More on Spiegelman's talk
Apr. 4th, 2008 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbySince I know that there are fellow Spiegelman fans about:
He's brilliant, really, and very funny. The event itself was sponsored by Hillel, which gave me pause (and was interesting, since their politics are substantially to the right of Spiegelman's) but my love for Maus and underground comics in general outweighs my being very, very uncomfortable in that audience. Also, there were a fair number of comic book geeks in attendance, which balanced things out a bit.
The subject of the talk was "Forbidden Images." So he began his talk with this slide:
...and went on to relate it to the caricatures of Mohammad, and Iran's anti-Semitic cartoon contest, and horror comics from the 1940s, and the New Yorker, and Mad Magazine. (And his own work, of course.) He talked a bit about semiotics and the relationship between words and images: how images become shorthand for concepts, except of course that's problematic because of how shorthand transmits cultural norms and stereotypes.
Probably the most interesting bit was about how Mad Magazine changed the cultural landscape. He talked about his own discovery of horror comics that had since been banned (comics were sanitized in the 1950s, but his father was cheap, so he bought Wee Art old comics with damaged covers that happened to be about playing baseball with human heads), so when Mad came out with its blatant agenda to shock, it gave an entire generation counter-cultural ideas. It introduced irony and anti-authoritarianism to the visual landscape.
And so, he said, it was read by people who later created underground comics. But it was also read by Karl Rove and people who would eventually become advertising execs. Irony becomes co-opted, and now we're in a post-ironic era.
He also pissed off a few in the audience, I think, by bringing up Palestine by Joe Sacco as an example of the brilliance of the new breed of comics. (Persepolis as well, of course, which was very much influenced by Maus.) You could hear the gasps; it was very funny.
Anyway, I wish he'd put the slides online because it's really much easier to analyze controversial images when they're actually in front of you. I've been on a comic-reading binge lately (The Watchmen, DMZ, and Transmetropolitan, all of which do very interesting things with the genre) so I'm all about babbling on the subject.
When you look at a work of art and don't understand it, you think you're stupid. When you look at a comic and don't understand it, you think the cartoonist is stupid.
He's brilliant, really, and very funny. The event itself was sponsored by Hillel, which gave me pause (and was interesting, since their politics are substantially to the right of Spiegelman's) but my love for Maus and underground comics in general outweighs my being very, very uncomfortable in that audience. Also, there were a fair number of comic book geeks in attendance, which balanced things out a bit.
The subject of the talk was "Forbidden Images." So he began his talk with this slide:
...and went on to relate it to the caricatures of Mohammad, and Iran's anti-Semitic cartoon contest, and horror comics from the 1940s, and the New Yorker, and Mad Magazine. (And his own work, of course.) He talked a bit about semiotics and the relationship between words and images: how images become shorthand for concepts, except of course that's problematic because of how shorthand transmits cultural norms and stereotypes.
Probably the most interesting bit was about how Mad Magazine changed the cultural landscape. He talked about his own discovery of horror comics that had since been banned (comics were sanitized in the 1950s, but his father was cheap, so he bought Wee Art old comics with damaged covers that happened to be about playing baseball with human heads), so when Mad came out with its blatant agenda to shock, it gave an entire generation counter-cultural ideas. It introduced irony and anti-authoritarianism to the visual landscape.
And so, he said, it was read by people who later created underground comics. But it was also read by Karl Rove and people who would eventually become advertising execs. Irony becomes co-opted, and now we're in a post-ironic era.
He also pissed off a few in the audience, I think, by bringing up Palestine by Joe Sacco as an example of the brilliance of the new breed of comics. (Persepolis as well, of course, which was very much influenced by Maus.) You could hear the gasps; it was very funny.
Anyway, I wish he'd put the slides online because it's really much easier to analyze controversial images when they're actually in front of you. I've been on a comic-reading binge lately (The Watchmen, DMZ, and Transmetropolitan, all of which do very interesting things with the genre) so I'm all about babbling on the subject.
When you look at a work of art and don't understand it, you think you're stupid. When you look at a comic and don't understand it, you think the cartoonist is stupid.
