A Brief History of Comics

In 1980 when I started RAW Magazine, it was the opposite of the way the world is today.
Comics were seen as this lowbrow entertainment with no respectability whatsoever. They would
pervert the mind of children or adults, and they certainly were not acknowledged as a medium
for serious art or literature discussion, so I created a magazine with my husband Art Spiegelman,
who was a cartoonist that was intending to change the perception for comics. Art came from
Miller in San Francisco of underground comics where Robert Crumb was leader of that field and
a lot of the work was trying to break taboos about sex and drugs and different lifestyles. That’s
not what RAW Magazine was trying to do.

A lot of the underground comics were sold mainly through head shops together with hash pipes
and all the other paraphernalia. With RAW Magazine, we were doing something that I
distributed in bookstores, legitimate bookstores for the most part and what we wanted which
shows a lot of a large size, well-printed magazine so that it would give a kind of frame of
appreciation closer to that given to art and literature.

When I first got interested in comics at the time I was studying architecture and I discovered
comics as a medium through listening to Art who was courting me by reading me Little Nemo
and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. It was really very effective. It’s wonderful, but when we
would go into a comic shop I really felt like it was a Times Square at the time. It was like a
porno shop. It just reeked of like testosterone and adolescent male. A sensibility dominated by
super hero comics with big busted woman being tied to like a ship’s mast, or whatever it was. I
remember being in a comic shop with my son, with my ten-year old son and he put his hand over
my eyes. He was embarrassed about me seeing the comics at Forbidden Planet. He didn’t know,
poor kid that I had been in many Forbidden Planets in my life.

Nowadays, we are actually about to celebrate the 30th anniversary of RAW Magazine and it’s a
world upside down. Comics are actually dubbed by euphemistic label of graphic novel, which
became a big deal. When we published RAW, we included chapters of Maus because there was
no other way. Art was working on it at the time. It took 13 years for him to do the book and there
was no way to publish this with a mainstream publisher, so we did it in our magazine. Eventually
it came out as a book from Pantheon. There was no expectation of it ever reaching a mainstream
audience and it exploded into an extraordinary like reception, Pulitzer Prize, museum shows,
show at the Momay 1991. I mean all those things were unprecedented and they opened the field
for a lot more serious comics.

Many of the people that we had published in RAW, such as Chris Ware or Charles Burns or Sue
Coe, became artists recognized on their own found publishers, and the reason it’s a world upside
down now is that at the time we were saying comics are not just for kids anymore, and now in
2010 we’re seeing comics or graphic novels accepted in museums and in bookstores, but not
widely available for children, so I now feel that I have a moral duty to course correct and say
wait a minute, it’s not just for adults.