You consciously tried to inject elements of Cubism and Art Deco into your work.
I'm still kind of studying it now again, and kinda figuring out how that thing worked. Probably the earliest piece in the book is the Maus strips. In terms of content, if we're talking about how this comics stuff is words and pictures and various chemical combinations, in terms of content, Maus was definitely moving into turf that wasn't Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates or Flakey Foont. Nothing wrong with it, I love that stuff. But this content wasn't there. It looked out of place in the funny animals comic that had a lead story by Crumb about these two fox guys chasing this big-legged, big-assed chicken girl, then they come up to the apartment and they're eating her, but not sexually, because of course they're foxes. So, content wise, yes, but in terms of the style it was only slightly tamped down. But the strip that really made a difference was the one about my mother's suicide, it's 'cause that one really erupted without me even knowing if I would publish it. It was like I'd been primed to get to this spot in a sense as a cartoonist, but didn't really have it happen until something overwhelming that I had suppressed came back. At that point I was using a different visual vocabulary than the artists who came before me. It was one more informed by the painters I happened to have an affinity with. Because ultimately, George Grosz, Max Beckman, and Otto Dix looked a lot like Chester Gould to me: it was just Dick Tracy bigger and with more color variation. And narratively, I was relying on things I had been looking at when I discovered work by artists like Bernard Krigstein, a comic book artist who had started as a painter. He was bringing a visual vocabulary that wasn't the norm. Like instead of making little whizz lines behind a character, he would echo "Nude Descending a Staircase" as a way of showing motion. The drawing style changed from strip to strip. Not very prolific — and not very funny, usually — but nevertheless, within his zone, opening up new territories. Allowed me to open up something that really does, even now, feel like something. Paris in the '20s seemed almost as exciting as San Francisco in the '60s. Discovering Cezanne and Picasso, and learning not to think of them as charlatans. Probably one of the more difficult ones in the '78 book was "Don't Get Around Much Anymore." It's a one page thing, and I was really just trying to see why comics couldn't go into the same area that painters and writers had gone into. From the Braque-Picasso Twins to Gertrude Stein and beyond that. Really breaks space and time, and words and pictures away from each other, so there's a different kind of entry into space and mood than comics gave.
You said your colleagues in the underground scene weren't too interested...
I don't remember getting much positive reinforcement. I also don't remember anyone saying, 'Hey, he's on to something!' But when somebody, namely Justin Green, said, 'autobiography,' that's what I'm doing, and confessional creepy autobiography, it opened up a brand new continent in comics. That's still inhabited. And growing. Now I can see that a lot of cartoonists over the years have made use of real discoveries that were happening in that page. But it wasn't at the time. It was more like, 'That thing you did of Fatty Arbuckle fucking Virginia Whateverherlastnamewas, you should do more like that!" So this was just more like Spiegelman on a bad drug or a bender.
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