Interview with Art Spiegelman.

I read this one years ago, in a book interviewing famous authors (artists and cartoonists too) and excerpting their words about their work:

I had one dream about comics, incidentally. It took place a long time ago. This guy, who was very important in helping me get started as a cartoonist, had one of the world's greatest collections of paper ephemera and old comic strips in his basement. I would stay in his basement and occasionally just fall asleep there, drift off. I had a dream that consisted of drifting off in his basement looking at "Happy Hooligan," a turn-of-the-century comic strip about a kind of tramp character, who wore a tin can on is head. In the dream I have a tin can on my head. I'm trying to get the can off and it won't come off. It's permanently there. The dream has several episodes of me trying to get this can off by having people pull at it, by knocking it against something. Nothing works. Finally I sit under a tree and start sobbing. Then this other character kind of lopes in and says, "Don't worry, Buddy Boy, it's just the style you're drawn in."

The other interesting thing that happened in this dream was that there were these occasional and very rhythmic moments that were rather painful. These were the moments where I disappeared and reappeared again. And they would happen rhythmically. I realized those were the little white spaces between panels.

I can't find it now, but somebody once said in writing, you have to read the white spaces too. What's left unsaid is often the most important part...

-----------------
I had the luck to see Spiegelman's PowerPoint presentation at the Miami Book Fair 2008. He and his wife had developed a series of Toon Books teaching children to read, in simple comic book style. Fascinating.

In my eyes, it rivaled Larry Lessig's entertaining Powerpoint at the 2003 Kastenmeier Lecture at UW Law. And you know what they say about the "Lessig Method."

Funny men, both.