Inexplicable

SOBEL: Did you plot the story out from the beginning, or did you write it as you were going?

LUST: I brainstormed from the beginning to the end. I wrote down everything that I remembered in a book, but I didn’t do a storyboard for the whole book because that would have bored me. A lot of ideas come during the drawing.

SOBEL: I’ve heard a lot of artists say that the best drawing is the first drawing.

LUST: No, not with me. I always start with something simple, you know, the first idea which comes to my mind, and most times that idea is ok. Then I start re-doing it and it gets better and better all the time. (laughs)

SOBEL: So was that your typical process as you were drawing it?

LUST: I’d do the sketches in the evening, in bed… like little sketches just for the next scene.

SOBEL: You did it in sequential order?

LUST: Yes. That’s very important, it was in chronological order. That’s a very important point. Maybe if you do a storyboard, you don’t need that, but without storyboards, it’s extremely important because of the flow, you know? Also to build the tension and make it stronger and stronger. I think it’s very important to be in the timeline.

So I’d draw the sequence in the scene, and then I’d read it, and then I’d redraw it, and then I rearranged stuff, and then finally, when I liked it, I would make the final drawings. Sometimes I also redrew the scene but not too often.

Paul Tumey on Art Spiegelman's book, Co-Mix.

Co-mix is not light reading, although it contains a great deal of humor. These are comics that use — among other things — sex, drugs, funny talking animals, and well-crafted comics to encourage one to think harder. A joke in a Spiegelman comic is rarely just that, being more often an inquiry: why is this funny? About ten years into his career, Spiegelman began to figure out ways to cram more and more information into his verbal-visual matrices, so that a medium supposedly for beginning and semi-literate readers actually tasks — and rewards — as much as art and literature. In addition to the high density of information contained in Spiegelman’s comics, there is also a moral stance, fiercely taken, that challenges us to go beyond the escapist qualities of comics as entertainment. In some sense, Maus can only work at its deepest level when we constantly see past the animal masks, and refuse to de-humanize. In his work, he questions everything: culture, art history (including comics), and politics. Often, his work co-mixes what we might consider extreme opposites — comics and genocide (in the 1970s, this was a radical idea for mainstream America), jazz and politics, the Crucifixion and taxes, hard-boiled detective fiction and Cubist art, to name just a few of the heady concoctions. While there is a certain amount of formal experimentation in Spiegelman’s comics, there is also a tremendous personal investment that makes the work relevant and worthwhile. Spiegelman’s comics may not be light reading, but they are enlightening.