Have you ever wondered about that beautiful, seemingly effortless relationship between text and image? It can be too easy to take for granted in a world where the coupling is so often employed to bamboozle, seduce and trick you in to buying and believing all sorts of things. Humans are inherently visual creatures- our brains are continually processing visual information that affects everything we do and feel- yet most of that information doesn’t even make it remotely close to  our conscious mind. Imagine if you formed conscious thoughts around every single thing you saw- exhausting. In place of focusing on absolutely everything, humans have a voracious appetite for systemised visual information that tells us the most things with the least amount of processing required. I was re-ignited to the complex wonder of the power of text and image symbols by the incredible Art Spiegelman at the Melbourne Town Hall on Tuesday night.

He strode confidently out on stage and opened with a one-liner about the amusing way punctuation was used in advertising his talk to replace the word ‘fuck. ‘ My heart melted just a little bit. Yep, the guy who wrote one of the seminal re-tellings of the Holocaust- a comic memoir dealing with his parents’ experience in Auschwitz for which he won the Pulitzer Prize- was opening up with gags about punctuation.  A sure sign of a good speaker is someone who can approach what they do with the good grace of humour, and Spiegelman did not for a second disappoint.  My friends and I were perched practically on the edge of our seats for the entire hour and a half, and were miffed when it ended- had it really been that long?

We were taken on an intimate whirlwind tour of Spiegelman’s personal history with comics, from his beginnings with children’s funnies up to more complex adult reading, like Mad Magazine. Going in to great detail to explain how extremist Christian groups in the 1950’s in the USA turned comics from a mainstream consumable shown in every newspaper across the country, into a marginalised, frowned upon form that warps children’s minds- complete, as with all good oppressive religious revolutions, with public burnings of the material-  was enthralling.

Through his talk, Spiegelman packed every panel on the big screen with beautiful testaments to the stark complexity of the relationship not only between word and image, but of people’s uneasiness with its power. For why the need to burn a thing, unless it holds great potential to influence those who experience it? The fact that these burnings happened right when the advertising industry in the US was really gearing up to take control of the entire public consciousness seems absurd, but hey- when you got the cash, you’re the one who gets to keep the wheels in motion.

I have a loving relationship with the joy of combining text and image in my own art practise, and have been reading comics throughout my life. What is strange however, is that I had never really considered the impact they have had on me. I always attributed my love of using words and pictures to talk about serious stuff to the work of appropriation artist Barbara Kruger, who I first came across when I was 16 or so. Her approach had a huge influence on me- maybe it’s because she was a woman speaking about oppression and media control, and her work represented the pain of my own experience- but it really overshadowed those endless hours I had poured over Asterix, Garfield, Peanuts, Mad Magazine and yes, even Footrot Flats, that loveable Kiwi canine. What I had sidelined as a child’s love of looking at narratives through pictures- because it was easier or more ‘fun’-Spiegelman helped me see is a part of an absorbed cultural negativity toward the form that I loved, with roots in the hysterical prohibition of comic books in the 50’s. I had never held it in high esteem, because unlike Kruger’s work, which was held in galleries and beamed on public walls, comics were dumb, inferior, and that ultimate dampener of respect- for kids.

This is indeed an aspect of my oversight of their influence, but to be fair, I also didn’t grow up in a world that paid attention to such things. I read comics because we were poor and my Mother got them for me from the op-shop for ten or twenty cents. They certainly weren’t the fetishised objects they seem to have been for a lot of other kids- books were just magical portals of escapism and I read everything I could get my hands on- magazines, novels, dictionaries, brochures (for this reason I’ve always loved the part of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, where he describes the girls’ habit of ordering travel brochures to pour over in their bedroom exile).

Spiegelman gave me that rare delight of speaking with such passion and seriousness, that he opened a window back in to my own past, where I cherished the things that let me slip completely from my own reality and into another world. He made me reconsider things I had looked over,  to reconnect with some truth about myself. This re-looking at reality lies at the fundamental core of all of his work, and apparently as we discovered, was a striking aspect of the man himself. He possesses the ability to tear at the fabric of the moralistic veneer we throw over society- he picks at the seams, sometimes with a needle, at times, a sledgehammer. The controversy he laughingly describes surrounding the Valentine’s Day cover of the New Yorker he illustrated, featuring an Orthodox Jewish man kissing a black woman is a perfect example of how he draws the real world, then delivers it back a bit like a slap in the face. Brutal, honest and revelatory.

If you haven’t read Maus (1986), one of the first ever graphic novels, that revolutionised the comic book form in the late 80’s, then you should go out quick smart and grab yourself a copy, but be warned: do not read this comic unless you are prepared to be sideswiped by a big dose of gut-wrenchingly painful and stark, beautiful humanity. If it doesn’t have you in tears at least once, I’d recommend a trip to the doctor to get your heart checked, just to make sure it’s still working in there. And if you are of the ilk who still believes comics are for kids, then may I suggest this is the book you pick up to test that theory.

Art Spiegelman: What the %!&* Happened to Comics? took place at the Melbourne Town Hall on 8 October 2013. The event was hosted by the Wheeler Centre.