Do you see any drawbacks to comics are now "art" and "literature"?
Years ago, even when we were working on Arcade magazine in San Francisco, I consciously wrote in some notebook and talked about the idea that this was a sort of Faustian deal I was trying to strike. That, if comics are no longer the dominant mode of mass media, which they had been at the turn of the 20th century, and when comic books were burgeoning in the '40s, they were read in staggering numbers. TV changed that. Shrinkage of newspaper space devoted to comics changed that. And, at that point, comics could no longer be that type of mass, mass, mass media. And at that point, if one could forge a deal with universities, libraries, museums, and bookstores, one could have a franchise on staying alive. What usually happens is, when movies came along, and got called photoplays, they almost put plays out of business but then found their own zone, which was not a photographed play, and last time I looked the other was still around. Similarly, our medium has to find another function after it's no longer just mass media. Usually that's art making, or it just dies as a medium. So I knew that there was a problem in that. Part of comics' greatest vitality is that they don't have the constraints that high-culture workers work under as they appeal to rarefied tastes. And that part of the vitality of a comic strip has always been its raucousness. And, on the other hand, if the medium gets to stay alive, then the Faustian deal is worth it., because then there can be cartoonist who say 'I wanna do something about a pig fucking my grandmother.' And the museums will embrace it or not. And if they don't, that's cool, because now there's room for that to exist in a new electrical field. So it's all part of the evolution. But with certain works, they can only happen with a skillful audience. And when Maus came out, it did open up things — Maus was done in a way as a corrective that I found myself in a cul-de-sac with Breakdowns. Work that demanded a sort of sophisticated eyeballs, and not an obvious way to beckon those eyeballs toward it. So in Maus, I was using the lessons I learned in Breakdowns, spinning them in reverse to deliver what people seem to want from their comics: a story. Now, in 2008, it seems possible for Breakdowns to come out and find more than 4,000 readers that were first around.
In one interview aboutIn the Shadow of No Towers, you talked about "intentionally trying to disorient" people. Is that something you do a lot.
Well, I wanted to express my own disorientation in No Towers, for sure. And even in the Breakdowns work, there's a kind of disorientation where you have to figure out what it is, and as you find out, I think you get re-orientated. What I do when I'm not making comics, it seems, is yakking about them on a book tour, and at that point helping those who can't easily re-orient. But now, this comes out after a generation of artists absorbs the work that was happening in underground comics, the work that I did, and others, that allows somebody, after reading Chris Ware, it shouldn't be that hard to read Breakdowns from the 1970s. It's not an unreasonable demand.
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