithographs. But what I can’t do is an extended comic. My brain just frys out; those nerve endings got hurt somehow. I think of it as the most refined thing I can do. The thing that uses my faculties to their most acute point–– but that point got blunted, oddly enough through the success of Maus; instead of egging me on it caught me off balance a bit. K.M.: Does that bother you at all? A.S.: I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I’ve been taking notes and I assume I will be doing it again. I write and draw everyday. K.M.: What kind of essays have you been writing? A.S.: The most recent was something for Mother Jones called “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Racist” and a piece for Salon about the Tijuana Bibles [an early collection of pornographic comics]. 

K.M.: Is there anything out now that is that extreme?
A.S.: A guy named Michael Diane did a comic book that got him arrested. It’s the first time in history that a comic book artist has gotten arrested. But that wasn’t how it should have been. He should have gotten arrested for drawing badly. It was something about subteen sex and mutilation and murder. It was drawn badly but it’s comics, you’re supposed to be able to open things up and let things happen. Instead he got busted and got put on probation where he’s not allowed to talk to anyone under 18 and he’s not allowed to draw. It’s been appealed but it’s never been won. 

K.M.: What about free speech?
A.S.: I don’t think it reaches Florida. 

K.M.: What about being politically correct? Your comics weren’t.
A.S.: Besides dealing with certain cases like people like me who smoke, it doesn’t seem to have much power. Its only powerful in the rarefied circles of academia and within the editorial offices of publishing. But in the outside world you would never get busted for being a misogynist. You get millions of dollars for being a misogynist. But on the other hand there is this other thing that still holds sway in America where a guy can get busted for drawing comics. 

K.M.: Anything involving sex and younger teens A.S.: It’s often been true. The ones my daughter likes were once the subject of Senate Hearings and censorship in the 50’s. Well you know the Tin Drum got busted in Oklahoma City. Anyone who rented it got called on by the cops because it involved the simulations of sex with children. 

K.M.: Both you and R. Crumb have resisted animating your comics books.
A.S.: R. Crumb only resisted by learning the hard way. Fritz the Cat was made out of one of his comics. He wasn’t involved in the actual work but he was unhappy with the product. So much so that he killed off a character he had used since childhood. In general I’m not resistant to it. It specifically had to do with Maus. If someone wants to say “open me I’m a movie” instead of “open me I’m a dog” that’s fine. Usually my stuff is so site specific that it wouldn’t translate well. This book is good example, it’s so much about it’s bookness but if I do something else from another part of my brain that would be fine. 

K.M.: Would you be interested in film or TV?
A.S.: Comics and the core of comics is aesthetically wrapped up with the technology of printing. I don’t know what happens when it becomes electronic media. There will be things that have relationship to comics. Bob Callahan and Spam Rodrqiuez are doing a Web site as a comic strip that involves going into room and checking things out but its definitely born of comics, though not comics. 

K.M.: Have you seen it?
A.S.: A test version. 

K.M.: What did you think?
A.S.: It looked very pretty but I couldn’t get very far because I have this really slow modem. It’s so exhausting loading this stuff up. When I get out to San Francisco as part of this book tour I’ll probably see what their doing. 

K.M.: I just think comics and books involving holding in your hands is part of the experience. A.S.: I think so too. K.M.: How do you read it? A.S.: I like paper but it’s only a matter of time before the computer will be that size.