Collected Prose

history will remember him: as the man who proved that comic books are not necessarily for children, that a complex tale can be told in a series of small rectangles filled with words and pictures—and attain the full emotional and intellectual power of great literature.
    But there is another side to Spiegelman as well, one which has increasingly come to dominate his energies in the post- Maus years: the artist as social gadfly and critic, as commentator on current events. As Spiegelman’s friend and admirer, I have always found it odd that he should have found a home for that aspect of his work at The New Yorker . The magazine was born in the Jazz Age and has been a fixture on the American scene for more than seventy-five years, rolling off the presses every week as the country has lived through wars, depressions, and violent upheavals, steadfastly maintaining a tone that is at once cool, sophisticated, and complacent. The New Yorker has published some excellent journalism over the years, but incisive and disturbing as many of those reports have been, the pages on which they appear have always been flanked by advertisements for luxury goods and Caribbean vacations, adorned with blithely amusing cartoons about the foibles of middle-class life. That is The New Yorker style. The world might be going to hell, but once we open the pages of our favorite weekly, we understand that hell is for other people. Nothing has changed for us—and nothing ever will. We are suave, tranquil, and urbane. Not to worry.
    But Spiegelman wants to worry. That is his job. He has embraced worry as his life’s calling, and he frets over every injustice he perceives in the world, froths diligently at the follies and stupidities of men in power, refuses to take things in his stride. Not without wit, of course, and not without his trademark comic touch—but still, the last thing anyone could call this man is complacent. Good for The New Yorker , then, for having had the wisdom to put him on its payroll. And good for Spiegelman for having reinvigorated the spirit of that stodgy bastion of good taste.
    Contributing both to the inside and the outside of the magazine, he has produced approximately seventy works for The New Yorker , toiling under the reigns of two chief editors, Tina Brown and David Remnick. These works include single-page drawings and paintings (among them a bitter sendup of Life is Beautiful , a film that Spiegelman abhorred), extended articles on a variety of subjects presented in comic-book form (neo-Nazi hooliganism in Rostock, Germany; homages to Harvey Kurtzman, Maurice Sendak, and Charles Schultz; an attack on George W. Bush and the bogus elections of 2000; observations on pop culture as reflected in the behavior of his own children), and close to forty covers. The outside of a magazine is its most visible feature, the signature mark of its philosophy and editorial content, the dress it wears when it goes out in public. Until Spiegelman came along, The New Yorker had been famous—even hilariously famous—for the blandness of its cover art. Smug and subdued, confident in the loyalty of its wide readership, issue after issue would turn up on the newsstands sporting sedate autumn scenes, snowy winter landscapes, suburban lawns, and depopulated city streets—imagery so trite and insipid as to induce drowsiness in the eye of the beholder. Then, on February 15, 1993, for an issue that fortuitously coincided with Valentine’s Day, Spiegelman’s first cover appeared, and The New Yorker exploded into a new New Yorker , a magazine that suddenly found itself part of the contemporary world.
    It was a bad time for the city. Crown Heights, an impoverished neighborhood in Brooklyn inhabited by African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, was on the brink of a racial war. A black child had been run over by a Jew, a Jew had been murdered in retaliation by an angry mob of blacks, and for many days running a fierce agitation dominated the streets, with threats of further violence from both camps. The mayor at the time, David Dinkins, was a decent man, but he was also a cautious man, and he lacked the political skill needed to step in quickly and defuse the crisis. (That failure probably cost him victory in the next election—which led to the harsh regime of Rudolph Giuliani, who served as mayor for the next eight years.) New York, for all its ethnic diversity, is a surprisingly tolerant city, and most people make an effort most of the time to