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AW seems to confuse a lot of people. Is it a comic book? Is it an art magazine? It's too "upscale" to be easily dismissed as garbage, the way many otherwise reasonable people have become accustomed to thinking about comics, but it has an urgency that makes it seem out of place on a coffee table. Of course it has a following- Raw has an 80.7% share of the Alienated and Anxious market-but its a difficult magazine to define. Our stationery announces it as "The Graphix Magazine That Changes Its Subtitle Every Issue." And that much, at least, is true.
We called the first issue "The Graphix Magazine for Postponed Suicides," taking our cue from E. M. Cioran's punchy one-liner, "Every book is a postponed suicide." The first issue came together on a dare. It was New Year's Eve, 1980. The flaming promise of Underground Comix-Zap, Young Lust, and others-had fizzled into cold, glowing embers. Underground comics had offered something really new: comics by adults, for adults;comics that weren't under any obligation to be funny, or escapist pulp; comics unselfconciously redefining what comics could be, by smashing formal and stylistic, as well as cultural and political, taboos. At last, there was a comics avant-garde. comics were coming of age, achieving a boisterous adolescence, maybe even full adulthood. It was an exciting time to be a cartoonist. Then, somehow, what had seemed like a revolution simply deflated into a lifestyle. Underground comics were stereotyped as dealing only with Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills. They got stuffed to the back of the cultural closet, along with bong pipes and love beads, as Things Started to Get Uglier.
In 1975, Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, and I Art, convinced one of the comic publishers, the Print Mint, to let us produce a quarterly magazine, tighter, more "professional" than the underground comics. We called it Arcade, and we thought of it as a lifeboat for the best of the San Francisco-based cartoonists. We actually came out on schedule, every three months, for almost two years-a considerable achievement, considering the anarchistic group of artists involved and the lack of enthusiasm in the market place. But the pressures were too great. Griffith seemd to be developing an ulcer. I doubled my nicotine habit and ran back to New York. The lifeboat sank and I vowed never to get involved with putting out a magazine ever again.
In New York I met Francoise, a French architecture student from the Beaux-Arts, AWOL in Manhattan, working as an electrician, house painter, architectural model-maker, cigarette girl at Grand Central, bilingual secretary, "actress" in a Richard Foreman play-doing whatever she could without a Green Card to keep the rent on her SoHo loft paid while playing hooky and exploring Manhattan.
She had a passion for literature. She liked comics, and, like most Europeans, didn't look at them condescendingly. Cartoonists in France, inspired by the American underground, had begun doing comics for adults in a much more commercially viable way than was possible in the United States. In 1977, when I went to Europe with Francoise, she showed me comics, on a myriad of subjects in a myriad of styles, in hardcovers, on good paper, in every bookstore. There were successful comics magazines on every newsstand. I'd died and gone to comic-book heaven. Of course, as I looked past my initial impressions, I found that lots of the work was mediocre-but it was a higher level of mediocrity than I had ever seen before. And a small percentage of it turned out to be first-rate. Francoise looked at the comics she took for granted with a new enthusiasm. We discovered the work of Jacques Tardi, whose ironically self-deprecating genre stories with a feeling for graphic style and storytelling have made him one of France's most popular, respected, and imitated comic-book artists. -UP- |
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We discovered Mariscal's work, an infectiously happy bebop synthesis of Steinberg, Herriman, and Crumb, being produced in the giddy atmosphere of post-Franco Barcelona. Then there were the Flemish artists, Joost Swarte and Ever Meulen, masterful stylists of Cartoon Precisionism. They somehow combined De Stijl and Art Deco with the style of old Belgian kid comics like Tintin, to come up with strong, subtle, very modern graphics. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, we discovered the wild, iconoclastic, cartoon-inspired art gangsterism of Kiki Picasso, Bruno Richard, and Pascal Doury. Great things were happening. Why wasn't any of it available in the United States? Back in New York, when anyone would come to visit, we'd start dragging out piles of books, posters, and magazines we'd amassed in Europe. "Look at this. And this. And this." We'd leave everybody with their eyeballs hanging out and swollen. Then we'd have to spend hours putting all the printed matter back on the shelves, only to yank it out again when the next pair of eyeballs dropped by. It was an exhausting and inefficient way to diseminate work. During this period, Fancoise had gotten interested in publishing and she decided to learn from the ground up. She bought a small second-hand printing press and moved it into the loft. She took a vocational training course in Bed-Stuy and and learned about printing and production. She picked up layout and design skills. She started by publishing postcards and booklets by our European and American cartoonist friends, and, by necessity, learned about distribution and the business end of publishing. Meanwhile, I had started working on my comic-book novel, Maus, in between freelance jobs and didn't realize I was being inexorably pulled toward the one thing I'd vowed I'd never try again-making a comics magazine. So it was New Year's Eve, 1980. We were at a party and a little bit drunk. For the thousandth time we began bemoaning the fact that there ought to be a magazine that would print the kind of work that interested us, and somehow, by the end of the evening, we were talking about how we were going to publish such a magazine. Just once. As a prototype. To show what someone ought to be doing. After all, we had some "mad money" from one of Francoise's more lucrative publishing projects, an annual map of our Soho neighborhood. Why not? "Just once...." At the time, there were a number of new magazines beginning to appear in our local bookshops: excitingly laid-out, they were devoted to punk and new-wave music, fashion, architecture, art, "lifestyles," even gourmet bathing." Since they were all over-sized they ended up next to each other on the stands, even though they all had in common besides size were a certain aura of new-wave hipness and sadly, a lack of hard content. One of the reasons Arcade had failed as a newsstand magazine had been that newsdealers couldn't figure out where to put such an anomoly. By going large-size with RAW, we could sit next to the other new-wave 'zines and have a luxurious format to show off the work. Maybe nobody would notice that there was hard content in RAW until it was too late. With relatively few missteps, we were able to find the kind of work we wanted. The work we liked seemed very urban, personal, with an edge. Each artist had to have his own individual stylistic voice. We naturally included work by European artists we had become aware of and solicited pages from underground-comix cronies-specifically Mark Beyer, whose angst-ridden nightmares had first been published in Arcade. We became aware of several other American artists whose work obviously belonged in RAW (since it obviously didn't belong anywhere else), including Daz, Drew Freidman, and Mark Newgarden, all three of whom I met while teaching at the school of Visual Arts. Our job was to orchestrate these voices together into a coherent whole.....
Art Speigelman, 1987.
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