"I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing"
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Spiegelman’s line is a quiet flex disguised as self-justification: if you’re “supposed to be making comics,” then you don’t get to hide behind the medium’s old alibis of disposability. You owe it craft, ambition, risk. The sly move is in where he goes to borrow authority. Not to contemporary “graphic novel” respectability, but to “those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century” - the modernists who treated form like a problem worth breaking your knuckles on. He’s aligning comics with the era that invented a new visual grammar under pressure: cubism’s fractured viewpoints, futurism’s speed, expressionism’s nervous line, Dada’s collage logic. That’s not nostalgia; it’s a claim that comics, too, can be an avant-garde instrument.
The subtext is also defensive, because Spiegelman’s career sits inside a long cultural argument: are comics “real” art or just mass entertainment? By invoking early 20th-century experiment, he reframes the question. Comics aren’t asking permission from literature; they’re part of the same modern project of making meaning out of rupture. This lands especially hard in the wake of Maus, where the burden isn’t just aesthetic but moral: how do you draw history that resists being “illustrated” without turning it into spectacle?
Intent-wise, he’s telling you the “best way” to make comics is to treat the page as a laboratory. If modernism was a response to a world coming apart, Spiegelman suggests comics can be, too - not by imitating prestige forms, but by owning their own innovations.
The subtext is also defensive, because Spiegelman’s career sits inside a long cultural argument: are comics “real” art or just mass entertainment? By invoking early 20th-century experiment, he reframes the question. Comics aren’t asking permission from literature; they’re part of the same modern project of making meaning out of rupture. This lands especially hard in the wake of Maus, where the burden isn’t just aesthetic but moral: how do you draw history that resists being “illustrated” without turning it into spectacle?
Intent-wise, he’s telling you the “best way” to make comics is to treat the page as a laboratory. If modernism was a response to a world coming apart, Spiegelman suggests comics can be, too - not by imitating prestige forms, but by owning their own innovations.
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| Topic | Art |
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