Spiegelman in Retrospection

Last night I attended a talk by Art Spiegelman at Northeastern University. During the Q&A at the end, an audience member asked what he was working on now, and Spiegelman explained that he had just gone through a period of, if I recall right, “forced retrospection.”

First came the opportunity to republish some of his earliest work, in Breakdowns. That involved revisiting his underground comics of the 1970s. I suspect very few people can casually review their activity during the ’70s without needing time to recover.

Then came the long-gestating Metamaus, a sprawling compilation of material that went into his two-volume masterwork Maus. More than 7,000 drawings, interviews, videos, and other raw material to be assembled in a book-DVD package.

Then the renowned comics festival at Angoulême invited Spiegelman to be president of its jury and receive the Grand Prix de la Ville, an honor which came with a career retrospective at the city museum. So he had to help organize that.

Spiegelman was back from France only four days when he spoke in Boston. He thus barely had his feet on home soil and was quite unsure what project he would take up next. But it’s clearly an interesting moment in his career, when past achievements have been so clearly laid out and codified.

What Made Maus YA?

More remarks on our cultural assumption that comics must be appropriate for kids from Dwight Garner’s review of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus in the New York Times:

When the book won a young-adult award from librarians, he was peeved. “I’d made something as mature as I was capable of making, and it seemed unfair that I was a victim of a prejudice against my medium,” he says. Ultimately, he says, “I reconciled to the fact that if ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ can be considered children’s books, I can settle for ‘Maus’ being on those shelves.”

Gulliver’s Travels is considered appropriate for young readers because of its fantastic element, and because many retellings have been bowdlerized of such scenes as Gulliver putting out a fire for the Lilliputians. Huckleberry Finn gets on that shelf because it has a child as protagonist and narrator. Maus is there because it’s in comics form, with talking animals.

“Children’s books are not real literature”?

John Hogan’s interview with Toon Books publisher and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly moves away from easy-reader comics for a while to discuss the larger question of how that literary magazine views children’s books:

I had a conversation with a colleague at the New Yorker where I was pushing and saying how come we don’t review more children’s books and more children’s literature? The only thing I can get the New Yorker to do is a yearly paper on it, but not on a regular basis. We don’t do book reviews in general, but still, we do mention books.

And my colleague was bluntly saying, “Well, it’s because children’s books are not real literature.”

I said, “Oh, okay. Explain that.” And he did.

He said, “Well, they are geared for a specific audience, and in literature, the author writes for himself, doesn’t have a specific audience in mind. But by definition, for children, you have to know who you are writing for and you have to take into account the limitations of your reader, and that makes it genre literature, not true literature.”

(I plan to discuss whether all children’s literature is genre literature in my workshop on what it means to write within genres at the SCBWI New England conference in May. But I think genres are defined by readership expectations, not limitations. And I suspect that authors who don’t write with the thought of communicating to their readers don’t get published by major presses or magazines. But back to Mouly.)

Now that’s interesting. To him, that’s obvious. To me, that made me realize even though it’s true we were specifically as editors trying to help the author come up with his or her best version of his strip, not worrying whether people would like it or how complex it might be, and that’s true for the New Yorker as well.

When you work for kids, especially the Toon books, for example, you have to take into account the reading level, not just the age, but the vocabulary, and we work within those limitations. I even had a conversation with my husband [Art Spiegelman], who wasn’t at first that interested in having to do something for kids because of those limitations. It’s only when he did it that he realized it’s akin to doing formal poetry. You have a set of limitations; you can only do your sonnet with so many beats—but then within that there is room for art.

Mouly has further interesting things to say about Jeff Smith’s Bone and Spiegelman’s Maus as unintended literature for young people, what defines a classic, and why major publishing corporations shy away from establishing new types of books.

American Comics and the Fantastic

Yesterday I suggested that Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn is garnering better reviews than we’d expect if the same magical plot—child fixes the Dust Bowl drought by conquering the embodiment of Rain—had appeared in prose. (Or in a verse novel, as Karen Hesse used for her Dust Bowl novel, Out of the Dust.)

I listed a couple of elements that might make a fantastic story seem more appropriate: age of reader, gender of protagonist. But I left out the biggie: the fact that The Storm in the Barn is in comics form.

American culture has more fantastic expectations for comics than for other forms of print storytelling, and is therefore quicker to accept supernatural or unreal elements when they appear in panels.

First of all, comics can put fantastic events right in front of our eyes. It’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief when one is seeing a man fly, a duck talk, or the embodiment of Rain fighting with a Kansas farm boy.

In a prose novel, and especially in a verse novel, writing about the Rain as a character would be taken as a metaphor. (“That’s called ‘personification,’” the rhetoricians would say. “And that dialogue is an ‘apostrophe.’ And it’s still going on. And on.”) But when we see the Rain’s angry face and clutching hands, we accept it as a character within the story.

Second and probably more important, American comics magazines have historically been dominated by fantastic genres: superheroes, horror, monsters, science fiction, funny animals. Of course, there have always been American comics that stick to a realistic world: stories of romance, crime, teenage life, and so on. But in the US, forms of the fantastic have dominated and to a great extent come to be seen as the form’s default setting.

Even the most serious topics can thus get a fantastic treatment in American comics. Take the work of Art Spiegelman. Maus adopts elements of the talking-animal genre to dramatize the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers draws from Winsor McCay and other comics geniuses to depict Spiegelman’s psychological, philosophical, and political struggles after the terrorist attack on New York in 2001.

The first graphic novel to crash the ALA prizes for younger readers, Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award-winner American-Born Chinese, intertwines mythology, memoir, and what looks at first like an unrelated tale of growing up in a way that would be even harder, and possibly more off-putting, in prose.

(Eleanor Davis’s Stinky, a Geisel Honor Book, offers a monster and uses comics tools for “showing the invisible.” But that book’s not such a useful example of contrast because its traditional analogues—picture books and early readers—often have elements of the fantastic as well.)

The comics medium, I posit, let Phelan tell a story set in the Dust Bowl that would have been impossible, or at least greeted quite differently, if he’d tried it in prose.

Same Image, Slightly Different

Having broken the news that there are more pictures on a typical comics page than a typical picture-book page, I'm going out on a limb today to suggest that there are fewer pictures in a traditional picture book than a comics-style book of the same length. Yes, the insights just keep coming.

My real point is that I think the smaller number of images in typical picture books has pushed artists away from a method of using sequential pictures that comics artists use a lot: a series of similar images with small changes from one to the next.

Picture books have a minimum number of images, a fact that writers have to consider when they conceive of their stories. As Peggy Tibbetts wrote, "if you can't come up with at least a dozen concrete visual images for the illustrator to choose from, you might want to re-think your picture book idea." Jan Fields went further in distinguishing a picture-book story from one more appropriate for a magazine: "In a picture book, it is...important that every illustration be different (not all in the same room, not all of two people talking)."

Traditional picture books also have a maximum number of images. They tend to be 32 pages, and if nearly every spread offers a single picture, that means there are only about 17 holes to fill. Where the Wild Things Are has an extra half-signature: 48 pages (including endpapers). But, even counting the cover, Maurice Sendak created only 20 images for that book. The picture-storybook Pink and Say is also 48 pages; Patricia Polacco created only 26 pictures.

Faced with so few opportunities for art, most picture-book artists strive for visual variety. They make each image a full-spread masterpiece, showing a complete scene. When a manuscript calls for them to portray the same scene over time, most choose different angles or move characters around to create dissimilar images. After all, why spend 2 of 17 spreads (more than 10% of a 32-page book) repeating yourself?

In contrast, the comics storytelling style often requires artists to depict the same scene several times on a page: the same two people talking in a room, for example. Artists can show that scene from a variety of angles, with lots of character action. Or they can create a series of similar panels, focusing readers' attention on the passage of time or the small variation between one panel and the next. I've come to think of that technique as another hallmark of comics art that's uncharacteristic of recent picture books.

The page from Sendak's In the Night Kitchen that I showed back here offers a view of that technique, clearly inspired by comics. A single page contains two images of Max falling through the same room. By comparing one to the next, we can see how he's moving down past the chandelier and the clock. We can also see Max lose all his clothes, which is bound to keep a young reader's attention.

I suspect that technique works best if the two similar illustrations aren't separated by a page turn. When the two images are side by side, we can see their similarity even as we concentrate on the details; we don't have to hold one in memory. However, some picture-book artists have used this technique well from spread to spread. Ellen Raskin was a master at it: Spectacles, And It Rained, Nothing Ever Happens on My Block. (I wonder if it was more popular when artists were responsible for supplying their own separations, and so were copying their drawings already.)

As an example of how this type of sequential art works so well in comics, I've taken two facing pages from Art Spiegelman's Maus. (I've fuzzed the unnecessary words so as not to show more than fair use.) On these pages the narrator's father describes his family gatherings before World War II.

This page contains eight images. Two show the narrator's father speaking from his exercise bicycle; in a picture book, that would be redundant. The other six images show the father's family, and they're even more repetitive. They're all from the same angle. They all show nearly the same instant in time. Yet they're still visually interesting because of their differences.

By comparing one similar image to the next, we understand that Spiegalman is bringing us into the scene through the window (like the opening of Citizen Kane!), and introducing us to each part of the family in turn. On this page, he's used panels to organize a single scene mostly by space.

On the facing page, Spiegelman continues to show us the same family from the same angle, but this time he emphasizes time by keeping the same part of the table in every picture, the same characters in the same seats. We're forced to focus on what changes from one panel to the next.
That puts more weight on the grown-up characters' words. We also see time pass by following a couple of little wordless stories involving the younger relatives. The teenager Lolek has his book taken away, and pouts. Baby Richieu turns over his plate, gets scolded, wails, and gets a hug. In a picture book with one image per spread, those four moments would need nearly a quarter of the book. Here it's just a lovely detail on a single page.