In their familiar modern form, comic strips were introduced to lighten the content of newspapers. They were sometimes called the "funnies" or, in the case of the Scottish Sunday Post, which was bred in the same stable as the Beano and the Dandy, "The Fun Section". Art Spiegelman is among the best-known living cartoonists, but the drawings that have made him famous are not funny, and they are not intended solely for children. Spiegelman and other comic-book artists of the underground renaissance that occurred during the 1960s are inclined to call their work "comix" - the final letter, perhaps subliminally, endorsing them for consumption by grown-ups. His most famous creation, Maus, in which the Jews are depicted as mice, tracks the experience of his parents in Poland before and during the second world war, leading eventually to Auschwitz, or "Mauschwitz". The book was published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991.
The new Spiegelman production, In the Shadow of No Towers, suggests parallels between the horror suffered by the elder Spiegelmans and that of their son on September 11 2001, and over the days and months that followed. "Maybe I really want the world to end, to vindicate the fears I felt back on 9/11!" says the Spiegelman figure in one of the No Towers strips, dated almost two years after the event. "Maybe it's just my little world that ended."
In person, Spiegelman does not give the least impression that his world has ended, or is about to. His express-train conversation manages to convey wit, paranoia, an obsession with American politics and a caustic intelligence, all in a single sentence. With his wife and their two chil dren, Spiegelman is about to embark on a three-week holiday in a gite in Provence. "I'd move to France," he says. "I'm just not sure if it's worse to be a victim of Bush's foreign policy than of his domestic policy." The sardonic one-liners roll from his tongue as regularly as the cigarettes from the pack on the table before him. He smokes so much "that I might not live to see the end of the world". An unrealistically sickly looking Spiegelman peers from a panel in the new book, gasping: "Cof!"
The strips in No Towers were begun while Spiegelman was working at the New Yorker. However, they were declined by the magazine and by other leading American papers, eventually being published in New York's weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward, which had serialised Maus. Steve Bell, the Guardian's political cartoonist, is not surprised that Spiegelman had difficulty in getting the new work published in the United States. "It was the climate after 9/11. I've spoken to a lot of cartoonists who had a hard time getting stuff accepted. Self-censorship then comes into play, because you just know they won't publish it. American papers are very careful not to offend - which is silly really, because while you're being careful not to offend, the government is off doing very offensive stuff."
Spiegelman describes his acceptance in the relatively humble pages of the Forward as being granted "the right of return". He felt obliged to point out to the editor that, unlike Maus, his new work would have little Jewish content. "He shrugged and said: 'It's okay - you're Jewish'." The strips were published, more or less simultaneously, in Die Zeit in Germany and in the London Review of Books in Britain. Spiegelman resigned as consulting editor of the New Yorker at the end of 2002.
In the Shadow of No Towers consists of 10 broadsheet plates by Spiegelman and a further seven plates, what he calls "the second Tower", taken from the funnies printed during the early years of last century in newspapers such as the New York American, the World, and the Chicago Tribune. The latter comics all in some way reflect the themes of Spiegelman's own drawings in the "first Tower". One, dated 1902, shows "Foxy Grandpa" reading the Declaration of Independence on the fourth of July and being interrupted by an explosion, while another depicts the Happy Hooligan, a popular idiot, assuming the guise of "Abdullah, the Arab Chief" and coming to grief with a 1,000lb weight dropped on his head. In a 1921 cartoon from the New York American, a character visits Pisa and, like Spiegelman after September 11, is kept awake by thoughts of the famous tower falling on him. However, the most spectacular of the book's borrowings is in the endpapers, which reproduces the September 11 1901 front page of the New York World with the headline "President's Wound Reopened: Slight Change for the Worse". The story referred to the shooting by anarchists of President William McKinley (he died three days later). The overall effect of Spiegelman's new work is of a synthetic collage, in which the various parts interact in the reader's mind to compose changing wholes.
Edward Koren, a cartoonist who has been associated with the New Yorker for more than 40 years, feels that Spiegelman "has an extraordinary sense of the history of the evolution of the comic strip. It's quite bold of him to put his work next to that of the masters."
The original schedule for publication in the Forward was one broadsheet plate per month, but when Spiegelman began work he found that the destruction of the World Trade Center, which he witnessed and which happened close to his daughter's school, had put him into shock and slow motion. Plate 2, for example, took almost three months to complete. "How did the old timers do it?" he asks, in awe at the rapid production of the beautifully executed New York World and Chicago Tribune strips, featuring the likes of Little Nemo and the Katzenjammer Kids. "I can't imagine. They had to turn out a full-page spread every Sunday, plus lots of work for the dailies. But here, I couldn't always meet my deadlines. And I had a certain kind of urgency. I really thought another attack was going to happen in New York any second."
Small and neat and wearing a black waistcoat like "Artie" in Maus, he seems every inch the smart New Yorker, although he was born in Stockholm, spent his American infancy in Pennsylvania, and moved to California for six years in the 1970s "after a short stay in a mental hospital". The power of Maus derives not just from the atrocious experience of the parents - the betrayal into Nazi hands by smugglers who had promised to save them, the poisoning of their elder son Richieu by a guardian to spare him from the gas chambers, the unspeakable ordeal of the camps - but from the book's sub-plot, which delineates the difficult relationship between father and son. Vladek Spiegelman is portrayed as selfish and petty. The resources that enabled him to survive Auschwitz have hardened into extreme parsimony. While virtually every other family member perished, Vladek and his wife survived. Then, in 1968, Anja committed suicide. Art was living at home at the time, having been released from a state hospital three months earlier. The suicide is commemorated with shrieking intensity in a four-page strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" (1973), which evokes the artist's imbalanced mind as he speaks from his mental prison: "Well, Mom, if you're listening... Congratulations! ... You've committed the perfect crime... You put me here... shorted all my circuits... You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!" Vladek died of heart failure in 1982, four years before the publication of Maus I.
Michael Greenberg, a New Yorker who used to work for the Forward and now writes a fortnightly column in the TLS, says that "a lot of the impact of the Maus books came from the fact that Spiegelman didn't sentimentalise the survivor. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, he showed how destroyed and desperate their post-Holocaust lives could be. There was this sacred, hushed, horrified feeling among Jews towards Holocaust survivors when I was growing up. We were supposed to revere them - they were martyrs of anti-semitism - but in reality they were often ruined, angry, depressed, impatient people whom you could never figure out." The children of survivors, Greenberg adds, "often had a mordancy that the rest of us didn't have. They had this special knowledge about suffering. And they seemed to resent it. In some cases, there was a need to do something extreme in response to it all. I sense something of that quality in Spiegelman."
Bryan Cheyette, the author of Modernity, Culture and "the Jew" (1998), adds: "What does this word 'survivor' mean? What has Vladek survived? He's picking up wire in the street and leaving the gas running all the time to save on matches. At some level, he hasn't survived at all." Cheyette teaches a course in Holocaust literature at Southampton University. " Maus has always been a part of the course. I brought it in straight away when the first volume came out in 1986. It very quickly became a canonical text." Students are often "shocked and surprised" at being asked to read a comic book, he says, "but they soon come round to seeing the complexity of the work. Maus operates on different levels. For example, it introduces the idea of the 'second generation', that the Holocaust isn't something that's buried in the past but that it flows through the generations."
The use of the first-person narrator in comics is a method Spiegelman popularised, though he credits its development to a fellow cartoonist, Justin Green. "I'm surprised it didn't take off earlier," says Spiegelman, "because comics have that quality of personal storytelling. In a sense it's like an overly developed handwriting. So it seems a natural thing to start using the word 'I' and continue from there." He has been drawing since an early age. At 15, he started working for his local paper in Rego Park, New York, "and getting paid for it, so I became a sort of pro. But I really found my own voice as a cartoonist beginning in about 1971, and the first important piece of work was the three-page version of Maus, which appeared in an anthology called Funny Animals . At that point, autobiographical stories became part of the mix for me."
Spiegelman went to Harpur College (now the State University of New York at Binghampton) to study art. "They told me I would have to take a philosophy foundation course, so then I decided to become a philosophy major to try to figure out why they wouldn't let me be an art major. And shortly thereafter I dropped out of school altogether." (His old university later granted him an honorary doctorate.) In 1968, after "taking LSD as casually as some of my contemporaries now drop antacids", he "snapped" and was stretchered into a padded cell. For many years afterwards, Spiegelman worked for the Topps gum company, designing novelty cards and sweet packets, including products familiar to Americans such as Garbage Candy and Wacky Packages.
Spiegelman's drawings are evocative, but they are seldom elaborate. They lack the frenzied inventiveness of some of his contemporaries in the underground comics movement, such as Crumb, inventor of Mr Natural, Honeybunch Kaminski ("Jailbait of the Month") and scores of other energetic creations. He describes his "signature way of drawing" as "really a result of my deficiencies". It is partly modesty, but Spiegelman suffers from ambylopia, or lazy eye, "which means that I don't have binocular vision, and have difficulty seeing in three dimensions. This might have been part of what made me a cartoonist rather than a baseball player. I was rotten at sports, but I found that if I could draw good caricatures of the teachers I wouldn't be doomed to be the butt of everybody's scorn." The condition might help to explain the thickset nature of many Spiegelman figures, and their broad-stroked execution.
According to Bell, "Art's drawing always impressed me because it was so simple, but I realised it takes a huge amount of work to achieve that simplicity. Some people think it's crude, but Art has developed a style and he can make it do exactly what he wants it to do." Some of Spiegelman's pages are bound together with visual motifs that are not always perceptible on first viewing. One example, which he demonstrates with a copy of Maus II open before him, occurs early on in the book. It has a large panel of the artist perched at his desk on top of a pile of emaciated bodies, reflecting on the success of the earlier instalment: "At least 15 foreign editions are coming out. I've gotten at least four serious offers to turn the book into a movie." The artist's pride is undermined by a barely visible swastika which, as he points out, "is holding the page together". To Cheyette, this element of Maus 's storyline suggests that Spiegelman is "very aware of the commodification of the Holocaust".
Spiegelman claims that each speech balloon in Maus was rewritten about 40 times "in order to condense it", and he is apt to discuss his work in the manner of a writer. "It's certainly true that I don't draw as my first response. I don't reach for my pen to doodle. To express myself visually, it's a lot of work, because I don't have the feeling in the wrist of total confidence that lets you move forward. It's easier for me to write than to draw, I suppose. Comics are an art of compression. You allow your thoughts to decant, until they achieve their maximum density." An obvious point of comparison for Maus, in which the Nazis are cats, the Poles pigs and the Americans rather genial dogs, is George Orwell's Animal Farm. A critic in the New Republic compared Spiegelman to "the young Philip Roth" in his ability "to make the Jewish speech of several generations sound fresh and unusually convincing". In 1994, he again took a literary theme when he produced an edition of Joseph Moncure March's epic poem of the prohibition era, The Wild Party, with 100 illustrations. Bell says: "One of the reasons I'm such an admirer of Maus is because it's a great piece of writing. 'Graphic novel' is too paltry a term. But I still want to think of him as a cartoonist."
Not everyone falls under Spiegelman's spell. In a profile in the Village Voice published in 1999, Ted Rall, a cartoonist and graphic novelist, attacked Spiegelman as New York's "undisputed cartoon tsar". The Pulitzer prize-winning author, Rall wrote, "is The Man: He's managed to triangulate seemingly disparate circles of Manhattan's media elite to gain the power to define cartooning in this town. If you're a cartoonist, he can make or break your sorry ass." Rall also wondered whether he was essentially "a guy with one great book in him".
Spiegelman's methods have done much to bring comics to the attention of an audience that would not normally read them. As he sees it, he is only helping to restore the status of comics to what it was in the 1930s and 40s, when they "tended to appeal to an older audience of GIs and other adults". In 1954, an influential American psychiatrist, Dr Frederic Wertham, published a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he claimed comics were a major cause of juvenile delinquency. Out of this came the Comics Code Authority, supposedly self-regulating but in effect a form of suppression, since distributors and retail outlets would not handle comics suspected of breaching the code. The result was the domination of the genre by what Spiegelman calls "lobotomised super heroes", frequently engaged in extreme violence while defending America from enemies such as "the followers of Mahomet" (Arak, Son of Thunder, 1982) and other exotics. According to Spiegelman, the code practically killed off the "great tradition" of comics, just as the persecution of Hollywood actors and directors by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the same decade wounded the film industry. "There were some very exciting things happening at that time, and some great artists," he says, citing Jack Cole, the inventor of Plastic Man in the 40s and early 50s. Spiegelman has compiled a book of Cole's comics, with an introductory essay. He is enthusiastic about the period between the first Superman comic in 1939 and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority in 1954, which he refers to as the golden age. "Comics that were very popular during the Korean war were Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, edited by Harvey Kurtzman, the same guy that did MAD. Those can only be described as, at the very least, humanistic comics - or as anti-war war comics." In the 40s, Cole was producing hard-boiled pulp fiction comic strips, such as "Murder, Morphine and Me", about a crowd of Los Angeles junkies and hustlers. "The industry was essentially stopped dead in its tracks. It had to rise from its own ashes and it didn't do so until the underground comics movement of the 60s, led by Crumb, Gilbert Shelton of The Furry Freak Brothers, and so on."
The spectre of censorship hovered over Spiegelman's life at the New Yorker. In an interview printed in Corriera della Sera in February 2003, he was quoted as saying that "the censorship of my work began as soon as I set foot in the magazine, long before September 11". Spiegelman claims not to remember having spoken those exact words, but he acknowledges that "the compromise and self-censorship necessary to play well with others settled in the minute I started working there". Next year he will publish a visual memoir of his 10 years at the New Yorker, "with all the different covers and images I did. It's basically a history of the wrestling matches, of what it means to try to graft an underground cartoonist's sensibility on to the DNA of the New Yorker. God bless 'em, they tried. And God bless me, I tried. I guess I got spoiled at an early age. I got used to publishing myself without editorial interference."
He was brought on to the staff of the New Yorker by Tina Brown, and raised hackles immediately. In 1993 he caused a furore with a cover drawing which showed an African-American woman locked in a kiss with a Hasidic Jew. "People were shocked and upset by it," says Greenberg. "It was the St Valentine's day issue and Spiegelman was making his statement about the Crown Heights riots and all the depressing shrillness that these powerless groups unleash on one another. I think of him as the political Crumb." Koren recalls that, among certain other artists at the magazine, "there was general lamentation and tearing of hair at that cover. You could look on it as very courageous. You could look at it and say, so what? What are we talking about? The complexity of race relations?"
Spiegelman says he would have been glad to have his No Towers work published in the New Yorker, "had the New Yorker been glad to have it. But I don't think my tone was appropriate. It was so obvious it wasn't going to be comfortable there. The New Yorker sees everything through a certain script, and it has a certain tone to it, but that tone wasn't the one I was striking with my shrill, sky-is-falling voice, cracking at every moment. I say this with no rancour towards the New Yorker - it's a wonderful magazine and if I take the right meds I might go back." When the war in Iraq began last year and the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, published "a reluctant hawk's endorsement" of the invasion, "I told him: 'Gee, I'm sorry it was reported that I left in protest, and I'm sorry I left when I did, because I could have left in protest now'."
Spiegelman's wife, Françoise Mouly, who is French, joined the New Yorker at the same time as he did and continues to be the editor in charge of cover art. "Because of that Bill-and-Hillary-Clintonish perception of us, there were difficulties from the beginning." Spiegelman and Mouly have published and edited various cartoon magazines, the best known of which is Raw. When they started Raw, in 1980, he had been drawing for publications such as Playboy and the New York Times, as well as working for Topps, and at first was pessimistic about a re-entry into the underground scene, which, with its emphasis on mere taboo-breaking - for example, Crumb's story, "The Family that Lays Together Stays Together" - seemed to him "even more bankrupt" than the milieu in which he was employed. But Raw proved to be a success, introducing a "fine-art slant" to the comic strip, as Dez Skinn, the author of Comix: The Underground Revolution (2004), puts it. "Raw's publishing schedule was erratic, to say the least, with only eight issues published between 1980 and 1986, but what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. It launched the careers of dozens of cartoonists and artists, from Charles Burns to Gary Panter." Koren says Spiegelman "has been very generous to other people who are doing the same sort of thing as he does. He has been a helpful mentor to a lot of younger artists, such as Chris Ware." In 2001, Ware won the Guardian first book award for Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth. Selections from Raw were subsequently published in the US as Penguin paperbacks. The Spiegelmans later established Little Lit, described as Raw Junior. Spiegelman quips: "We were trying to show that comics aren't just for grown-ups." The couple have two children: Nadja, 17, who is featured in No Towers, trying to talk sense into her freaking-out father, and Dashiell, 12, who has also been incorporated into comic strips.
In Spiegelman's SoHo studio, described by the New York Times as "also a kind of haphazard museum of comic-strip history", he works on a computer for some projects and on paper for others. Beside his old-fashioned drafting table, on which he sketches by hand, is another desk with "all the electronic toys". Sometimes, he draws straight on to the computer, using a Wacom Tablet, a digital graphics pad, "which I find a very great pleasure. It enables you to try things out, make some part of the picture bigger, smaller, yellow, red or whatever. Then I'll spit that out of the printer, bring it over to the table, put a sheet over it and continue drawing by hand, and then scan that in, and change it again. There are some panels of In the Shadow of No Towers that never saw a piece of paper, and some that only saw a computer at the last minute when I scanned them in." He laments, however, that the computer "deprives me of the pleasure of an original".
The slow progress of In the Shadow of No Towers is characteristic. The original three-page version of Maus, which Spiegelman refers to frequently, saw the light of day in 1973, whereas Maus II, subtitled "And Here My Troubles Began", would not be published for almost another 20 years. "I'm never really satisfied with what I've done. It's not a matter of how long does it take to make that many lines on a piece of paper. It's a thought structure. And comics, at least as I understand them, are very condensed thought structures. It has maybe more to do with poetry than it has to do with narrative prose." With Maus , he had "the self-created deadline of chapters in Raw magazine, but I was working on all the other contents too, and there would come a certain point when everything else was finished except my damn chapter. As for In the Shadow of No Towers, when I did the first few of those plates, I really did believe that I wouldn't live to see them published. Now I feel that the world may be ending, but it's ending slower than I thought."
Art Spiegelman
Born: February 15, 1948, Stockholm.
Educated: High School of Art and Design, Manhattan; 1966-68 Harpur College.
Married: 1977 Françoise Mouly. Two children: '87 Nadja, '92 Dashiell.
Employment: 1966-86 creative consultant, Topps; '79-87 teacher at the School of Visual Arts, New York; '93-2002 consulting editor, New Yorker.
Some books: 1977 Breakdowns; '86 Maus: My Father Bleeds History; '89 Raw: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix; '91 Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began; '94 The Wild Party; 2001 Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits; '04 In the Shadow of No Towers.
Some comics magazines: Arcade (with Bill Griffith), Raw (with Mouly), Little Lit (with Mouly).
Some awards: 1990 Guggenheim fellowship; '92 Pulitzer prize.
· In the Shadow of No Towers is published by Viking on September 4 at £20.