Didn’t realize how much of a firestorm a simple recap of an Art Spiegelman lecture at Yale University I posted last month would generate — I think the Maus guy might be amused by it all — so, play nice in the Comments area, after reading this conversation with Spiegelman for The BWOG, the Internet site of The Blue and White, Columbia University’s undergraduate magazine.
As one very astute Comments poster noted last month, Spiegelman is teaching a spring semester class at Columbia, entitled Comics Marching into the Canon, the subject of the BWOG interview.
And it’s been a tougher chore than Spiegelman ever thought it would be: Oh man, my life has stopped, it’s on total hold ’til this semester’s over. I’m working about five days a week, as opposed to what I thought was, oh, you plan a little the day before, then you do it, then the next morning your life can resume.
On graphic novels: It made me aware of how important this re-branding of comics as graphic novels has been, despite my own cynicism about it, in the sense that graphic is respectable, novel is respectable, graphic novels are doubly respectable, but what it did offer people who might have such a notion that “well, it can’t be a work, because you can’t get the shape of Little Orphan Annie,” which went from 1924 and I think it’s still on in some form.
Teaching another comics course: Not next semester, that’s for sure. Like I said, my work level has really come down to a crawl if even that.
As I was doing some vetting for this news item, I came across a couple of interesting pieces of news about future works by Spiegleman from an unexpected place: Publicity for an upcoming public lecture April 9 at Columbia.
- A new edition of Art Spiegelman’s 1978 anthology, Breakdowns, will be published in spring 2008 and it will include an autobiographical comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself, entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!
- Meta Maus, a book and accompanying DVD about the making of Pulitzer Prize winning work.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to review the long out-of-print The Complete Maus CD-ROM, here’s hoping the Meta Maus DVD will include those same audio excerpts of Art’s father, Vladek, sharing recollections of that dark time in human history that were faithfully recreated later on to critical acclaim by the younger Spiegelman.
