Art Spiegelman came to EMU on Thursday to reflect on the history, state, and future of comics. It was part of a tour he was on, and I was afraid the talk would be clearly practiced or tired or reluctant, or all in the service of a new book. It wasn’t. What surprised me most was that from the start he seemed to genuinely care about his subject. He talked about how comics affected him in his childhood, some of their history, how methods developed. He started with comics — at the time I think sequential woodcuts — popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on to a popular book of woodcuts published in the US in 1929, and then onto the underground comix movement that was just developing when Spiegelman was a child. He told us about his father buying him lurid comics as a child because they were cheaper than the nicer ones and how the moral panic around comics at the time shaped the development of comics in his life.
He was well-spoken, friendly, and engaging throughout, and there was never a time when it seemed like he was doing anything other than talking about what he wanted to talk about. At the end of his talk (he went overtime) he said he had a few minutes for a question and answer session. A small line formed behind a microphone, but he took his time to answer each question, and it went on for probably over half an hour. He went off on tangents and matters on interesting in the way only a really interested person can. Finally it came time for the book signing. “By this point an unsigned copy of Maus must be worth more than a signed one,” he said. “I think that’s my penance, to sign every copy of Maus, and when I sign the last one I’ll die.”
In fairness, he was selling a book called Metamaus, a book of reflections on Maus and how it had affected his life, and he was selling the book there, but he was clearly talking about stuff he liked talking about, and his interest and enjoyment were what really made the event.
