Below is, as you’ll see, an extremely informal translation, found on a website previously unknown to me (bunnymechanics.com), of an interview Art Spiegelman, author of the ur-graphic novel Maus, gave to the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, soon after his resignation in protest from the New Yorker magazine. It seems to me to be a small sign of the cultural times — on the one hand, a highlighting of the meekness, mildness, general blandness, not to say in many cases actual cowardice of the mainstream media in the face of possibly the most radically reactionary government the United States has ever had; and on the other hand, of the small, brave, individual acts of protest and challenge that sooner or later, cumulatively, may change the mood of a nation. Tom
Art Spiegelman talks about his resignation
An interview with Corriere della SeraIt was termed “a divorce of historic proportions”, of the kind that leaves a deep cultural mark, and gives rise to debate that continues for months. Art Spiegelman, the legendary New York illustrator who for ten full years put his name to the most provocative and incisive covers of the New Yorker, has decided to leave the prestigious magazine, in opposition (protest) to what he calls “the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush era.”
“The decision to leave was mine alone,” the author of Maus, the saga of Jewish mice exterminated by Nazi cats that won him the Pulitzer Prize (the first given to a comic book), explained in an interview with the Corriere della Sera. “The director of the New Yorker, David Remnick, was shocked when I announced my resignation.
To read more of the Spiegelman interview click here
It was termed “a divorce of historic proportions”, of the kind that leaves a deep cultural mark, and gives rise to debate that continues for months. Art Spiegelman, the legendary New York illustrator who for ten full years put his name to the most provocative and incisive covers of the New Yorker, has decided to leave the prestigious magazine, in opposition (protest) to what he calls “the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush era.”
“The decision to leave was mine alone,” the author of Maus, the saga of Jewish mice exterminated by Nazi cats that won him the Pulitzer Prize (the first given to a comic book), explained in an interview with the Corriere della Sera. “The director of the New Yorker, David Remnick, was shocked when I announced my resignation.
To read more of the Spiegelman interview click here