Mp3: Spiegelman speaks!

Published Nov 12 2008, 12:28 PM by Mike Miliard

(Joel Veak)

It’s been about five years since I’ve inhaled the delicious, nutty tang of a second-hand cigarette puffed indoors — since I’ve reclined and watched while whorls of smoke hover and shift and dissipate through the room’s still air. I’d forgotten what a nifty bit of atmosphere it adds to a conversation.

During an interview last month in a well-appointed room in the Hotel Commonwealth, legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman lit up Camel after Camel as he propounded upon his long career: from zonked-out underground comix scribbler to aspiring fine artist to commercial draftsman (he co-created Garbage Pail Kids) to Pulitzer Prize-winner, for his 13-years-in-the-making Holocaust opus Maus.

We only had room for about 15 percent of the transcription in this week’s paper, but we’ve uploaded audio and text of the entire interview to ThePhoenix.com.

Ostensibly, the chat was about Spiegelman’s new books — the augmented re-print of his 1978 debut collection Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist As a Young %@*&! (Pantheon), and an intriguing foray into children’s lit, Jack and the Box (TOON Books). But we ended up going on about subjects as diverse as Mad Men, Max Beckman, Harvey Kurtzman, MAD magazine, MoMA, amblyopia, and the “Faustian deal” whereby comics are thriving while also being saddled with outsized expectations that they always be “art” and/or “literature.” Listen for yourself.