IT´S ONLY WORDS: Art Spíegelman

And what’s interesting to me is how great cartoons are at doing that, where it puts things in a high relief. And when they’re in a high relief, you can see them. You can then surround them with lots of words trying to contain them. But the images cut past all that. They move so directly into your brain that there’s no place to avoid them. They’re in there. Then you try to, like, put this salve around them, which is language. And that’s where we got that—whatever the currency rate has, a thousand words for each picture? Takes 10,000 words, because pictures keep leaking out in ways that weren’t intended even by the artist making it, but that are thereby functional—functioning as Rorschach tests for what actually are we living through right now. And it does that in a way that is so high relief that you can’t avoid it. And that allows us to have, hopefully, more language, more pictures, until these things all settle.

- Art Spiegelman