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https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/15/art-spiegelman-the-us-needs-a-counter-revolution>
"When the cartoonist Art Spiegelman began dating his future wife, Françoise
Mouly, in the mid 70s, she would tell him not to worry about walking her home,
because even the New York muggers didn’t bother venturing to where she lived in
Soho. He moved in with her quite suddenly not long after, when his apartment in
Greenwich Village burned down. His landlord, who lived on the ground floor, was
a hoarder – once, when he came to collect Spiegelman’s rent, a cockroach
crawled up from under his shirt collar – and eventually his accumulated junk
caught alight.
This feels like a quintessential New York story, but then much of Spiegelman’s
life does, or at least fits with the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves
about the city. The Soho apartment Spiegelman and Mouly have lived in for five
decades is worth millions now and is surrounded by high-end designers; his
studio, down the road, is above a branch of Tiffany’s. “It’s just kind of an
embarrassment, I mean Tiffany’s is not my class,” says Spiegelman, who refers
to these flash new arrivals, dismissively, as “very fancy airport mall stores”.
The couple used to print their own “oddball” comics from a printing press that
Mouly, who had dropped out of architecture school in France, installed in their
house. Today, they are a New York art establishment power couple. Mouly is the
art editor of the
New Yorker, having been recruited by Tina Brown in the 90s,
when she was looking to make the highbrow magazine “hot”. Spiegelman, who in
1992 became the first cartoonist to win a Pulitzer prize for
Maus, a graphic
novel about his father’s memories of the Holocaust, has done more than anyone
to establish comics as a serious art form, capable of tackling difficult
political and personal subjects. The couple’s trajectory had “its own weird
logic, although it wouldn’t be anyone else’s. It’s not a ‘recipe for success’,”
Spiegelman jokes. “We were wilfully just doing what we wanted to do.”
He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee and
wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can think. He
offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering June day, but then
keeps getting distracted from making it by his own anecdotes. He takes me on an
impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb
Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous
to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living
room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of
bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking
Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying
for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to
Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room,
and pieces of art and curios everywhere."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
