Acclaimed cartoonist Art Spiegelman on keeping comics daring

Celebrated cartoonist and counter-culture icon Art Spiegelman joins Shad to discuss his evolving medium and why comics should always retain a sense of danger.

For fifty years now, Spiegelman has tried to jolt his readers into thinking differently about the world. From his defiant comics magazine RAW to his grotesque but wonderful Garbage Pail Kids, the artist is the master of turning lines on paper into a mirror on society. 

In 1992, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for his genre-busting graphic novel Maus, a harrowing account of his parents' life under Nazi rule in Auschwitz.

WEB EXTRAS | See a gallery of Spiegelman's works, provided by the Art Gallery of Ontario, below. Plus, scroll on to read some stand-out quotes from the interview. 

The quotable Spiegelman

"Disaster is my muse."

On newspapers refusing to republish the controversial Charlie Hedbo cartoons: "That's bull-blank, as they say in free speech land ... I'm so filled with expletives."

"There's a certain point at which you have to stand for something. And instead of standing for something, The New York Times gave me a double-whammy. They said: 'we don't need to show it, we can describe it.' That's just not true of pictures."

"If [The New York Times wants] to be — and if Canadian newspapers want to be — newspapers of record, you don't send people to the internet. Because then why the heck should they come back to you?"

On the NYT's decision to give its Op-Ed space to the leader of France's far right Front National Leader Marine Le Pen: "This is a fascist dressed up in a suit ... [Jean-Marie Le Pen's] daughter is more sophisticated. Second generation fascist ... Marine Le Pen is couching the same poisons in fancier designer bottles."