How do you do a reading from a comic book? Comic books resist performance. Do you read from the word bubbles? The captions? You don’t describe the action in the panel, do you? If you project it on a screen, do you just talk about the panel and let the audience read the words at their own pace? But different people read at different speeds, which means you’re either boring half the audience or confusing the slower readers. Most cartoonists, when they tour with their books, just give up and show a few slides or go straight to Q&A.
Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus and creator of some of the best New Yorker covers of all time, may have finally cracked the code. Spiegelman has been talking about comics for years in slide shows across the country, but his new show, Wordless!, is his most performative yet. “I’ve been calling it intellectual vaudeville…