And then there's MICA. Students in George Ciscle's Exhibition Development Seminar are preparing Comics on the Verge, a huge graphic arts show featuring many of the biggest names in American alternative comics today. Guest curator Paul Candler, who recently co-curated Raw, Boiled, and Cooked/Bay Area Blast at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is working with students in the class to put on a world class exhibition. As Candler wrote for his last show, "It seems every twenty years or so, underground comics go through another cultural revolution...the underground has [now] gone 'overground,' with a proliferation of new creators who can be seen in media all across the board. …[C]omics are in the public eye like they've never been before."

Thirty-nine artists, including Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, Brian Ralph, Debbie Dreschler, Mary Fleener, Carol Lay, Ho Che Anderson, Charles Burns, Mark Newgarden, and Gary Panter will grace the Decker Gallery's walls. Satellite exhibits at UMBC, the Park School, and Creative Alliance will explore other aspects of comics as a vital force in art. "There's been a long history of comic art in Baltimore. I'm learning more and more," says Ciscle, "but the influence of comics is not unique to here. It's national, international, really. As a teacher and a curator I constantly see it in what our students are doing."

Add to all this a related Maryland Humanities Council-funded weekend conference in February, with a small press expo and sessions focusing on such issues as racial and gender identity in comics, and the "Babblelab," a collaborative project on the theme of gravity by MICA students, sculptor Wu Wing Yee, and illustration great Henrik Drescher (see www.babblelab.com/students.html). It's clear that from now on everything's coming up thought clouds and (cartoon) roses.

Spiegelman Talks

As a something. I don't even know what to call it, cause it's gotta be printed that size (i.e. larger than standard newspaper—ED.). The scale of the work doesn't reduce well. I got so interested in the layout's design at the time that I didn't think of it in modules that could then become a book. So I'm stuck with a very peculiar book that I've just finished designing. The problem with it is that it's too big: any bookstore that puts it in the window will not get sunlight. It will also probably end up being expensive, which isn't what I necessarily want. But one way or another I need to collect it now, because it makes sense as a set. They build on each other so the ten are better than any two or three. I'm now hoping to find a publisher so something will come out by next September.

Are you satisfied with the level of exposure that the work is getting in the U.S. and abroad?

Well, abroad its been fine. I couldn't have been more visible in Europe. It was attended to in serious quarters- people looked at and discussed it. Here, I'm glad to be in The Forward. It's a way of getting it printed, but it really is a backwater in a certain sense. A few of the pages have appeared in one alternative paper or another—like, the L.A. Weekly's run a few or the Funny Times, printed really badly, printed oddly, without any rhythm so you can't find them. So it's better than a kick in the head, but it's not what I was hoping for.

Do you think your case for getting it printed has been helped or hindered by your recent resignation from The New Yorker?

Neither. I think the problem was that what I was doing wasn't going to fit in any logical venues. At this point it probably must have some kind of covert reputation. I don't follow these things. I'm just kind of in my own private bubble at home. I assume there are people who would like to see it and I'd like to make a book out of it.

There's a title of one of the RAW anthologies that I love—RAW: The Graphic Aspirin for War Fever. Do you feel like humor and cartooning in the U.S. today are putting up a good fight against the Bush regime, or is economic censorship taking its toll?

It's taking its toll, but in the alternative press there's a few pages by various people that I've really liked. Tom Tomorrow is doing a good job. But even though I guess there's humor here and there in the strips I'm doing, I'm not that interested in making jokes. It's a by-product. The same way you have to ink what you pencil, you have to put a wise-crack in to keep it all coherent and working in the idiom of comics referring back to earlier comics. But as a civilian I'm glad for whatever I can get. Not so much in comics, but The Daily Show became like a lifeline during this Iraq war because it was the only news show I could watch that I didn't have to talk back to. There were some amazing things that gave you the feeling "O.K., you're not alone"—and that's an important thing to know.

Well, all almost all books now have short shelf lives. They're like what magazines used to be. But the whole thing that allowed the children's book to develop in America was the fact that it was in a backwater of publishing in which people who were interested in making picture books could do them, and they stayed around for a long time. It's very recent, this idea that every season has to have 5,000 new kid's books and whatever happened last year is old news and only one or two books manage to survive long enough to become classics. (Ian Falconer's) Olivia will now be a classic 'cause it sold well enough. I don't think most of Maurice Sendak's books could have happened in a later generation...the fact that they were able to insist on their own permanence. Knowing that you wouldn't sell much the first year, but by the twelth year you'd actually have some word of mouth that would have helped you, helped create the aesthetic of what the classic picture book in America was, and still, to a degree is. So, I think we are just following a fairly firm tradition of children's books although it certainly isnt the tradition of American comic books. They were about as ephemeral as it gets.

Is less attention given to your work for children?

It's always confusing to me. I once did this comic strip interview with Sendak for the New Yorker, in which he shrugged it off, saying "Children's books, adult books! It's just marketing!" There's a continuum of this stuff. I'm annoyed when people get this hip smirk and say "Oh, yeah. Little Lit is really for grown-ups." It was designed to be understood by somebody who didn't have the wide frame of reference that an adult has, but not thereby being done as if you were shouting for the hard of hearing or talking to dogs. It just assumes a certain native intelligence. On the flip side of the same issue, I was annoyed when I first found out that kids were reading Maus because at that point it was very important to me that, no, I'm making comics for grown-ups. It was "Why do they assume that because it's comics format it's for kids?"

You get interviewed a lot. Is there a question that you've heard enough and wish people would stop asking?

It's always like "So why did you use mice?" at which point I just go to sleep. But I'm willing to confess to anything when asked.