issue # 8—2005
Art Spiegelman
Quit Thinking Like An Emoticon
An Interview with Marjane Satrapi
Spiegelman + Satrapi
ART SPIEGELMAN
QUIT THINKING LIKE AN EMOTICON
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hese days, you can’t throw a rock in any major city without knocking the Warby Parkers off some kid holding a Daniel Clowes book. But there was a time when comics were dangerous and deeply weird, and Art Spiegelman was standing on New York street corners handing out copies of his cartoon pamphlets like some kind of crazed funny-paper evangelist. Which makes sense, considering the role Spiegelman would take on over the next 50 years. As an enabler, chronic collaborator, and indefatigable critic, he continued to preach the word—not just of his own work, but also of his medium as a whole, tearing down assumptions about respectability and art,and converting the uninitiated. Spiegelman published the seminal Arcade magazine in the 1970s, and in the 80s, put out RAW with artist and editor Francoise Mouly, his wife and frequent co-conspirator. He freaked out the squares with Robert Crumb (and every other comic book artist worth knowing); invented the Garbage Pail Kids; and as a New Yorker cover artist, spent the ‘90s challenging the sensibilities of the publication’s genteel readership. And just to prove his point, Spiegelman took home a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic novel about his Holocaust survivor father, finally silencing a weakening establishment chorus that claimed comics were trashy, juvenile, or simply not literature at all. Spiegelman won the war over comics. But Spiegelman has never been content to rest on his accomplishments. He’s building something—an infrastructure, a more complete artistic lineage for his obsessions that dwarfs the world of horror comics, porn flip-books, and muscular men in spandex. In his new show, WORDLESS!, he introduces us to a long-lost uncle of the comic book, the wordless novel, sometimes called the woodcut novel. Artists like Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel told stories in graphic form without any dialogue or narration, silently communicating raucous humor, haunting sorrow, and powerful iconography that reflected the politics and struggles of the time. For the next month, Spiegelman is touring the country with a six-piece band led by jazz saxophonist Phillip Johnston, presenting the muted stories on the big screen and locking them into a multi-sensory performance piece that draws on Johnston’s experience composing for silent film. Spiegelman is setting out to introduce a new generation to the charms of illustrators like Ward and Masereel, and to place their work firmly in the context of the comic book family tree. In the process, he’s created a show that promises both a good time and new insight into how we digest graphics and words, and why it matters. Spiegelman spoke to me by phone last week from downtown Manhattan. Before our conversation, I was intimidated. Spiegelman is famous for his acerbic wit and unwillingness to suffer fools. But I found the cartoonist in good spirits, eager to talk about the WORDLESS! tour as well as his music, artistic process, and “narcissistic” generation of comic book pioneers.
Interview With Marjane Satrapi. Anyone who read Marjane Satrapi’s simple and evocative graphic novel, Persepolis, felt the sting of its final page. In Satrapi’s first installment of her memoir of Iranian life before, during and after the 1979 revolution, she chose to end with the image of our fourteenyear-old heroine—the cartoon Marjane—with her hands pressed against airport glass as her father carried away her fainting mother. Marjane was being sent by her parents to Vienna to get an education, and to go through those best of times—the teen years—free from a totalitarian regime. We meet Marjane again in Persepolis 2, laying face down on a made bed. It’s a pose typical to teenage angst. Only this time the kid has something to complain about. In an interview in her hotel lounge, Satrapi talks with a rapid, thick accent and cigarette in hand about teenage rebellion, identity crises, and such important things as peeing in pools and how Jennifer Lopez will never play her dad in the movie. But mostly the conversation leads back to politics, and it’s obvious why she’s so thrilled about a pin that reads “Japanese Americans for John Kerry.”
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o words limit art? Good question, because it’s at the core of this thing. I would say that as words rose in our cultural firmament, pictures got smashed down to make room for them. And ever since, pictures have been more suspect. We’re living in this Protestant country that doesn’t respect imagery the same way it respects the word. And all of a sudden something like comics comes along that mixes the two together, and it’s viewed as contraband. We’re getting into a place where we’re barraged with words and images all the time, and we have to get rid of our prejudices against one or the other, and this tour is like a controlled science experiment where you’ve got the pictures without the language.
You once told NPR that when you’re creating comics, words come before pictures. Was making “WORDLESS!” a counterintuitive process for you? A lot of my larger projects come from narrative, which comes from words, but they’re essentialized words, not sentences. They’re like keywords. And those keywords immediately conjure up pictures for me. It’s a little like how Miles Davis once put it: “I’ll play it for you first and tell you what it is later.” So I’ll also find myself drawing and then working my way backward to find out what I’m thinking about and what I have to put in place. The whole thing exists somewhere in between words and pictures because that’s probably how we think. Not just me. Not just this cartoonist. We speak in words, obviously, but we probably think in some kind of . . . Well, we probably think in emoticons. What was your process for compiling the material for the show? My interest in this stuff goes way, way back to my teenage years, when I first discovered it. All of a sudden there was something that was as satisfying as the comics I was used to looking at, but it came with a different cultural pedigree. It had an impression on me and stayed with me as I explored other things like DC horror comics, MAD comics, and beyond. But it sat there as this separate neighborhood I enjoyed visiting. I used to have to search these books out—now searching for a book only takes 20 minutes, and it’s just a matter of whether you can afford it or not. But I spent years trying to find as many of these books as I could in this new world where graphic novels are so respectable that there are young cartoonists that don’t even realize that they should be ashamed of what they do for a living. That in this particular world—it feels like I‘m living in one of Philip K. Dick’s alternate universes—the Library of America asks me to write the introduction and work with them on the complete woodcut novels of Lynd Ward, makes it even more exciting to me to understand how this stuff came to be and what it offers.
Q A
The first Persepolis is told from the viewpoint of a young girl taking in a difficult world around her, whereas this second book, facing young adulthood, you make an obvious decision to focus inward more. Instead of the story of a young girl trying to make sense of her country, it’s more about a young woman trying to make sense of herself. Was it more difficult to write the second one? In the first book I had the advantage of being cute, because I am just a small girl, it’s not me who makes any decisions, it’s not me who does anything. So the world around me changed, I am a witness of this big change around me. The war starts, and after a while it becomes completely normal, the situation of the war. That is the capacity of the human being, that everything suddenly becomes absolutely normal. The feeling that I am evoking in the second book is more a problem of when you are going to a new culture and you absolutely want to adapt yourself, and you absolutely want to be integrated. You have
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Before, you described “WORDLESS!” as educational. Do you think of it as a historical or nostalgic exercise to any extent? No, no! Absolutely not. This is the trouble I have describing it. The words that ended up floating to the top in our conversations about the show were “intellectual vaudeville,” but it’s also probably closer or truer to say that it’s lowbrow Chautauqua. Anything that has the words ‘historical’ or ‘nostalgic’ puts me to sleep, let alone anyone I might be beckoning into the tent to experience it with me, because we put a very strong divide between entertainment and education. “Here’s your id, here’s your superego, just do your thing, each of you, but don’t get together.” And one of these things is dissolute and the other seems medicinal, but it’s not true—it’s one thing. It definitely offers up history in that it takes us through previous decades, but I think that in this performance there’s something hard to communicate because we’ve made something interestingly new. And the music makes it very experiential; it’s not like, “Rembrandt, Van Gogh, blah blah blah.” Most people don’t know much about these comics, but they’ll experience them here, along with all the other things that followed them in a way that makes it all a part of the present tense. It’s a crash immersion. Marjane Satrapi
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to forget about your own culture first. You know, because culture takes all of the space inside you. If you want to have another culture come into you, it’s like you have to take out the first one, and then choose what you want from the two and swallow them again. But it’s the moment you look at everything that it’s this lack of identity. You don’t know anymore who you are. You want so badly to be integrated, but at the same time you have a whole thing that is inside you. It’s the problem that when you leave and then come back, you are a foreigner anywhere. I am a foreigner in Iran. I don’t take the risk to go back to my country anymore, but at the same time, it’s a good feeling not to belong to any place anymore, at the same time it’s a hard feeling. So if I wrote a book and said I was worrying about the situation in Iran the whole time, that would be so untrue. Any of us who have moved from Iran—and there were many of us who left like this without parents—all of us have gone through this desire to be part
of a new society, that we had to abandon everything. And the funny thing is, all the Iranian friends I have now, who left the country alone at 12, 13, 14, we have become extremely Iranian after all these years. How so? Because when you are young you mix the fanaticism of the government of Iran with the culture of your country, and it’s all one thing. When you are also very young, it’s so difficult all the time justifying yourself because of your nationality. A simple question for everyone is a one-word answer to “Where do you come from?”—“I am French.” For an Iranian, it’s a one-hour explanation: “I am Iranian but, I am Iranian but…” How do you answer that question now, as opposed to when you were young? When you are young you hate to answer that question. Well, today I just say “I am Iranian,” and they say “You are Iranian?” and I say “Yes, it is a fact, I am Iranian. I was born there, I have black hair. Yes, I am an Iranian person, what
can I do?” Since writing the book, nobody can tell me “Give me some explanation.” I think now my explanation is just “Read the book and you’ll see.” This book has permitted me not to talk so much anymore. People have read the book so they see what my situation is. So you’ve been in France for a long time now. Do you feel you can call it home in any way? I can live fifty years in France and my affection will always be with Iran. I always say that if I were a man I might say that Iran is my mother and France is my wife. My mother, whether she’s crazy or not, I would die for her, no matter what she is my mother. She is me and I am her. My wife I can cheat on with another woman, I can leave her, I can also love her and make her children, I can do all of that but it’s not like with my mother. But nowhere is my home any more. I will never have any home any more. Having lived what I have lived, I can never see the future. It’s a big difference when someone
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How did you choose the music for “WORDLESS!”—why jazz? I would say it comes from the fact that me and Phillip are friends, and we’ve moved into similar territories in our own chosen disciplines. Jazz and comics both have intertwined histories of being whorehouse culture, as well as now having become symphonic, museum culture. So they have that in common. I would say that jazz has a suppleness that allows a lot of different kinds of things to fit into its idioms. In other words, these books are different from each other; I didn’t want to do it all with same tomato sauce. Each one has its own character, and Phillip has something that he does with the music he composes that’s very analogous to—do you have any of my other work, besides Maus? I have the Co-Mix book. OK, so you know I work in a lot of different styles. Usually the style grows out of the needs of the idea. So one piece next to the other doesn’t necessarily look like it’s done by the same person. And Phillip also has those chameleon-like qualities in his work, and that allows him to re-inhabit each of these things with music appropriate to that particular piece. Do you listen to any contemporary genres of music or popular artists? No. I really don’t. My son was into it, but I could just not get into the world of hip-hop, or anything beyond. There was the group called The Last Poets in the 1960s that I really like, which I hear is one of the roots of hip-hop and rap. But I’m put-off by the—and I’m certainly showing my age here—that there isn’t much of a melodic base, outside of the stuff that takes from free jazz. The way I consume music is when I’m drawing, I try to find something that has the same mood as what I’m trying to make happen on paper. And so it’s not a concert experience so much as: “All the oxygen here, let it have this mood traveling through it with music.” I came up at a time when folk and psychedelic-rock things were happening. And I was listening to that until I discovered flea markets and thrift shops, and I found out about older music and was more interested in setting my own tones—not just the ones imposed on me by the time and place that I was born. But, I have to confess that a lot of what’s happening now is a little more difficult for me to be patient with. I’m limited in a way but continue to keep finding more and new connections between the things that I do listen to and like. I’ve heard you talk about the 1960s and ‘70s generation of comic artists—there was this boom of autobiographical material that defined the work. Do you feel like “WORDLESS!” is in any way autobiographical? I wouldn’t have been able to do some of what I did without having stumbled on these wordless novels—my comics tend to have a literary aspect to them, a word component. But I wouldn’t have been able to make what I do without this material, so in that sense my discoveries are being recapitulated and shared with you. In that sense,
Phillip Johnston
has to leave their country. At the end of this book, you leave to go to France to have the freedom to work. As a woman and as an artist, do you feel like you’ve gotten that freedom in France? Oh yes. You see, the basic problem of a country like mine, apart from the regime, apart from the government, is the patriarchal culture that is leading my country. That is the worst. That is why the government is still there. Whatever it touches, it gives its interpretation of the thing. When it touches psychology it says that the woman is more sensitive than the man. When it touches the medicine it says that our brain is a little less weight than the man’s. When it touches anything it gives its own interpretation, and the interpretation goes towards politics, towards religion, towards everything. So that is the situation. You know, the feminists become very angry when I say I am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I believe in human beings. After what I have seen in
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it’s autobiographical. This autobiographical thing that started in the ‘60s underground-comics moment is actually something I have to pull back from in the course of trying to explain where this stuff sits for me. It never occurred to me to think of it as an autobiographical piece. But as part of a generation of narcissists, maybe everything is autobiographical. How does it feel after all these years, to be . . . if not high art, then at least highbrow? I was very proud when recently as part of an art-and-music festival in Italy—I was invited over there—one of their bigger newspapers says, “we have a literary section every Sunday, and we’ve invited artists like Damien Hirst to do whatever they want on the cover. Send us a drawing and we’ll put it on the cover.” I send them a drawing and get a letter back saying, “our readers will be too disturbed by this image; do you have anything else you could offer us?” This was after they had offered me carte blanche. And I was so relieved to find out I was still an underground cartoonist.
the world, I don’t think women are better than the men. See what the women soldiers did in Iraq, that was not better than the men. Margaret Thatcher was a woman, look what she did to Great Britain. Or Madeleine Albright? So the women are not better than the men. So do you think the definition of feminism is to define that women are better than men? That is what I feel. When they talk about “The men ruined this, the men did that,” it is a person, and their sex comes after what they’ve done. I believe that we say too much “We the women” and “We the men,” but should say “We the human beings.” There are really two types of human being—the ones who care about environment, who want a more just society; and the other ones who care about greed and war. So it’s not a question of East and West, and American and Iranian, and women and men. 6
You are very determined in both books to show both sides of a
situation, and often two sides of individuals. Whether it’s you, your grandmother, or even more minor characters in the books. The world is complex. Even in my book I show a mullah who is good, the one who accepted me at the ideological test. He accepted me. So I can never say “All the mullahs are bad.” There was a man who much easier to say they are all shit. My life would be easier. But everything is so much more complex. There is so much good in bad, and so much bad in good. Are you so determined to foster understanding between people because you see—particularly in the last three years—that we’re getting further away from that? I don’t think the question is between the people. The politics of the world has created that. When I come to the United States, I’m supposed to be the axis of evil. They are supposed to be the Nest of Satan. That is the way the two countries call each other. Which is really bad, when George Bush uses the same kind of words
Spiegelman + Satrapi
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If people want to talk about you they will talk about you, so do what you think is right. –Marjane Satrapi as a completely fanatic, theological regime. When I come and see people here, everything is fine. Since the kidnapping of the two French journalists, with the demand of the kidnappers being that the ban on headscarves in schools is lifted, we’ve been reading a lot here that there’s a solidarity in the French Muslim community against this. Have you witnessed that? Absolutely. It is the truth. When they banned the veil in schools, I was against that. It became complete nonsense, because instead of understanding why the girls were putting the veil on their heads, they just made a law. And if by just making a law you could stop things, it would be so easy. Forbid persecution, and it doesn’t exist anymore? Of course it will exist, it will just become hidden. Just get rid of the veil and it will come out in another way. So the law is not a good idea for me. Then they cannot go to school to get an education, and the one way they have to become
WORDLESS!
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Spiegelman + Satrapi
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clockwise from top left: (1)
Art Spiegelman,
Shaping Thought; (2) Si Lewen, The Parade; (3) Milt Gross, He Done Her Wrong; (4) Lynd
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Ward, Frankenstein; (5) Lynd Ward, God’s Man; 5
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(6) Frans Masereel, A Passionate Journey
PERSEPOLIS
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top: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (page 40) bottom: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (page 25)
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emancipated is then lost. At the same time, when the two journalists were taken in the name of Islam, no religion in the whole world allows this kind of thing. So of course there was very quickly solidarity. Even those for the veil, even the more fanatic ones, they just said “No.” Which is a very great thing. We cannot agree on some stuff, but the life of a human being, everybody agrees. All my life I have been against the veil, and now I am the one defending the veil. I hate the veil and what it means, I would never put that thing on my head, but I put myself in their place. It’s a question of these girls’ identity. Their mothers never wore the veil, and so they want to. Why? They have come to France, 30-40 years. For French they are not French, and for Arabs they are not Arabs. So the height of irony is that the veil has become a symbol of rebellion. When you are fourteen and they tell you not to do something, of course you want to do it. Art Spiegelman
THIS TOUR IS LIKE A CONTROLLED SCIENCE EXPERIMENT WHERE YOU’VE GOT PICTURES WITHOUT THE LANGUAGE. – ART SPIEGELMAN
That brings me back to the question about the search for an identity that you write about in this book. You get very personal by showing how you try on so many identities and are never quite comfortable. That had to have been difficult to look back on, and write about. It was more difficult than the first one because I have lost my innocence in the second book and I don’t have anything to justify myself. Things happen, and I grow up, and I am the actor of my decision, I am the actor of my life. It is more difficult but you have to try to be as honest as possible. I wrote the thing in the book that is not so cool for myself. When I turned over that guy to the Guardians of the Revolution to save them from arresting me it was not so great to show about myself. But
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it is also to show that when you are scared, you behave badly. I read once that you once apologized to Art Spiegelman for the fact that every graphic novel is now compared to Maus. Yes, if I were him, I would have hated me. Well, why is that? Do you think that constant comparison is more of a problem for Art Spiegelman, or for other graphic novelists like yourself who might be a little bored of the comparison? No, it’s not a problem for me. Maus is a masterpiece. To be compared to Maus is nothing but a compliment. But for him that should be extremely tiring. If I was him I would have hated all these younger graphic novelists being compared to myself. So that is why I called him once, to tell him that none of this propaganda is being made by me, that it is other people who say this. He thought it was very charming. He invited me to his studio, and I met his wife and children, and we are friends. Who are some of the French graphic novelists that you admire? Joann Sfar’s book comes out in 2005 called The Rabbi Cat. This is a Jewish guy, and in the book the whole question of Judaism is evoked by his cat. He has a very ugly cat, the most ugly animal you can imagine. He can draw with ease, as fast as I’m talking. I am always interested in him. He makes stories like fairy tales, with questions like religion, and at the same time making this great drawing. (Satrapi lights another cigarette.) You know Art Spiegelman so you know how much he smokes. 12
Did you get a smoking room? No, I don’t think they have them.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (page 30)
But I smoke in the room, and I have this spray that’s supposed to stop the alarm. But I don’t think those work anyway. It’s like years ago, when you were a kid, they said there was this thing they put in the swimming pools so if you peed it was going to turn red around you. That doesn’t exist, because I have peed since then in the swimming pool and it didn’t work. So the same thing in the nonsmoking room, it’s a lie. You just need to get the spray.
moral center of both books. Are you writing more about her? The day I die, you will look at all my books together and see a big family saga. The book Embroidery, my grandmother is the main person. Everything revolves around her. I have another book coming in France in October called Chicken With Plums, about the uncle of my mother. I appear on two pages and disappear. Like Hitchcock did in his movies, I am playing a little bit like him.
You end this book just as abruptly as the last, with the last line telling us that this was the last time you would see your grandmother. And once again, things end in the airport. I hate airports. Goodbye is the worst word for me. Goodbye means they could die and I never see them again. Anyone, even you who I meet for an hour, it is a difficult thing to say. I like the word forever. Forever—we will be friends forever, I will see you forever.
When will Embroidery be out in the States? In America in 2005. It is in her living room with nine or ten women. What do nine or ten women do in an afternoon, especially when they are old? They talk about sex. And one thing leads to another and they laugh and they cry. To some people my grandmother could seem a little bit cynical. But she was not cynical. She had a great sense of morality. She wasn’t a moral person—she didn’t say “Do this, it is good, Don’t do this, it is bad,” but she always told me “Mar
Your grandmother is a sort of
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jane, if you go to a party and you don’t talk to anyone, they will say “Who does she think she is,” but if you go to a party and start laughing with everyone they will say “Oh, look at this bitch.” So, no matter what you do, if people want to talk about you they will talk about you, so do what you think is right. If you don’t feel like talking, don’t. If you feel like laughing, laugh. Because she had a great sense of justice. And she was not an educated woman. She hardly knew hard to read and write, but at the same time, what was the most important to her was justice. I remember during the war, we had this coupon for some oil and some sugar and things. We went into a shop, and there was a lady begging the guy to give her credit for a little bit of chocolate and the guy didn’t want to. And my grandmother became completely mad. For two years, every time we went into the shop, she would make something fall down in the guy’s shop, joking, and would say “You know, I am old.” Just to make this guy pay. Is the most difficult part of a translation the humor? Absolutely. The words are not the same and the feeling is not the same. You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman. She is either beautiful or faithful. So it’s better when she’s beautiful because when she’s too faithful it might be very ugly. This is French people. This translation, though, is very well made. This is my American editor, who knows me very well who has made the translation. But in any translation you lose a little bit. Have you written very much in Persian? Not really, because, well, the book Persepolis, I wrote for the other ones, not for Iranians. For
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (page 29)
Iranians I wouldn’t give so much explanation. And I speak in French, so it is now more obvious for me to write in French, and not in Persian. In a way, when I write in Persian, I think others can do it much better than me. Did you, however, feel a sense of responsibility to the Iranian people in telling these stories? Yes. You know, last year, someone from LA proposed to make a series, like Beverly Hills 90210, but happening in Iran. Based on my book. With lots of young people, and then there are some bombs. I don’t know what the basic idea was. So I imagined that they would put Jennifer Lopez in the role of my father, and it would be a whole mess. And even if they gave me two million dollars for this I wouldn’t have accepted. When you make a book like that, you have a responsibility, you cannot give it to anyone who will turn it another way. So I thought I should work with French people, and now I’m working with them, and Americans are also interested, so maybe it will be a co-production.
Speaking of Art Spiegelman, have you seen In the Shadow of No Towers yet? Yes, thank god people like him exist! I have made a bet with him. I think that Kerry will win, and he thinks that George Bush will win. So if I lose the bet I must take him to a very nice restaurant in Paris. And we both hope he will lose. So, last question. I assume you know that Kim Wilde writes gardening articles and books now? Yes, but I am much more into Iggy Pop, you know. When I was in Barnes and Noble in Chelsea in New York, they had this music that I hate, this R&B that makes me want to throw up when I hear that. So the guy asked me what music I would like and when I said Iggy Pop he laughed and that was the end of it. But then, he was expecting, like, 70 people to come, and instead more than 360 came and the whole place was full. So he was so happy about that, he said next time I am there he will have Iggy Pop playing for me, live. So some day I will have Iggy Pop play for me in Barnes and Noble.
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