Of Maus and Men
1. Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, and Dan Cloves are the League of Extraordinary Freelancers
Last night, which happened to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I attended a lecture by Pulitzer prize winning comic book artist (or graphic novelist) Art Spiegelman. It was supposed to be a talk on tolerance and art, but he self-deprecatingly waved away these weighty subjects. “Everything I know I learned from comic books,” he said. “So I’m going to talk about comic books.”
And for the next two hours, that’s exactly what he did, talking and joking his way through a brief history of comic books, from the first old French comic strips to the now critically acclaimed “graphic novels” like The Watchmen, or his own masterpiece, Maus, which grapples in alternating humor and horror with his father’s memories of surviving Auschwitz, and his own turmoil in understanding that history.
Fortunately for the audience, the talk, like Spiegelman’s work, was not limited to words. On a giant screen Spiegelman guided us from one comic to the next–some his, many from others who he took inspiration from. And bit by bit, as he traversed the world of comics from the early days of racial caricatures to the modern world, where entire populations were subdued by the fear of Islamist reprisal over the Danish cartoons, (a subject he did a cover-story for Harper’s magazine on and which was subsequently banned in Canada) to the propaganda posters the Nazi’s used in the lead-up to the mass-execution of the Jews in Europe, Spiegelman drove home his overarching point:
These are not just lines on paper. [Read more →]
January 28, 2009 7 Comments
