Art Spiegelman Interviewed by Gary Groth excerpted from The Comics Journal #s 180 & 181

In this excerpt of his massive, definitive interview, Art Spiegelman sandwiches a discussion of his work for The New Yorker with two interesting -- and remarkably different -- critiques of famous artists: Jack Kirby and Robert Crumb. Spiegelman's discussion of Crumb is important, as it brings to light in a thoughtful manner the "racism critique" of some of Crumb's work. Spiegelman's thoughts on Kirby were a surprise -- especially to interviewer Gary Groth, who never would have guessed that he and Spiegelman could have talked for so long -- and so interestingly -- about an artist for whom Spiegelman holds little passion.

Spiegelman on Kirby

GARY GROTH: Where does Kirby reside in your pantheon?

ART SPIEGELMAN: I see him as a lesser God, to use his metaphors. I was just accusing you of blaming Eisner for things he influenced in Miller, but I must confess I can't look at Kirby purely, because of the effect he's had elsewhere. I gained my real appreciation after adolescence for Kirby from Gary Panter, because Panter's been very strongly influenced or inspired or something by Kirby. There's this kind of seeing people as cubes, as blocks and space, and of letting those cubes flatten out again. I suppose there's something about Kirby's sensibility, the optimism of it that just puts me off. [Groth laughs.] There's an unpleasant exuberance, like a teenager chattering so excitedly he keeps spritzing you with his saliva... The enthusiasm is kind of charming and endearing, but it doesn't strike deep in me. So actually I find myself more interested in Kirby's love comics than in his superhero comics. I kind of liked when everything looked like it's made of Reynolds Wrap. The buildings, the people, the clothes are all made of the same kind of aluminum foil.

GROTH: Which brings us back to the tension between form and content. With his romance comics, the dynamism in the kisses...

SPIEGELMAN: [laughs] Right, there's a tension there that I appreciate. I like it, I just don't have a strong affinity for it. It probably has something to do with not having much interest in superheroic, mythic fantasy.

GROTH: That's what I was getting at earlier when I asked you if you could respect something but not like it.

SPIEGELMAN: Oh yeah, there's lots of stuff in that category. In fact there's more stuff in that category than in the category of stuff that I genuinely like. I wouldn't even use the word "respect" for Kirby though, because I sort of like it, but I don't really respect it. I respect the fact that this guy was able to produce such a prodigious amount of work and shape an industry ultimately around himself while pursuing his own muse; that's remarkable. But I don't study his work. Caniff is an example of someone whose work I don't like much but I respect a lot. I don't get any real pleasure from his work, but I appreciate the influence he has had, and I do see him as the last real cartoonist before illustration entered comics to kill them. On the other hand, I get much more pleasure from Roy Crane's work, even though the stories are equally dimwitted. And it's odd because there I actually enjoy the exuberance, so I don't know why it's so bothersome for me in Kirby.

GROTH: Yes, Crane's work was exuberant.

SPIEGELMAN: It's sheer energy.

GROTH: There was a lot of anger in Kirby's work -- which should mitigate the boyish exuberance of it.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, but... I guess I was using words that I won't be able to stand by. Because I actually do enjoy the exuberance in Crane.

GROTH: Maybe the idiom is off-putting to you.

SPIEGELMAN: I certainly have less trouble with his non-superhero genre work.

GROTH: Did you ever see that eight-page strip he did --

SPIEGELMAN: Wonderful. I really enjoyed that. It was nuts. That was one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

GROTH: The autobiographical strip?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah.

GROTH: That was amazing.

SPIEGELMAN: It was amazing because it was nuts. It was as crazy as Rory Hayes. To retranslate his life into superheroic idioms... [Laughs.] Like when somebody goes through a door to come home for milk and cookies, and he's basically splintering it like the Hulk! [laughs] It's really nuts!

GROTH: Do you remember the two-page spread? It was teeming with people, it was like an old Cagney movie.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I liked that. I guess the problem for me with Kirby is that I end up thinking a lot about the things that he made happen rather than things that he did. All the people who came after him normalized the strangeness of what he did. But I don't find myself running to it and wanting to look at it more. It has something to do with temperament.

GROTH: Too bombastic?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, its overinflatedness, and simple-mindedness don't move me. On the other hand, I am moved by Gould who is overinflated and simpleminded in another way. So exactly where Kirby is an irritant probably has something to do with its physicality. You're sitting here wounded from a racquetball accident, and that will never happen to me. I may die of lung cancer, but I'll never have to walk around with one of those stupid splints, unless I slip on a bit of icy sidewalk while walking to the store for cigarettes. The physicality of Kirby's work doesn't do anything for me. It's not sexy, and it doesn't remind me of anything that I want.

GROTH: That's interesting because the physicality of his work, I find, is one of the great virtues of it.

SPIEGELMAN: It probably is. It's clear when you look at my work that there's none of it.

GROTH: That's true. There was a tactile quality to Kirby's work. If somebody was throwing a boulder across a river, you could feel the weight of the rock.

SPIEGELMAN: I could feel the splinters of the breaking door, but I could never feel the weight of the rocks -- they felt like over-size ping pong balls.

GROTH: I felt the awesomeness of that act. I felt it when I was a kid; maybe it's just deja-vu when I look at it now.

SPIEGELMAN: For me, Stardust was much more magical. But it was far more ethereal too. Magritte for beginners or something. I can't listen to Wagner either. It's just not part of my engagement in the world. I actually could find it easier to like Frank Frazetta, whom I'm really not interested in, and I could end up getting into a conversation about what might be interesting about it, but it has no real use for me. But at least I can relate to the plushness of the women. So that's where I'd find a way to enter into some kind of conversation. With Kirby I suppose where I can enter is by getting interested in the strange cubes in space.

GROTH: I know you like Jack London's novels, and they're rooted in physicality. And that's not off-putting to you?

SPIEGELMAN: No. I don't think I was successful in defining why Kirby doesn't interest me.

GROTH: Maybe it's the aggressiveness.

SPIEGELMAN: No, because I can't think of things that are too much more aggressive than Jim Thompson, and I've enjoyed those. They're aggressive if nothing else! [Laughter.] But London is also politically impassioned. It's not just about physical things. He's a Socialist, and Socialism is central to the dynamic that moves the characters around. Maybe that's where something else happens. It's simple-minded too, but it's not as simpleminded as Kirby. [Laughter.] Kirby just seems dimwitted to me. And Jack London doesn't. It also seems, for the most part, repetitive. But that's true of some other people's work that I like. It's interesting because I've read enough of Kirby's work to have a clear sense of him, and I can't easily figure out why he leaves me cold. I remember when I was teaching, I had a really hard time explaining why I liked Carl Barks to students who didn't read Donald Duck as part of their childhood. I did find something sober in Barks that I kind of liked.

GROTH: Your antipathy toward Kirby might be the same reason you don't watch James Bond movies. [Laughs.] It's so intrinsic to the material that...

SPIEGELMAN: Maybe I'm just a sissy...

GROTH: [Laughs.] There you go! That might be the core of it.

SPIEGELMAN: Well Hemingway was a sissy when you get right down to it. [Laughter.] I don't think I'm going to be able to locate it.

GROTH: Kirby is possibly the most problematic artist in comics. There is something intrinsically infantile about his work that is very discomforting. Well, it's discomforting because I like his work so much and that conflict...

SPIEGELMAN: The fact that you like his work actually explains one of the riddles about you that I could never quite understand, which is, how can you devote so much energy to disliking Marvel and DC. You have to care about Kirby to care about the devolutions and evolutions of Kirby-land.

GROTH: The terrible desecration that was done.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah. If you find the whole thing dismissable, then you dismiss it. But you never dismiss it; you're always coming back and quarreling with it. I've always found that mysterious because it's just not interesting. So once something's not interesting, you walk away.

GROTH: Sure, you don't care what happens in its wake.

SPIEGELMAN: If I think back on my own actual childhood comics reading rather than the comics lore and history I accumulated since childhood, I remember kind of liking The Fly when it first came out. I liked the fact there were these vista pages: those big, double-page spreads. There was some kind of Dickens-like depictions of poverty in The Fly -- people wandering around in rags. I actually found that genuinely disturbing compared to the bland advertising-art world Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino's character's lived in around 1960. I liked the fact that Kirby's stuff was cruder, it looked like it was drawn by hand. It was certainly true for all the early Marvel stuff, before the superheroes. But Marvel came just about the time I was giving up on reading comic books. Marvel age begins what, 1963? I'm about 15 years old, and I'm just about finished with the pre-pubescent comics, and most of my energy and attentions were devoted to satire magazines. Since Marvel put a new wrinkle into the stuff I had been reading, I sort of followed the first year or so of Spider-Man and Fantastic Fourand liked the neurotic characterizations well enough. But at that time it already seemed kind of puerile to me. I could imagine if I was a few years younger, it could have made more of an impact, but I came along at a period where the only Kirby stuff that might have affected me would have been The Private Life of Sergeant Strong, or whatever that was called. Probably because of my distrust of organized groups, born of whatever dimwitted understanding I had of what my parents went through when I was a kid, I was very distrustful of armies, or Boy Scouts, people marching, of team sports, and a lot of the Kirby world is involved in working in teams. The Challengers of the Unknown were undifferentiable to me. This cluster of people in purple uniforms or something, you know? [Groth laughs.] So if I was going to be attracted to a superhero, as far as superheroes have an attraction for me, I was more likely to move into a more alienated world of Spider-Man or before that, the more alienated world of Batman than I was to a Newsboy Legion or even a Fantastic Four which was a group of individuals that were somehow managing to function together . Individuals were more interesting to me than the larger conglomerate.

GROTH: To come to Kirby's defense, and to slightly mitigate what I said about the intrinsic infantilism in his work --

SPIEGELMAN: You're doing this only because you know that if you publish anything in the least bit derisive about Kirby, you're going to make people feel like we're dancing on his grave, and it's hardly that. Let me just at least put in a disclaimer, that I do respect the fact that he's so --

GROTH: [Laughs.] You're trying to one-up me on vitiating our guilt here...

SPIEGELMAN: He was prodigious; I admire the energy of that kind of output. And I admire the fact that he was able to invent a lot of different genres and forms that a lot of people ended up colonizing. My problem with it is just that there's no one form except maybe love comics that I have any use for. As a kid I saw a girl reading a love comic and crying. It impressed me that comics could elicit that emotion.

GROTH: When we ran his obituary, we calculated that he did one page a day for 50 years, every day, for 365 days a year.

SPIEGELMAN: That's phenomenal! He definitely has his own voice. It moves toward the mythological, and I'm interested in moving in exactly the opposite direction. So I have a strong personal need to look elsewhere. I'm not interested in gods.

GROTH: What I was going to say though is that, the fact of the matter is, Kirby was better than everybody else that was doing that work. He had genuine virtues. He was able to, quite apart from the monumentality of his drawing, imbue a tragic dimension to all the dime-store, melodramatic clichŽs in those super-hero books. I'm thinking about the Fantastic Four, the tragedy in the Thing, and his ability to communicate that somehow. With Thor he was able to communicate a genuine grandeur that no one else could. I think there was something genuine about his expressiveness, and that he was communicating an authentic feeling in a highly original way.

SPIEGELMAN: I would say I hate Alex Raymond's work, but I would consider him more appropriate as a paradigm for grandeur. And I would say that Winsor McCay, whom I love, is more important to me than either as someone who could evoke that.

GROTH: Grandeur?

SPIEGELMAN: The monumentality of the world he's making out.

GROTH: I would agree with you in regard to Raymond, and this is getting into quibbling, but with Kirby, there was such an enormous tapestry of distinctively defined characters and an expansive, architectonic world; Raymond's world was luscious but comparatively constipated.

SPIEGELMAN: I'm moving into an area that's outside my passions but inside my interests.

GROTH: Yeah, and somewhat outside mine, but we're trying to define the virtues --

SPIEGELMAN: The virtues of Kirby?

GROTH: [laughs] Yeah, right.

SPIEGELMAN: Gary, I feel like an idiot going on at length about stuff I don't care about. Certainly the work is energetic and dynamic, and his roots as an animator are exciting to see. I suppose, the movement that I'm interested in is more a movement that exists in the abstractions rather than in the portrayals of motion, I'm more drawn to artists who are making things move in another way. Like, Chester Gould comes to mind. Or Jacques Tardi comes to mind. There is a lot of movement in those things, but there is also a stillness. When I'm looking for animated movement, I'm better off going to a movie.

GROTH: I guess what I was trying to say is there was a human quality about Kirby's work that very few, if any, other superhero artists as far as I can tell were able to invest in that work.

SPIEGELMAN: Where's the humanness?

GROTH: In a sense of tragedy and even in that tactile quality of his drawing.

SPIEGELMAN: I like the fact that you like it. [resigned]

GROTH: [laughs] Well no, I've never been completely persuaded myself. No one I've heard, not even Gil [Kane], has mitigated my skepticism about Kirby's work. Whereas Mike Barrier wrote a great book telling us why we should like Carl Barks' work and I agreed entirely with his argument as to why Barks was an important creator. I've never really read anything that's done that for me, that's appeased my --

SPIEGELMAN: The operative word that you just used that sticks with me is "dime store."

GROTH: And unfortunately that's the problem.

SPIEGELMAN: Tragedy seems like a pretty heavy artillery for a rather binary set-up of the fact that there's a noble being trapped inside a gargoyle's body.

GROTH: Right, and obviously it's not genuine tragedy. But it's something approximating tragedy. [laughter] It's come closer to eliciting a sense of tragedy than any other...

SPIEGELMAN: No, it's melodrama.

GROTH: Yeah, it is, you're right.

SPIEGELMAN: Not drama. So I can get more interested in it in terms of its plastic qualities than in what he has to say. Very likely because it came along at the wrong moment for me and didn't hit me right before the hormones kicked in, it doesn't stay deep. And because it has had such a wide influence that it's really hard now to thread back to what was actually there, it just doesn't have much meaning to me personally. I could see that being true for someone finding Crumb right now. At this point, Crumb has had a very pervasive influence in a certain area of comics, and I could conceive of somebody -- it's not true for me -- but I could see somebody looking at it and going, "Uh-huh. Well, it's mostly nasty, isn't it?" I think there are a lot of other qualities there, but I've had an organically grown intertwined relationship with his work to a degree that certainly isn't a part of the way I can look at Kirby. I suppose I'm more interested, when you talk about the birth of the superhero and all that came after it, I think Eisner would have been a more useful influence than Kirby to create a comic book that I could still read.

GROTH: I wouldn't necessarily argue with that.

SPIEGELMAN: The quality of melodrama that they both share isn't necessarily a strong quality for either of them, but the areas in which Eisner was moving away from the general and toward the specific, is where there is something of value for me. And it's the opposite of creating generic mythologies. It's about finding the quirkiness of a person and place. And that just wasn't interesting to Kirby. It's more interesting to me. So again, I'm just left with a certain appreciation for the kind of primitive Cubism.

GROTH: There's no question that a contract shouldn't be taken out on both our lives after this sees print..

SPIEGELMAN: But I have no use for the kind of comics that he inspired. So the people who really cared about it are obviously going to be very unhappy about anything we said about Kirby that doesn't validate what he spawned.

GROTH: The mindless and absolute adulation of Kirby seems to me an example of the uncritical attitude that most people bring to comics.

SPIEGELMAN: It's just that what Kirby wanted and was interested in, is really what these people are interested in. When you talk about infantile, what you're really talking about is not really -- yeah, to a degree it's infantile -- but it's mostly pre-adolescent power fantasies. He expressed those very well and obviously did them with conviction, and for those people to whom this is an unresolved issue -- it is expressed with conviction; he is a little boy in that sense -- it's just that I don't find that an important part of my make up. I have adult power fantasies rather than pre-adolescent fantasies. [laughter] The homo-eroticism of it doesn't appeal to me. I've always thought that the women in Kirby's comics were men in drag. And it made me very uncomfortable with them. I always wanted to pull out Betty and Veronica again. [laughs] It really may just have to do with... What keeps calling me into check is I'm trying to compare it with Roy Crane. Crane was obviously a strong influence on Kirby. There are properties that exist in both of them that I have some interest in, and yet Crane remains interesting to look at. The stories have no interest for me, but I also am not condemning them for their adventure stories the way I am so unhappy with the superheroics of most of Kirby's work. I do agree that Kirby's autobiographical eight-pager is great, because there the inappropriateness of his drawing style for the actual life that he's trying to depict, sets up a collision that isn't successful, but is really fun to look at. And the fact that it's so clearly the way he's re-inhabiting his own past makes something exciting there.

GROTH: Do you think it might be because Kirby takes it all so seriously and Crane didn't? There's a great deal of levity in Crane.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I suppose that's a lot of it. There's some kind of ironic distance that's totally lacking in Kirby.

GROTH: Kirby's seriousness is slightly fatuous.

SPIEGELMAN: [pause] Yeah, I was actually thinking of the word "Fascist,' even though he was a great defender of Democracy.

GROTH: "Fatuous," "Fascist," something like that. [laughs]

SPIEGELMAN: But seriously, the triumph of the will, the celebration of the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect, is very much an impulse in Fascist art. It has a lot to do with the motor for Kirby's work, even though I understand that his work is filled with characters who fought the Fascists. You know, the stuff in Rockefeller Center is fascist art as well, those kind of art deco statues. It's an international fascist style that's true in official communist art as fully as in Nazi German art. I associate it maybe with things I find threatening. Maybe it's as simple as that. And I don't find that celebration true in Crane. Crane's work is more limber in that sense, in having a good-natured humor. It also has a kind of stupid, hot-cha, woo-woo, interest in girls that look like girls. [laughs] I say girls advisedly, as opposed to women. These aren't fully realized characters in his work, but there is an interest in women that I like in his stuff. I remember seeing some sketchbook pages of Crane's that are really fascinating because they were about not drawing the same woman twice, of really trying to find what's specific about a woman character. So it's not just that she represents the female in this story, she's someone. That's an aspect of his work. But I think the most interesting thing about Crane for me personally has to do with the formal tensions I was talking about before. Here's a tension that has to do with discovering how to portray drama and melodrama in a medium that had been fully steeped in a much more burlesque tradition. So, although there are elements of melodrama in things like Hairbreadth Harry and other early comic strips, they're really burlesques. And Crane's moving toward Jack London-like adventure stories (obviously I like Jack London a lot) is trying to re-channel a tradition that's antithetical to those goals and make use of the comics vocabulary to make that happen. And over a period of years, you see Wash Tubbs make the transition. You see it so fully that by the time the transition is complete, the work is less interesting to me. There's a Crane sequence (it's not one of my favorite sequences in Crane's body of work) in the Smithsonian book of comics that's cows stampeding. And before the stampede you're actually in a melodramatic panel that looks like it has something to do with the Milton Caniff work that it inspired. But then in the next panel you've got these cows that are straight out of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse, or Segar's Thimble Theater. They're goofy cartoon cows. It doesn't work. It falls flat, but the fact that it's struggling to develop a vocabulary is part of what remains interesting for me in the work itself. And that process of assimilating, of creating a language, I don't feel as an aspect of Kirby's work. The clue is that Kirby could be inked by a lot of different people. And part of what Crane was involved in, was trying to find a means of using cheap-shit black and white reproduction to create atmospheric and subtle tonal effects, difficult to articulate effects that can still be graphically pleasing. You see him moving from cross-hatching with a pen to using a crayon, to finally developing his famous duotone technique, all of which are attempts at finding a graphic analog for the world he's trying to portray. That, in and of itself, that process, makes looking through the Crane books interesting to me. As I said, I like the Simon and Kirby love comics because I actually did kind of enjoy the dissonance of the dynamic figures in the static world that they had to move around in restlessly.

GROTH: [laughs] That goes back to your liking that tension again.

SPIEGELMAN: It's different kinds of tension that I'm liking. I'm not saying the same thing with different examples. You talked about conflict and that I am interested in a kind of dramatic conflict, but it's not necessarily Thor versus Loki. I am genuinely interested in a conflict that exists between the narrative aims of the work and the formal means used to achieve that. That's genuinely exciting for me.

Spiegelman on Crumb

GROTH: What did you think of Crumb's last comic?

SPIEGELMAN: Self-Loathing I thought was brilliant. I thought it was really brilliant. Crumb is great. I really love what he does. I'm repulsed by some of it, but not by the Self-Loathing comic at all. What repulsed me was what he thought was an outrageous racist comic in the last Weirdo.

GROTH: What he thought was satirical?

SPIEGELMAN: What he thought was satirical and outrageous.

GROTH: I interviewed him for the Journal last week and he told me that you gave him a dressing down over that.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, well, this is like Rashomon. I didn't see it as a dressing down. That implies a condescension that has nothing to do with how I perceive Crumb. I saw it as an expression of my own disgust. I thought he received my response with his usual "Yuk yuk, that Artie Spiegelman -- isn't it amazing that he's able to work up some moral indignation?" I think I was just seen as rising to the bait as given. My problem with the strip was that it wasn't virulent enough. And the proof of that is that it was able to be co-opted and reprinted in a neo-Nazi magazine with no problem. If he had done his job as a satirist well, it would not have been able to be looked at without anger by the presumed target -- the presumed target being the racist, rather than the blacks and Jews.

GROTH: On the other hand though, that brand of racist is particularly stupid. I wonder if it's possible to do a satire that they themselves would have recognized as being satirical about them?

SPIEGELMAN: I believe it's possible. I think if it had really done its job, they inevitably would have been unable to embrace it, it would have made them uncomfortable. As it stands it really is no more than a fairly anemic catalog of racist cliches. The last page ostensibly satirizes White Men, but actually just functions the same way the last two panels of an old pre-code crime comic book functions. "Commit a crime and the world made of glass, crime doesn't pay." A glib moral after 15 pages of lurid mayhem. Similarly Crumb's strip has a coda that is simply the super-ego falling back into place to try and rationalize and justify the pleasures of what came before.

GROTH: I'm not sure how relevant this is, but, did you think the failure for that comes out of racist impulses on the part of Crumb?

SPIEGELMAN: I think it comes from a repetition compulsion on Crumb's part that sometimes passes, in his mind, for introspection. Something similar to the way Crumb reported my responses to you happened with Terry Zwigoff; I think there's some misunderstanding of my response to his film. I called him up to rave about it and he walks around saying, "Boy, that Spiegelman sure hated my film."

GROTH: [laughs] Right -- we have exactly that anecdote in our Zwigoff interview.

SPIEGELMAN: That he thinks I hated his film?

GROTH: Oh yeah.

SPIEGELMAN: It's stupid! He's like somebody who has at least as bad a case of "anhedonia" -- whatever that word is that describes the inability to process pleasure -- as I do! I mean, I don't do this: I don't call up to respond to people's work that often. I did after seeing his film, to say that I thought he had done a really great job. An amazingly good job. While making the film, Terry had called to consult with me several times, he even wanted to film me, although I felt uncomfortable taking on the role of cultural critic in his film and steered him toward Robert Hughes instead, who I knew appreciated Crumb's work. In the context of that, I called Terry after seeing what I understood to be a rough cut, to talk about where the film was more successful, where it was less. I said "I could do with a little less of this, and if you're able to get a little bit more of that, that would be great... " On the other hand, it was all in the context of admiring what he did. It's a little baffling to me that it could go by him like a dog whistle! That the praise was on a frequency he couldn't hear. I thought I was gushing. Similarly, with Crumb, I think he's one of the great cartoonists of all time. Nevertheless, I think there's stuff that he's actually never really examined and doesn't want to examine, and what he wants to do is keep re-expressing a compulsion -- whether that compulsion is to give vent to a racist stereotyped image or to a specific sexual buzz that he gets from certain body types. Actually the weakest part of his work -- and he's been so prolific, that one just takes it as part of the flow and waits for the good stuff to happen again. Sometimes he finds some new way in again, like I remember his Boswell strip as kind of a breakthrough for him, where he was able to still deal with his big-legged women, but got another voice to play off of. And that made the strip feel rich.

GROTH: What did you like so much about his strip in Self-Loathing?

SPIEGELMAN: The fact that he was able to focus that hard on the non-events that make up most of every day.

GROTH: I was trying to figure out why and how he made that so compelling.

SPIEGELMAN: I'd have to look at it again to really talk about it, but my memory of it is that he was able to inhabit every second of those non-events, so they weren't just a photostat of the same panel 15 times. He actually made it a project to observe what happens when nothing's happening. It makes it much richer than, in a way, an analogous attempt on the part of Seth. I think Seth was trying for something similar in some weird way, in Palookaville. And it doesn't have the same relentless intensity of inhabiting those moments that don't have anything in them. That makes it really for me, great stuff. But you asked me if I thought Crumb was a racist. I think, after all is said and done, yeah he is, but so what?

GROTH: [laughs] Hmm...

SPIEGELMAN: He's not a racist like the neo-Nazis who republished his material. One can kind of beg the issue and say, "Well, he's more of a misanthrope than a racist, and he hates himself more than he'll hate any other group." I should also say that I'm willing to recognize racism in myself. So I'm not sure how stinging a review it is to call him a racist in that context.

GROTH: That's what I was going to ask because if you say that virtually everyone is a racist because everyone harbors some sort of racism, the term's meaning tends to diminish.

SPIEGELMAN: But I think once you take it on as a subject, you're responsible to do more than just give in to it. That feeling of responsibility isn't something that can or should be imposed from outside. He doesn't feel it. And I think that's where my problem with those aspects of Crumb's work lies, rather than with whether or not he's racist. Not like he's responsible to make the world a better place, but he's responsible to dig deeper into what it means to mess with this particular brand of dynamite.

GROTH: Do you think he's anti-Semitic as well? Or does that fall under the umbrella of "racist"?

SPIEGELMAN: It's all the same! Yeah -- so what? So am I.

GROTH: Isn't that a little glib?

SPIEGELMAN: Very. I was being ironic because I've been accused in some Zionist quarters of being a self-hating Jew. I'm not. As Woody Allen once said: "I hate myself. And I'm Jewish. But I don't see the connection." I'm just saying that I can recognize all of these pathologies and can vibrate to them. This may seem oblique, but it's not unconnected: I'm with Mariscal back in the '80s, in Barcelona, and he's talking about something I've never heard of before -- he's talking about Jewish ears. Now, in the culture I grew up in, it never occurred to me that my ears were Jewish. My nose might be Jewish. Or whatever. But in terms of the body, the idea that an earlobe that hangs downward rather than going directly into the head could be a signifier had never come my way before. This is Catalan or Spanish, I don't know. But I'm sitting around talking with somebody who's a good friend of mine, and all of a sudden my earlobes are getting bigger. I've had to internalize all the anti-Semitic stereotypes as part of figuring out who I might be in the world, and I'd somehow missed earlobes. Money has always been a matter of ambivalence for me, for instance. I've careened between being ridiculously extravagant and ridiculous stingy because it's never been a non-issue. Some of this clearly come from hanging out with Dad when I was little. And to the degree this has to do with Jewishness? I don't know. I'll never know. But all of this is to say that those images of the shiftless, lazy, sexualized, dangerous Black -- or the crafty Jew -- are images that I recognize and to one degree or other are phantoms that wander around hovering near real people, some of whom I've known and loved dearly, people of various ethnic backgrounds. I'm somehow still aware of this thing hovering over them -- as are they. Now that terrain to me is much richer and much more interesting than saying, "Nigger" five times fast. For me the Crumb stuff is bankrupt in that that's where it stops and that's what it does.

GROTH: Don't you think it's a bit glib though to say, "So what?" I mean, shouldn't whether an artist's point of view is racist be important insofar as that point of view inhabits his art?

SPIEGELMAN: Yes. If Crumb was simply a racist, one could just dismiss the work. Crumb is interesting enough to not want to dismiss him. If I could remake Crumb in my own image and make a different Robert Crumb, I'd probably cut out some of that shit. It's not mine to do. I inherited an entire collection of Beethoven records. A friend of mine had discovered that Beethoven was anti-Semitic. So he purged his collection!

GROTH: That bit of parochialism really helped you. [laughs]

SPIEGELMAN: I've been telling him that Fats Waller was anti-Semitic... [laughs] and I'll look over his record collection and see what I want next! But I don't think it's possible to carve the work away just because that's a factor. There would be too much of culture I'd be cut off from if I had to stick only with Jews and philo-Semitic creators! Or non-racist creators. A glib but true statement is that in a racist culture, everybody is racist. What you do after that is what's interesting: Do you avoid it? Do you ignore it? Do you act as if you weren't? And if you indeed are, then what can you do inside your own work to dig hard enough to make something interesting happen from it? I seriously have never found that part of Crumb's work interesting. "Never" may be too strong. I think maybe the first time I saw Angelfood McSpade was amazing. To find that stereotype again, after it had been suppressed and buried. But to keep finding it again and again and again -- no, that's not that interesting.

GROTH: On the other hand, his biographies of blues musicians are the antithesis of that, aren't they?

SPIEGELMAN: I'm not sure.

GROTH: They don't seem the least bit racist.

SPIEGELMAN: They seem awfully sentimentalized to me.

GROTH: I was going to say, if anything, they're the opposite, almost idealized.

SPIEGELMAN: So that's why I say I think they're the same. I mean, the other way around is still the same.

GROTH: Flip side of the same coin.

SPIEGELMAN: But the flip side of it is really a matter of not being able to figure it out. And when he thinks he's figuring it out, he's usually just repeating it. That's where he just falls short, that's all. That's to me where the dilemma is.

GROTH: And where do you think his strength lies as a cartoonist?

SPIEGELMAN: For one thing, he's been around long enough for me to be able to say "historically," he was the great synthesizer of cartoon styles. He's a person who was able to rescue the rich motherlode of the cartoon idiom and bring it back to life rather than let it remain a discarded style. We talked about this earlier. That was a very, very important thing to do at the time. Comics styles were moving more and more toward this Gerald McBoing-Boing sterility. And it was a shock just seeing cross-hatching again. More importantly he had the insight that things don't have to have punchlines to be worth telling. All that combined with attempts to find -- I don't know, it's all going to sound too intellectual and heady this way -- but he's tried to find ways to record and echo his thought processes by making comic book boxes. Whether that took the form of his Surrealistic strips or of dividing himself into a Flakey Foont and a Mr. Natural. And he's somebody who has a very beautiful "handwriting," you know? He learned how to cartoon at an early enough time in his life that he was really able to internalize it all and build from it. He's just a very fluid and natural cartoonist. And when he's on, he's dead on. Like Self-Loathing. A great story.

GROTH: In many ways I think his sketchbooks are every bit as good as his comics.

SPIEGELMAN: I think you'll find that true with a lot of artists. The people who genuinely keep sketchbooks because they can't not, that's where their best work is. It seems to be true for Gary Panter as well. But back to the Zwigoff film for a moment: I think to one degree or another, the success of the movie is not born at all out of people's interest in comics or in Crumb as an artist. It's become an intellectually acceptable substitute for Oprah Winfrey, an interest in the dysfunctional family.

GROTH: The freak show appeal.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, there's that aspect of it. Entertainment Weekly ran a piece that was more like a review of Crumb's family rather than a review of the film or even of Crumb's work. On the other hand, I think Zwigoff did a good thing by focusing on what for me became the most interesting theme: to what degree does making some kind of art offer some kind of salvation? The answer is probably zero. What might offer some salvation is public acceptance of one's art. Charles was clearly some kind of an artist or other, but, unlike Robert, just wasn't able to find a way to make that art bring him back into a dialogue with the world.

GROTH: It never seemed to mature either. I mean, I'm not that familiar with his work, but it never evolved or matured as far as I could tell.

SPIEGELMAN: But he wasn't able to use it as a means of doing that. I actually saw some of Charles' late notebooks included in a show at the Drawing Center about writing and art. It was just presented as one more artist's work, this notebook of gibberish scribble. This was before the film, though it might have been after Charles' suicide. One interesting thing to me was that Crumb expressed -- even in The New Yorker -- irritation with the film, although he's been trying to keep clear the fact that he and Terry are still friends. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but in some way I wonder if Terry might have reached into Robert's most private place and robbed him of something he needs as an artist. As if Terry discovered Robert's Rosebud, only instead of a sled it's other aspects of childhood. I always thought of Crumb as an autobiographical cartoonist. I mean, he draws himself. But although he draws his sexual fantasies he has hardly probed the actual foundry in which those fantasies were forged. It's a rich and central mine for him as an artist if he dares plumb it directly, but somehow it's now been appropriated and colored by the perceptiveness and success of Zwigoff's film. It's not where Crumb located his dissatisfaction with the film, so maybe I'm projecting because it would bug me, being robbed of unmitigated access to my life as material.