Chicago Journal

Art of Spiegelman

In the Quad Club lobby five students wait for Art Spiegelman, the creative-writing program’s 2004 Kestnbaum writer in residence. Fifteen minutes into the scheduled start of their small workshop with the graphic novelist, third-year Iana Dikidjieva passes around her surreal sketches and writing snippets. First-year Sophie Hunter scans them and asks, “Have you ever seen that book Insanely Twisted Rabbits? This reminds me of it.” Dikidjieva claps her hands, smiles, and blows Hunter kisses for the compliment.

Finally Spiegelman descends the staircase. “You guys are down here?” he says apologetically. “I’ve been waiting in my room.” Faded black from the gray strands in his wispy hair to his worn Lee jeans, he leads them to his corner suite. As writer in residence he is giving a lecture, sitting on a panel, having lunch with 20 students, and holding three workshops—one on graphics, one on writing, and this afternoon’s mix of both. More than 30 students applied for the 15 workshop slots and the chance to be critiqued by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Maus, the graphic novel about his father’s Holocaust survival.

Spiegelman takes a wooden chair by the desk and fires up a Camel Light; the students sit on a couch, a chair, the floor. Taking the top folder, he turns to first-year Ted Anderson, who’s begun a graphic novel about a blind girl. He’s included rough sketches, but Anderson doesn’t consider himself an artist and wants someone else to illustrate the book.

Spiegelman tries to steer him away from that idea. “Comics is one of the few places you can make a world that’s yours.” Besides drawing, he says, a comic-strip artist can use the size of each box, the size and style of the font, to convey meaning. “Because of the subject matter,” he continues, “which is about not seeing, I can see a series of black boxes with balloons, a photograph now and then when you switch from her point of view. That would be a way to make something visible that’s not.”

The next folder in the pile belongs to Rich Wang, a second-year who wrote a short story specifically for the workshop. “Your writing,” Spiegelman notes, “has a transparency that I was so grateful to find.” The ending, in which the protagonist “thinks” he hears the other character whisper “I love you,” needs help, the group decides. “It’s a real ending, but it would be nice to have it not be so sentimental,” Spiegelman says. “Since everything else is so relatively precise, the end gets soft by having ambiguity.”

They move on to Dikidjieva, who sits on the floor hugging her knees. “Are you from Eastern Europe?” asks Spiegelman, who was born in Stockholm and raised in New York. “Yes, from Bulgaria,” she answers. “Your popular culture is so different than if you’d grown up in Chicago,” he says. “It moves into surrealism and the fable.” Her drawings—a platform shoe with a chimney head, sitting on books and smoking a pipe; teeth with wings—have “a spark,” he says, “but it doesn’t seem like you’re invested in it.” “Right,” she admits. “It’s all fragments.” He suggests she keep trying; eventually she might connect the pieces or by sheer volume have a worthy collection.

Hunter’s CD images, meanwhile, have loaded onto Spiegelman’s laptop: photos of her Los Angeles graffiti, black-and-white photos from Mexico, sketches of drawing-class nudes. “The graffiti is the most accomplished of your work,” says Spiegelman. But the art is “all over the place—you’re sending out little probes.” Recalling Anderson’s book, he suggests, “You might be perfect for drawing blind people.”

It’s MFA student John Preus’s turn. He’s made a five-minute animated film—using images he drew with a mouse in Photoshop—that plays on Spiegelman’s laptop. As the Crow Flies begins with a close-up of a hanging cocoon—taken from a photo, he says, of the bodies of four U.S. security guards murdered March 31 in Fallujah, Iraq. An animated crow then flies out of a field and morphs into various scenes such as a person whacking the crow with a sword or two Arab women whispering.

Besides suggesting Preus use an easier tool than a mouse—a stylus and tablet might be quicker and less awkward—Spiegelman offers nothing but praise. “The transformations felt so logical,” he says, noting his own foray into 9/11-inspired art. Preus’s film, he says, “seems so focused, like it has a motor.” “That’s about the biggest compliment you could have given me,” Preus says. “I struggled with that.”

The workshop over, Spiegelman has an hour before his Court Theatre lecture. For the students in the Quad Club suite, his personal attention has been the highlight of the day.—A.M.B.