Art of the New Yorker

The cover of the May 17 issue of the New Yorker, by Marc Rosenthal, is one of the good ones. Its washed-out colouring recalls the tones of the magazine's covers from the 1950s, but with something of a Spiegelman / Mouly sensibility to it that sent me to the shelves to see if his work might have appeared elsewhere under their imprimatur. And there he is: not in any issue of Raw in my possession, but in the second of Spiegelman's Little Lit anthologies (the one with the Charles Burns cover), doing a single page of "jokes". This often happens to me: I find something I love, and then discover that Spiegelman has already been there before: Ben Katchor is one case in point; Richard McGuire another. Even Chris Ware was in Raw way before he became a megastar.

You can say what you like about Art Spiegelman (or, in the case of Ted Rall in the Village Voice a while back, what you don't like about him), but where would we be without him? No Raw; no Little Lit; no Maus (still the standard bearer, in the English-speaking world, of what the humble comic book is capable of). Thanks to Tina Brown's inspired appointment of both Speigelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, to the New Yorker in the early 90s, a vast array of otherwise marginalised comic-book writers, illustrators, and graphic designers have had access to the kind of broad, mainstream exposure a magazine like the New Yorker can provide, at no real cost to themselves in terms of reputation, degree of street credibility, "selling out" accusations and the like. This is a rare example of something that might justify that appalling expression "a win-win situation".

I know that September 11 was a terrible event; I wasn't in New York that day. Spiegelman was. So it's hard for me to criticise him either for the trauma he clearly suffered or for his subsequent anger (both of which come over, a little too clearly, in "In the Shadow of No Towers"); but walking out on the New Yorker in the face of what he perceived to be that magazine's pandering to the "agenda" of the Bush administration, well, I think that is a pretty tough argument to sustain, particularly if one considers the magazine's coverage of the state of the world in the almost three years since the planes hit, and its hardly flattering portrait of the President over the same time, more so in recent months as various chickens have come home to roost. Now, more than ever, the New Yorker needs Spiegelman. It is having its moment in the sun, thanks to Seymour M Hersh's goal-scoring ability. There is nobody else that I can think of at the magazine whose covers are capable of combining such superb artistic skills with an uncanny knack (partly, I assume, owing to name recognition, which is something few illustrators carry) for creating controversy.

But maybe, too, he needs the magazine. "In the Shadow of No Towers", at least those episodes that have appeared in the London Review of Books, which I assume not to be the whole story, is just too angry, and too unfocussed and unrestrained in its anger and its bitterness; the edge which is usually apparent in Spiegelman's more "political" covers for the New Yorker seems to have been blunted.