Do you think you'd be what you are today, if you saw the world in 3D?
Well, if I was four inches taller, life would be different. [Laughs] I'm sure that it has something to do with it. Each of these things you're bringing up are all very specific thoughts and memories, and I think, distilled, it says all I can say about it. Being bad at baseball wasn't OK. And you had to find something else that was OK, in order to not get beat up on, and the library was a real haven, and that drawing cartoons seemed real. Whatever those 12 panels were, they had a lot of knots being made into something basic about how I understand myself.
You say that when you were in your mid/late 20s, working onBreakdowns, you had big plans that it would be a "central artifact in the history of modernism." And it wasn't. At least not yet.
Nope. I remember moving back to New York when I was 25. The stuff in this book spans from when I was 24, until I was just about 30. I'd been working in cartoons for about a decade before that, and I remember going back to New York City, fleeing from Arcade magazine that I was doing with Bill Griffith — I got the be the bad cop, 3000 miles away, while he was the good cop back in San Francisco — going to the museum of modern art and trying to get an artist's pass to get into the museum free, and it was a really humiliating experience. They were asking for my gallery shows, and I'd had two shows that I'd had pieces in, and it wasn't enough for them, and they wanted to see slides, so I had to shoot slides of my comics, even though they have to be printed, and I remember, literally, standing in front of the Museum of Modern Art building, shaking my fist at them, saying, 'You cocksuckers! Some day I'm gonna make you pay double for my work! Double!" And they did. It was one of those triumphant moments. And when I started working on Maus, applying for New York artists grants, Council of the Arts program, they didn't know what to do with my work, so they put it in "mixed-media" with Nam June Paik, and that had nothing to with nothing. I felt rather outside that particular set of doors.
So whenMaus comes out, and it's a huge success, and you win the Pulitzer prize, is that a huge vindication?
Well, yeah, there's various triumphs in the world of people who can't play baseball, that was one of 'em. But I got into the MoMA earlier than Maus, for finishing the RAW magazines that they wanted for their library. And they were out of print, so I could charge double out-of-print prices. And then I was able to get in, no problem. And they're very nice now.
"Comics are thriving while the rest of the world goes to shit."
This is like El Ultimo. There's never been as many as now. In fact, it makes me think that comics will soon turn to shit, just like the rest of the world. But, no, there's great stuff happening now.
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