On March 2, 2002, five major figures in contemporary artcomics and former contributors to the seminal comics anthology Raw, participated in the panel discussion "The Graphic Novel," held at the Free Library of Philadelphia. There, they expressed opinions about recent trends in comics, praised work by their peers and described their current projects. Chip Kidd, editorial director of Pantheon's graphic-novel line, moderated the discussion. Although he contributed some of his own questions, Kidd mostly selected and read questions from the audience, which numbered about 400 and filled the auditorium where the discussion was held.

A program for the event said that it would concern "the state of comic books/graphic novels." According to comments by various panelists, some notable aspects of this state include: the challenge of avoiding sentimentality in comics after Sept. 11, the "Faustian bargain" of exhibiting comics in museums and the increasing role of computers in the creation of comics art.

The following is an edited transcript of their discussion.

- Jack Baney

CHIP KIDD: Kim, what is your motivation for writing and drawing comics? Where did The Boulevard of Broken Dreams come from?

KIM DEITCH: That story came from the fact that I grew up around the animation business, and I was running around an animation studio even before I quite knew what animated cartoons were. At a certain point, looking for material, it struck me as obvious that this was something I knew all about. It wasn't just knowing about the cartoons, but I knew all of the different people involved in making the cartoons, including I had some really interesting ins. At one point my father ran a cartoon studio in New Rochelle called Terry Tunes. There were guys still working there that had been making these old Farmer Gray cartoons in the 1920s. And there they were, and I got to know them and talk to them all. So it seemed like it was a good angle. In that book I was really going more for the interesting human-interest stories I could tell about the people that made the work rather than "Gosh! Wow! Isn't animation a cool and crazy thing." So it was really just the fact that, for years, I've been drawing about what I don't know about. The old saw that you're supposed to draw what you know about. Well, this is something I know a lot about, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

KIDD: I could ask the same thing about Black Hole. What is that about?

CHARLES BURNS: For me it was the idea had been floating around in my head. The departure in this story was I was trying to, what Kim was saying, trying to do something that I knew about -- the torments of growing up, the teen-age years. And putting that into this larger context. The story was really one of the first times that I was willing to concentrate on the characters much more than just a plot line. I tried to involve myself with the lives of the characters and have them be the focus of the whole story. Trying to reflect on my adolescence, like the horrors of sitting in a room filled with smoke and listening to a Pink Floyd album that's been drumming down the turntable ten times in a row. I'm trying to capture some of that part of my life and get it out of my system hopefully.

CHRIS WARE: Do you feel like you've lost your current life working on it? I'm really serious here. Because sitting at a table staring at a piece of paper working on a story like that ... and yours is incredibly complicated and involved ... Do you find that you sometimes forget where you were -- I'm not trying to sound kind of goofy or mysterious or anything -- but do you feel like "Wow! Jeez! It's been four years now and ..." [Audience laughs.]

BURNS: The depressing part is to think about it in those terms. [Audience laughs louder.] I'm glad to know that it's a story I'm standing behind. I like the story, when I step back and think about "Yes, the first one came out how many years ago and I've got three more years to go to finish this thing!"

KAZ: Charles, what about the desire to go back and to rewrite stuff that you're not happy with? It's done. That's the one thing about doing your own comics with me.

BURNS: Right.

KAZ: You don't get to rewrite usually. I mean, you draw it and after you ink it, it looks beautiful. You don't want to touch it.

BURNS: It's not so much like writing a novel where you go back and edit or have someone kind of look over your shoulder and say, "Well, you could change this around, make it clearer ..."

KAZ: "Make this character stronger by adding this on or that on."

BURNS: Another thing that happens, too, is that after you're drawing a character or characters for five years, if you look at the way you drew them five years ago, they've slowly ...

KAZ: They've changed.

BURNS: They've slowly changed. You can't go back and re-edit everything that way.

RICHARD McGUIRE: Did you ever go back and reedit anything?

BURNS: Well, a few things I've done. In this case I think that I've worked hard enough figuring out the story, that by the time I've put myself --

McGUIRE: You're taking it one comic-book chunk at a time in terms of revision.

BURNS: It's thinking of it as a whole, actually. I know the last panel that I'll still be inking four years from now.

McGUIRE: You know the ending, then?

BURNS: Oh, absolutely. Every little fragment of the ending.

KAZ: See, if I knew that, it would be hard to proceed.

BURNS: It changes, too. There are things that come in there as I'm working. There are ways of telling the story that I'll figure out as I'm working. But all of the skeletal structure is firmly there and all of the symbols and characters and who knows what is figured out. But as far as how you tell that story, how it gets broken down on a page, that's actually the fun part that keeps you going, or keeps me going.

ART SPIEGELMAN: I ended up redrawing the first two chapters of Maus when I finished.

BURNS: I just think that you can get in trouble with that, too, because it looks good but you're --

SPIEGELMAN: It doesn't look any better for being redrawn. I just needed to feel like I'd come back and thought through that first part again. I'm talking to Kim on the way up here, and that seems to be part of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams as well.

DEITCH: Yeah. I'm redrawing the end.

BURNS: I have to draw one thing that I'm going to change. But I'm not going to let myself go back and redo it.

SPIEGELMAN: One of the advantages is that editors can't mess with you as they can with prose folks. They wouldn't have a clue as to where to enter it. It's there. Something's just agitating you so much that you end up having to go back and dismantle or remantle.

BURNS: There's such a commitment to just draw some panel that takes a person two seconds to glance at. Before I came over here, I inked this tabletop that's filled with dirty dishes. I'm doing all of these little ellipses of cups and this is how-many hours and I still have hours to go on it. I have a lot of dirty dishes there, so I have to figure that out. [Audience laughs.] Just that alone. Just to go back and break it open again it's just too much. You have to pretty much know what you want -- what your story is going to be beforehand -- or you're doomed.

SPIEGELMAN: I had it all outlined before I did Maus. I had the whole story worked out. I would always rewrite whatever was left between chapters so that I ended up, like, having 20 outlines. By the time I got to the end of this thing, I had at least 15 different ways that needed ... Even though I had a version of it that I could have -- theoretically, if I could have worked fast -- just done, by the time I got there I totally reworked large chunks of what I'd been mapping out for myself.

BURNS: There's also the second book. Where the first book's out and there are things that you --

SPIEGELMAN: Well, things change. Yeah. You work in this vacuum where you think that it's all going to stand still, but in the course of working on Maus my father died, I'd gotten a successful first half of a book out. It affected me even being willing to sit down and do the second part. All of that had to be kind of woven back into the fabric for me to just be able to continue. I think that at some part during one of the many writer-block periods I ended up reading all of those Paris Review interviews with writers books, just learning how people deal with writer's block, which is a way of avoiding work. [Audience laughs.] There's one thing that I remembered that -- I don't remember which author it was, but it said something that became really meaningful to me, which was that the last chapter of the book has to be double the density and weight of everything that came before. And each paragraph has to double in density until you get to the last sentence, which has to double in density. That seemed like an interesting rule of thumb. I remember puzzling over that for a long time before I was able to wrap up the final work.

[To read the rest of this discussion, please see The Comics Journal #243.]