It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.
Art SpiegelmanSometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.
Art SpiegelmanComics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.
Art SpiegelmanIn 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true!
Art SpiegelmanEven on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.
Art Spiegelman