Art Spiegelman’s Comics Meta-Vocabulary

Art Spiegelman's One Row - cleverly self-conscious comic about how comics work and don't - in Raw No.5, printed in Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps

One post isn’t enough to cover Art Spiegelman’s entire oevre… so I am going to try to touch on a few things and call it a post. Easier said (written) than done.

Over the past month, I re-read pretty much everything I own that Spiegelman has done (see list below.) I scanned a few things for my mutli-panel pan inventory.  Then I walked into a bookstore and saw MetaMaus – Spiegelman’s new 300-page book that explores what makes Maus Maus. I bought it immediately, and spent a lazy day reading it… and then dove back in and read most of Maus again, seeing all kinds of wonderful things that Spiegelman had hidden in plain sight. 

Artistic Inspiration from Mehmet Sander

A little over a year ago, I wrote a short blog post about Mehmet Sander. I just came across a few more videos of his work on-line, so I got inspired to write a bit more about him now. Mehmet is a choreographer-dance who taught me a lot. Above is a video documenting his piece Obtuse Space – performed by six dancers, including Mehmet, on a set that includes a flat and a sloped area.

I met him when I was living in Long Beach in the 1990s. He ran the Mehmet Sander Dance Company, which I ended up volunteering and helping out with administratively for a couple years, mostly schlepping around sets, designing and selling T-shirts, and sitting in on rehearsals… sometime sketching, sometimes just being inspired.