Art Spiegelman on Comics and Film By David D'Arcy November 18, 2005 - 12:35 PM PST "The only place you could really see a man fly was in comic books." When I grew up in the 1960s, my friends and I split much of our free time between watching television and reading comic books, that is, until we had the chance to see movies on a big screen. We were hearing all about the threat of Godless Communism, but Mindless Television was conquering the marketplace as comics were losing their hold on America's youth - Mad magazine would extend that hold for a while - but there were a few years when we had a circus of images of fantasy and satire, two of the realms that both movies and comics explored. There's no doubt that the imagery and the storytelling of comics found their way into films. Cinema swallows and ingests anything that can be sold. But to know about the influence of comics on film, you have to know something about comics. Here's one opportunity. Masters of American Comics opens this weekend at two museums in Los Angeles - the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art - you could say that they're bookends at different poles of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (the title of a recent volume by the great comics artist Kim Deitch who, for whatever reason, is not in the show). Comics and movies have cohabited the marketplace, although not really competing with each other, since the late 19th century, when both of these media grabbed the public's attention. Each told its story in images. Each was cheap, each was mass-produced, and each reached for the mass audience, much of which was made up of immigrants who could not read, much less read or even speak English. (Throughout their history, American comics would remind us through characters like Li'l Abner and the Dick Tracy hoods that their subjects were also illiterate.) The exhibition, with its accompanying catalog, tells the stories of the rise and refinement of comics better than I can in a few paragraphs. Before you go to that catalog and - even better - to the comics of George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, just bear in mind that comics didn't begin simply as children's entertainment, but concentrated on the kids' market starting in the 50s, just like almost every other consumer product. Comics that looked at sex and satire were attacked by moralists at the same time that communists and all other non-conformists were stigmatized. Many simply went out of business rather than struggle in a marketplace where hunters of witches operated with impunity. (See my article in the current issue of Modern Painters.) By the late 1950s, when the movie industry that seemed to be dying thought it could save itself by packing the youth of America into drive-ins (passion pits, as they were called), American International Pictures took its cue from comics and mass-produced movies about monsters, juvenile delinquents and beach parties. They cost nothing, they made money, and they created stars like Jack Nicholson, Michael Landon, Mike Connors, Peter Graves and Robert Vaughn. The campy Batman craze soon followed. In a decade or two, Spider-Man and The Hulk would be appearing on large and small screens, accompanied by the kinds of special effects that were once the realm of comics, but comics still had the worlds of sex and satire to explore. R. Crumb set the tone for that "underground" movement, which began in San Francisco, and soon reached every suburban teenager who lived near a big city. These were the images, stories and atmospheres that nourished Art Spiegelman, the creator of the Holocaust memoir in comics, Maus, and the future generations that have finally reached the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, and the Village Voice. It's crucial to note that comics' journey to this degree of legitimacy was neither straight nor rapid. Maus was rejected by a dozen publishers at first, even by the publisher who eventually agreed to publish it. Yet now the once-implausible notion of a Holocaust story told in pictures seems logical, even appropriate - you need to stretch the notion of what's acceptable visually to address the unimaginable. (Joe Sacco has now done it in Bosnia and in Palestine.) Perhaps it's no accident that Art Spiegelman moved from his family memoir in Maus to his post 9/11 nightmares in The Shadow of No Towers. (Perhaps it's also no coincidence that the strip was rejected by the American publications that Spiegelman approached at the time.) Two of the best novels about the Nazi era - The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and The Ogre by Michel Tournier - have grotesque protagonists (a dwarf and a giant, respectively) more suited to depiction in comics that in live action movies, which may explain why both those films never achieved the dramatic impact that the original books did. As always, beware of film adaptations, whether of novels or of comics. But The Simpsons, Ghost World, South Park, The Triplets of Belleville and the upcoming Art School Confidential keep me optimistic. (For more optimism, see the forthcoming title from Fantagraphics, the leading publishers of books of comics www.fantagraphics.com) For the extreme political edge of the medium, you can sample World War 3 Illustrated. If you can get to them, don't miss the exhibitions at the two museums in Los Angeles - the show's organizers can be forgiven for giving us all the impression that we needed to be told by curators that what we were seeing was art. They can be forgiven, this time, for not including a single woman comics artist, although these artists do exist. They can also be forgiven for putting so many comics in real size in a museum show. Your eyes will ache, but it's worth it, so bring a magnifying glass. One of the many artists you'll rediscover is Art Spiegelman. I spoke to him about the shared properties of comics and film, and about the qualities of each medium that set the two widely apart. Is it correct to say that comics and cinema have come to resemble each other these days, or could that observation just be a reflection of my generation seeing so many moving pictures with stories and images that were taken from comics? Some of the stuff that's done in comics is literally hoping become a movie, and movies are looking to comics to find subject matter, but for people who are really serious about making comics, it's a language unto itself. It's not a just a preliminary sketch for a movie. If anything, a lot of the language that you associate with cinema predates cinema. It's comics-related. Cross-cutting was invented by a cartoonist, not by D.W. Griffith. A lot of what one would associate with what happened in silent film happened first in 19th century proto-comics, Rodolphe Töpffer being the most notable example, where you end up having the equivalent of a pan. Close-ups are something else. I don't know when the first close-up happened in comics, but it predates movies. We're talking about a grammar of film that came from comics when it was just getting started, including even using comics for subject matter - like Dream of a Rarebit Fiend - so that language at one point was not a film language. Now when we talk about a close-up, a long shot, tracking, I don't think this vocabulary was the way the cartoonists thought about it, but some of the storytelling is very specific to the visual storytelling of comics. On the other hand, some of the ways in which comics were best were in the way they weren't like film. The death of a certain kind of comic that I admire might be result of the Milton Caniff approach, wishing it was a movie, like Terry and the Pirates. The one thing the movie people have been relatively honest about is that they don't have their own ideas, so they looked to novels, and they still do. Given that they're looking to a younger generation that they assume is more visually oriented than earlier generations, whatever that means, they've been looking at graphic novels for 15 years. It's speeding up, and it's really based on technology. I've also noticed that, during this time, certain novels and graphic novels seemed to be constructed as film treatments - with establishing shots, lots of dialogue - they seemed designed to be shot, off-the-rack, ready-made for screen adaptation. Is that happening in comics now? I'm sure it is, but it's not the stuff I'm interested in, and it's not what makes up the bulk of the MoCA show. One thing that happened in the commercial comics universe, was that comic books were not selling all that well by the time the 80s came along, and one of the reasons is that they lost hold on a franchise. The only place you could really see a man fly was in comic books. It was too hard to do it convincingly in film. What with computer graphic imaging techniques and home software to do such things with, you could do anything a comic book could do, almost as easily as a cartoonist could draw a cast of thousands. So the energy for that kind of mesomorphic-based fantasy, which appeals to teenage boys, who are the core market for movies, can be accomplished with movies now. Comic books lost their grip on that monopoly. What's been the effect of this huge growth in video games on comics? Same thing. We're talking about exactly the same phenomenon, the electronic media being able to do more compellingly what was once a domain for comics. It was so much a domain for comics that a lot of people confuse comics with superhero comics, which is just one genre. People must have approached you about making Maus into a film. Yeah. What did you say? No, thank you, and leave me alone. I have no interest in it. In the beginning, when it happened, I remember there was one person who got my home number and kept bugging me. And she would say, "Well, if you were going to do it..." I said that I wasn't going to make a movie, but then she would insist, and say, "But if you were going to do it, how do you see it, how could we do it?" And at that point, because this was a relatively early technological moment, I said, "OK, let's do it, but let's use real mice." Did she stop calling? Yes, she stopped calling. There's been a lot of interest over the years and it continues. Look, it took thirteen years for Maus to find its form. I'm not about to give it to someone else to make something else out of it. back to past articles >>> Index "The only place you could really see a man fly was in comic books." back to past articles

David D'Arcy Besides reviewing art and film for National Public Radio, David D'Arcy has also written for the Art Newspaper, the Economist and other publications. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles