Graphic Novels Panel: Art Spiegelman, Chip Kidd, Jessica Abel, Charles Burns and David Heatley

I’m such a geek for sci-fi and the paranormal and that I sometimes forget there are other sections of the bookstore that feature biographies or even fiction without aliens or vampires. The same principle applies to the comic shop. My frustration trying to find something to read often blinds me to other kinds of comics. Comics that are more literary than my usual reading material, that maybe my hated 11th grade English teacher would have considered unlikely to turn my brain into mush.

Thank god for the Free Library of Philadelphia, who brought Art Spiegelman, Jessica Abel, Charles Burns, David Heatley and Chipp Kidd together for a panel presentation and Q & A.

And it went something like this.

CHIP KIDD – “Would you talk a little about your experiences with censorship of your books?” We’ll start with Charles Burns.

CHARLES BURNS – My comics have been done under the radar for the most part. I’ve worked for alternative and underground comic companies that allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do. I self-censor upon occasion but I never had any problem with my publishers. The only time I was ever really faced some sort of censorship issue was when I had a weekly strip for a while – maybe about two years. What I would do normally was send it out in a batch of four episodes each month, so I knew I was safe for the month. Some small paper in Florida was running it, and asked for the next batch early. I was absolutely sure I had completed enough for that month. The paper said “Well, we didn’t run that ‘one’ because we thought it might offend our readers.

The story I was doing had some fairly violent themes, some dark themes in it. It was a story where I had this depiction of God as this one-eyed creature, and that’s what they thought would be offensive to the readers. There were readers in California that were very upset about the types of stories I was telling – it wasn’t just letters to the editor.

ART SPIEGELMAN – I’ve had a lot of experiences with, not exactly censorship – it’s not like it comes out and gets confiscated – it has to do with working through Gatekeepers. It’s very difficult to work for a magazine where there’s an editor who you have to submit to. That word just drives me crazy. And it led me to quit the New Yorker a number of times – like once a month.

They were perfectly within their rights to do so, and I felt like every time I was running – it was like I was a kind of lawyer advocating for my own work. It’s very exhausting to have to do the work and then have to explain and defend it. In Breakdowns there’s a bunch of strips from the Seventies, and there really was censorship. Stores would get busted for carrying underground comics. Underground comics were specifically involved with testing the limits of what one could say. They were highly sexual and political in their content.

I was part of a comic book called “Young Lust.” There were several things you specifically could not show. They had to do with penetration, they had to do with certain kinds of sex acts – so I made them the feature of one of the most abstract strips I’ve ever done. It’s not what it looks like when one first sees it, but it has a number of panels of hard-core sex copied from porno magazines. As a result, the book now has “Adults Only” on it, at my insistence rather than my editor’s. When my editor said “We could reprint this book,” I thought it wasn’t reprintable because of my experiences of having my books specifically be busted in headshops across the country in 1975 when I was part of “Young Lust” – that strip was taboo. I told my editor, “But what about these sex panels?” and he says “What, the naughty bits?” At that moment I felt so fucking old.

As I said in the afterword to Breakdowns, I know that our culture exists somewhere between Janet Jackson’s tit and Paris Hilton’s clit, but I just don’t know where. Even though I’ve just come out with a book that’s very safe, and proper, and appropriately aimed at five and six year olds who are learning how to read called “Jack in the Box,” this book (“Breakdowns”) is genuinely meant for adults.

The other experience I really had was “In the Shadow of No Towers.” When I needed to make these pages about September 11th, I was caught in some kind of obsessive September 12th that lasted for about two years – being downtown, under the towers – I needed to work on the subject, basically what I saw that day and what happened. Basically, the hijacking of the hijacking. It just wasn’t possible in the large-scale magazines to talk about the thugs that we finally had just gotten rid of. On election night, I spontaneously broke out into a round of “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” when the results came in. But when I did those pages, editors the New Yorker and elsewhere were just not interested. And so the pages I did were for European newspapers where I was working with a “Coalition of the Willing” in the Old Europe. Nobody in America wanted to be part of these things. Eventually the “Weekly Forward” allowed me to run them there, and a few years later the climate had changed – satire and irony were back and alive – and it was able to come out as some sort of a book in America as well.

DAVID HEATLEY – In a lot of ways, I’ve benefitted from all the heavy lifting that people like Art have done, so there were no limitations on what kind of comics I could draw. I knew I had access to these small press publishers and I could do any kind of strip I wanted. I knew I did want to do this comic strip about my sex history and pack it all into one fifteen page strip and get it out of the way and not dwell on it for my whole career. What happened is that I drew it and it went to the printer almost before I had digested it – so I almost didn’t quite know what it was about. When I first printed it, it was kind of graphically sexual – there’s pornographic panels in it. At the time, my wife was pregnant so I wasn’t getting any sex, so all my sexual energy was being channeled into this strip. It’s just funny, but four years later, re-reading it and re-packaging it for the Pantheon book, I realized that it’s really about longing and bad sex and grasping for love. It’s really not about erotic titillation. I was getting responses from people, mostly from younger boys, saying “Your strip really turned me on.” I kind of had an ideal female reader in mind – I want to explain what it’s like on the other side of the fence.

So I wound up with this creative solution which was to paste these little pink rectangles over all the genitalia in the strip. And they’re hot, flourescent pink – they’re not black, they draw attention to themself. So it’s kind of like censorship with a wink. And I’m happy, I stand behind that solution, but it’s amazing – people are angry at me for censoring this book. They feel that the original version was the real, honest version and that it’s dishonest now. It’s a funny thing, I didn’t think there would be this kind of reaction. I think of it as kind of the final layer of narrative that I’ve added to the work. There’s so much pornography in the world, I really don’t need to add to the pile.

JESSICA ABEL – I’m sort of like Charles in that I haven’t faced that much censorship in my creative work. Working with magazine editors on the occasional strip you go through layers of discussion about what your going to do…

CHARLES BURNS – Wait a second. Wait a second, I remember when I was censored by Art Spiegelman. One time in “Little Lit,” I did a cover for them where there was an alien creature that was in this little boy’s bedroom. And the creature had this weird appendage coming down from it’s head, like a night-lite, and I thought it looked very cute, and I thought the monster looked very cute reading a comic book in this kid’s bedroom, and the kid is just waking up. They were concerned, probably justly so, that it was just a little bit too spooky. So we went into this very long process of making it cuter. And I guess I don’t get cute very well, so it took a long time. I finally got my manga magazines out, and I’m trying to get something super-cute – giant eyes, all kinds of creatures. And I think there was a list – I think I drew maybe ten…

ART SPIEGELMAN – There was a very large selection of heads you drew, each one more grotesque than the last.

CHARLES BURNS – Either way – Art Spiegelman edited me…he censored me!

ART SPIEGELMAN – That’s why I gave up the editing racket.

CHIP KIDD – Jessica, here’s one for you since you teach at SVA. “I’m an educator putting together a Graphic Novels as Literature course. Besides your own works, what must-read items should be on the student reading list?” Do you have a student reading list when you teach?

JESSICA ABEL – I don’t, because I teach making comics, and although every year I say I’m going to make my students read more stuff, I tend to not have time to make them do that. So I depend on their other classes, and their literature classes to do that. Which is probably unwise. “What are three must-read books…” That’s pretty much a question that everyone here gets. It totally depends on the class, it totally depends on the level of the students, and what the mission of the class is. Are you teaching non-fiction, and do the top books that everyone thinks about, which are “Maus,” “Fun Home,” and “Persepolis,” which are always the top three. And for good reason. But they’re all non-fiction. So if you’re going to do fiction, then maybe one of those two of those, then you could do “Black Hole.” You could do some Hernandez books.

CHARLES BURNS – There are some anthologies out now that really give great overviews of comics. Jessica co-edits or works on a series that publish the best comics each year, that’s a great place to look…

JESSICA ABEL – Charles is the next guest editor.

CHARLES BURNS – That’s the reason I brought that up. Ivan Brunetti has two books that he has put out from Yale University…

JESSICA ABEL – It’s the “Anthology of Graphic Fiction,” there are two volumes of it. I tend to think, because I’m in the second one, that the second one is better.

CHARLES BURNS – And there’s McSweeny’s – Chris Ware edited an anthology as well – those are kind of good places to start, just to get some sense of what’s out there.

JESSICA ABEL – I think that reading short fiction is actually a good way to go. Reading whole graphic novels – depending on the kind of class could be great, but it could also be too much – so reading short stories, and excerpts in an anthology can be a good answer. The choices I’ve made when I’ve taught comics as literature are things like “Palestine,” by Joe Sacco, and “Jew of New York” by Ben Ketcher.

CHARLES BURNS – The good news is that there’s a lot of good books out there now. There’s almost too many suggestions as compared to ten or fifteen or twenty years ago. There’s a lot to choose from.

JESSICA ABEL – Another good one to choose is “Ice Haven” by Dan Clowes. It’s a good one to read in terms of thinking about how comics work because there are strips that interact.

ART SPIEGELMAN – As long as the kids are over fifteen. One school teacher got fired for…

JESSICA ABEL – That’s the thing. The question is so open-ended. Are you teaching high school? University level? Is it a conservative community? There’s lots of ways to answer the question.

DAVID HEATLEY – I have two suggestions. There’s a story called “The Hannah Story” by Carol Tyler which for me, is one of the most emotionally rich comic strips I’ve ever read. It has brought me to tears almost every time I’ve read it. That’s in a small anthology by Drawn and Quarterly that hasn’t been reprinted. I also think John Porcellino does some of the best, kind of like, Buddhist, spiritual, detached, just beautifuly reflective kind of personal stories. There’s a book of his called “Perfect Example” that’s just great. Dan Adell has a company called Picture Box and they’re producing these really wonderful books there that are much more graphically and artistically driven. They’re kind of like books that are moving paintings or about forms moving through space. They’re a little more conceptual, a little more visually driven and I find it very refreshing. It’s sort of the opposite of the sort of stuff I make.

ART SPIEGELMAN – I know that when Maus was introduced into schools I was really upset. I remember being given Silas Marner when I was about thirteen – it was sort of like getting your polio vaccine and your copy of Silas Marner to protect you from literature. I was frightened that Maus would end up in that way. I’ve accepted that it keeps a book in print and I’m grateful.

I think that what Charles said about the profusion of stuff available makes a lot of different routes through possible that wasn’t before. The only thing I would like to have back in print – I taught a seminar at Columbia a year ago – is comics is a much bigger field than just graphic novels, what graphic novels seems to be meaning, anyway. There’s a book that came out in the late seventies called “The Smithsonian Book of Comic Strips” and another called “The Smithsonian Book of Comic Books” that are well-selected and intelligent. Teaching this should be a bit historical and look further back than ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. The Smithsonian books I had to get off of Amazon, but they seem to be plentiful, so anybody teaching can find the Smithsonian books and they make a great introduction to comics language, to the flexibility of the form. And somewhere between that and those Ivan Brunetti books, one could probably navigate what one would need to know about showing comics to others.

CHARLES BURNS – Also, there’s a more recent Smithsonian book, so don’t be confused…

ART SPIEGELMAN – That’s a terrible book.

CHARLES BURNS – There’s a really bad, bad Smithsonian book that came out recently…

ART SPIEGELMAN – Go for the one that’s out of print.

CHIP KIDD – Art, somebody wants to know, “Will Meta Maus ever be published?”

ART SPIEGELMAN – I have a two-book contract for “Breakdowns” and “Meta Maus.” “Meta Maus” is sort of like the Criterion Extras DVD version of “Maus.” It’s the out-takes, sketches, the historical research, the bits of deposition and interviews that will be accompanied by a now-defunct CD-ROM version of “Maus,” and audio of my father being interviewed. It’s now being mounted on to something that can be read because that was done with Hyper-Card, which is like a Jurassic technology. It’s now being mounted on to Flash to accompany this book that’s also got a very long interview because when I would go out on the road to talk about “Maus,” the only questions people would ask me were “Why comics? Why mice? Why the Holocaust.” So those are the three chapters of this long interview. But I found it a lot drier than making the Portrait of the Artist thing (“Breakdowns”), so I procrastinated on “Meta Maus,” and did “Breakdowns” first, but now it’s one of my main jobs to get “Meta Maus” going next year.

CHIP KIDD – Jessica, here’s one for you, and you probably get this all the time. “What would make the graphic novel/comics world more hospitable to women?” If it isn’t already.

JESSICA ABEL – I think it’s pretty hospitable to women now, in a way that it wasn’t even when I started out. The short answer is, “Good comics.” The more good comics there are and the more diversity there is comics that are out there, the more they welcome in all kinds of people, not just women and girls, but older people, from other places, people that don’t have the same background as your average thirty-five year old white male comic book reader. I think that it’s happening and has been happening for a long time. One of the biggest factor in bringing girls, small girls, into comics – which is the biggest factor in having women read comics – has been the boom in manga. Partly just because they’re cute, but partly also because there’s so many different kinds of stories, there’s so much diversity in the field. There’s nothing about comics that turns girls off, as was proposed in years past, because there are tons of girls that are reading them now.

I’ve seen the change in our classroom over eight years – it’s still not fifty-fifty, but it’s heading toward sixty-forty men to women in comics school. And a lot of them are students to watch. So I think that when we see the generation going through school now, getting out, in the next few years, when we see them maturing and getting their work out there, you’ll really see a change in demographic overall.

ART SPIEGELMAN – I think better page rates.

JESSICA ABEL – Better page rates would just attract people. But yes, it’s economic too. People need to make a living.

CHIP KIDD – Charles Burns – “How did you develop your inking style, and who are your inking influences?”

CHARLES BURNS – Oy vey! “What kind of brush do you use?” This one is always hard to explain. At a young age I looked at the kind of comics that I was exposed to very early on – the things I was attracted to – were things like TinTin, which my work doesn’t look like at all. I saw Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad comics work, the black and white reproductions, which was the exact same paperback book that Art showed in his slide talk. I was looking at those, at an age that I probably shouldn’t have been looking at it. I was looking at at before I could read. They were in black and white, and there was a look of some of the stories that I just loved – the richness and darkness – there was a real mood to it. As I grew older, I just found myself emulating that kind of line, trying to emulate that kind of look. I didn’t really understand how they were acutally made. I knew that cartoonists worked on Bristol Board with pen and ink, so I got my tools out and tried to figure that stuff out on my own. It wasn’t until years later that someone said “Oh, that’s done with a brush.” There’s a very fluid, natural line that’s created by dipping a sable brush into ink and making a line. That’s pretty much how it started, just emulating a very specific look and then taking it to an extreme. Who are my influences? Pretty much who I just mentioned – a few people from that time period. Harvey Kurtzmann worked with Bill Elder, who unfortunately went on to do “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy, but way back when he was an amazing artist, and I still think he was one of the greatest. So all that kind of stuff, in the forties and fifties I was drawn to.

And I use a number two brush.

CHIP KIDD – David – “What has been the reaction of your friends, family, girlfriends – how true to life are your comics?”

DAVID HEATLEY – They’re all true to life.

CHIP KIDD – But has there been any sort of notable reaction amongst the people being depicted?

DAVID HEATLEY – I get asked that a lot. I explained some of what happened with my mom (in the slide show presentation preceding the Q&A). I don’t do strips about my brothers so much. I feel like I was stuck with my parents so I’m allowed to do work about them, but my brothers didn’t ask to be part of my comics so I tend to respect their privacy. My brothers are fascinated by it, and a lot of times they’ll show friends and be like “Here’s my Dad. Read this strip about my Dad.” I haven’t had any girlfriends from the past looking me up and saying “Why the hell am I in this strip?” All this stuff is over ten years ago. There’s a very famous ten-year rule, and I respect that rule. The thing is is that it’s really my life story. The main character in this book is sort of this blank container for experience as people filter in and out of my life. It’s really my way of talking about country, the city I grew up in, my experience growing up in the world. It happens to be about me, I happen to be the main character. I’m not really trying to pigeon-hole the people I knew, it’s really more my impressions of them.

CHIP KIDD – We’re going to wrap it up with an interesting last question here. “According to you, what is the worst direction you have taken as an artist? And how did you recognize it and remedy it?”

CHARLES BURNS – I think you learn by imitation. I was just describing the kind of inking style that I’m known for and how I was imitating artists that I really loved. I also love the kind of artwork that I can’t do. For example – one of my favorite artists in the world is Gary Panter. I love what he does, and there have been periodic – especially early on – there have been times where I’ve tried to do something that was more loose, and open, and spontaneous. It took about five or ten minutes into whatever the project was for me to very quickly realize that it was absolute garbage.

JESSICA ABEL – Wait a second. You didn’t actually publish these things? Does that count?

CHARLES BURNS – They all got to be torn up.

JESSICA ABEL – That doesn’t count.

CHARLES BURNS – I recognized it instantly, is all I’m saying. I love the idea of working in a much more spontaneous way, and it never works for me.

JESSICA ABEL – I have gone down that path and published it. I think my worst direction was early on. If anyone has seen my earlier book of strips called “Soundtrack,” it’s like my extremely weak impersonation of Art’s breakdowns and ideas – all the early stuff I could stand to reprint. There’s a lot of experimentation there and a lot of different directions I was taking. Most of them I didn’t follow, but I was kind of heading down the incredibly, po-faced, sappy, not auto-bio but close, downtrodden, everything is depressing proagonists types of stories where nothing happens. At all.

There was a story about a young woman whose best friend is moving away for college or something, and there’s this panel where she’s sitting at the airport, “Uhhhhh. Nothing will ever be the same again.” Something like that. I’ve never done auto-bio, I’ve never been very interested in that – that was as close as I got, heading that way toward non-stories about depressing stuff that happened. And I pulled back from that as soon as I realized it. I was doing stuff when I was in college, and publishing it in college magazines and stuff, and it took a couple of tries before I realized that it was just a huge mistake. I should do fiction.

CHIP KIDD – David, was it those Aquaman stories that you did?

DAVID HEATLEY – I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I definitely had a number of false starts, too. The very first, kind of serious type of thing I tried to make was really wash-y, ink drawings of me longing for some girl that I had a hopeless crush on, but she was my best friend, and I can’t figure it out. Awful. Awful drawing. So I sent it right to Fantagraphics and was like, “Why won’t they publish it?” The second thing that I did was this story, a true story about these Mafia relatives I have on one side of my family. Literally. People who work for John Gotti. I did a story about refusing a bribe at my great-grandmother’s funeral where they wanted me to breakdance after the funeral at the after-party. And I refused the bribe and made a story about that like my big triumph in saying “No” to the Mafia. And that one actually sort of holds up because it’s about race and it’s about my views on family. And then from there I thought I’ve got to do serious fiction. I was living in San Francisco, and I heard this story that someone told me about this woman who lived there in the sixties, and met up with a band of lesbian carpenters who were going to build a boat and sail away from Patriarchy forever.

CHIP KIDD – Not in San Francisco!?!

DAVID HEATLEY – I heard this story, and I thought it was the best story every. And the boat sinks, and then something happens. And this was my Grand Story, and I did a whole twenty-four pages of it and just thought, “What the hell am I doing?” It’s not my story, I don’t have any of the chops to write or draw it. So I thought I should go back to doing what I know, so then I started doing my dream comics.

CHIP KIDD – I think maybe the smartest thing I ever did was give up trying to be a cartoonist because I’m just not good enough at it. But I think that also part of that question is how do you remedy it? How do you figure out I’m going in a bad direction and how do I right myself. That’s a pretty hard skill to acquire. I think you have to somehow – if you’re making something and you’re not sure about it, you have to put it away and go do something else for like a day or a week or something. And then when you come back and just really, honestly look at it and go “If I didn’t know who did this, what would I think of it?” And then you have to figure out that “I would think it’s pretty bad. Let’s go in a different direction.”

ART SPIEGELMAN – I have the problem where it happens every time I sit down at the table. It takes a lot of re-invention each time out to figure out what I’m doing. There’s a lot of throwing away and ripping up. A lot. I keep trying to find a way to make fiction. The closest I came recently was a strip about why I can’t make fiction that’s part of the introductory section to “Breakdowns.” Basically, all this feels like playing tennis without a net, but I keep figuring that the highest aspiration of literature is to make a believable lie. I find it so easy to tell a lie when I’m trying to tell the truth, that I never completely get over to making the complete fictions and I keep throwing them away. The work I did immediately prior to the work in “Breakdowns,” I look back and cringe. The work “Breakdowns” is made by the same brain that has made everything since. Before that, I was too influenced by my underground comics pals – “I can do something more grotesque than that!” It even got me banned from Robert Crumb’s house because his wife was afraid of me. That’s all stuff I don’t think that I’ll ever reprint. Unfortunately, the process of learning in print means that floating around somewhere, probably being brought to me to be signed later, is stuff that I did in the sixties that was done while I was totally drug-addled, where I took a step back from something that I was aiming at which was making some kind of comics to re-read, and was trying to make comics that were as “far-out” as the underground comics.

CHARLES BURNS – Someone will gather that stuff up someday.

ART SPIEGELMAN – It will be my kids’ retirement fund.

JESSICA ABEL – People have totally brought that stuff to me before. That old stuff of mine. It’s in print, and being in print is one of the ways that you realize you have gone down a wrong path. You do this thing, and you’re like “This is done.” You send it off, and it’s on deadline, and you don’t even think about it. And then you get it back and your like “Ohhhh no. That’s not what I meant at all.”

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Art Spiegelman – Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!
One of the pioneers of the graphic novel genre, Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a narrative memoir of the Holocaust that portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Known for his comics’ complex, controversial content, Spiegelman is a strong proponent of the value of comics as a valid medium of art and was named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People. Breakdowns is a retooling of Spiegelman’s classic 1978 anthology of the same name.

Chip Kidd – Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan
An art director at Alfred A. Knopf and editor-at-large for Pantheon, Chip Kidd is “the closest thing to a rock star in graphic design today” (USA Today). His work–more than 20 years of book jacket designs–has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and is collected in Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006 (Chip Kidd), a monograph that reveals his distinctive ability to compress a literary trajectory onto the body of a book. He also is the author of novels The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters and The Learners. Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan examines and celebrates the popularity of Batman comics in Japan.

Jessica Abel – Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond
Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel is the author of the Harvey Award-winning graphic novel La Perdida, about an American woman in Mexico City, and two collections, Soundtrack and Mirror, Window, which gather pieces from her popular comic book, Artbabe. With Ira Glass, Abel is co-author of Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a non-fiction comic about how the National Public Radio show This American Life is made. She received the 1997 Harvey Award for Best New Talent and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Charles Burns – Black Hole
A prolific and highly sought-after comic illustrator, Philadelphian Charles Burns’s images appear on the covers of such magazines as Time and the New Yorker, and he is the regular cover artist for the McSweeney’s magazine The Believer. Best known for his magnum opus, Black Hole–a multiple Harvey, Eisner, and Ignatz Award winner, that was named one of Comics Journal’s Top 100 English-Language Comics of the Century–Burns has also designed the cover for Iggy Pop’s Brick by Brick album and a major marketing campaign for Altoids.

David Heatley – My Brain is Hanging Upside Down
David Heatley, author of the Deadpan comic series, has illustrated the cover of the New Yorker and Best American Comics 2007 and his work has graced the pages of the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Nickelodeon magazine, and Kramers Ergot. Taking more than five years to complete, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down is a graphic memoir that Heatley calls “an illuminated manuscript of my life… my statement to the world.”