>>Spiegelman: Well right now,
I think it's a really amazingly flourishing moment
for my medium.
A lot is really happening.
There's no obvious career path where you can come
in like punch a time clock
and say I'm making the comic books now that's meaningful.
On the other hand, the audience has opened up enough
to be willing to accept anything worthy without the pejoratives
that were there all over the place
when we were doing RAW magazine when I was doing Maus
and that means that things can find their way
through into the culture but there's no clear path to do it.
It has to be more of a calling than a career.
Maus was three hundred pages not because it was padded;
it's because it was compressed.
If I drew more fluidly and wanted to get paid by the page
or something, I suppose it could've been a 2,000 page
graphic novel.
But most of the ideas left in my brain can be expressed either
in one panel, five pages, 15 pages, or 20 pages
but I don't really need the 300 unless I really want
to pretend it's moving and I really like the language
that comics offers that lets one get things down to a form
that allows one to somehow get the overview
of what the thing is both as a reader and the maker
and then let it expand inside one's brain.
But prior to Maus, I think
that the longest thing I had ever done might have been 15
or 20 pages even though I've been making comics for decades.
I always thought of comics as femoral but nothing like showbiz
and that's part of what's kind of amazing about comics is
that they can be made by one person even if they can be --
one can choose to make them with a team
and express oneself fairly fully in that range between words
and pictures and manifest it rather efficiently.
It seems to me that even more in our new digital video moment,
negotiating pictures as meaning is at least as important
as alphabet signs and comics
because they mercifully don't move,
allow you to study and figured out.
I believe that certain comics if you were just left with them
as a kind of wolf child that had never been civilized you could
sort of end up figuring them out.
You could understand what is happening a little bit
from the pictograms.
I'm very attached to paper even though I make more and more
of the finished results relying on the computer as a crutch
but I keep finding the loopholes in the contract that allow me
to keep making things on paper because I suppose only
because I'm used to but I don't think I would've become a
cartoonist in the 21st century.
I don't know that it would've had the lure that it did
in the mid-20th when they kind
of captured brain and heart for me.
And comics are doing very well these days among the last
standing books because they tend to take advantage
of their abjectness in the way that your textbooks here
at Dartmouth and even the novels you're reading
don't necessarily.
They can be read on and iPad fine
but when one is making a book that has to be 11 by 14 inches,
you'd have to buy a special iPad for the occasion
or read it smaller; it's not going to translate well
to electronic technology.
The thrill of has to do with its total femoral nature,
it's gone while it's being made, just like us.