The Comics Journal #65

History

The interview with Spiegelman and Mouly was conducted in two sessions: the first took place before RAW #1 had been published, and the second after RAW #1 was out and while they were at work on RAW #2, giving it a rare before-and-after quality. TCJ editor Kim Thompson later confirmed the Spiegelman piece ran in issue #65, recalling that Fantagraphics and the RAW team were part of the same small orbit of people pushing for comics to be treated as a legitimate art form. The issue was produced while Fantagraphics was headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, in what Thompson described as a creatively intense period for the young company.

Trivia · 7 facts

• The issue's major interview — titled 'Jewish Mice, Bubblegum Cards, Comics Art, and Raw Possibilities,' conducted by Joey Cavalieri and running pages 98–125 — is one of the earliest extended print interviews with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and is a primary source repeatedly cited in Maus scholarship.
• Spiegelman discusses the origins and concept of Maus with Cavalieri in this interview, describing his use of animal allegory as 'a way to allow you past the cipher at the people who are experiencing it' — one of the earliest published explanations of the book's central metaphor.
• The Newswatch section (p. 23) carries the article 'Jack Kirby Returns to Comics with Cosmic Hero,' reporting on Kirby's move to Pacific Comics for Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers — a creator-owned title that Kirby accepted specifically because Pacific promised him full creative control and character ownership.
• The Don Rosa-illustrated Opening Shots column 'Duck Kapital by Karl Barx' (p. 6) is an early example of Rosa's work appearing in TCJ, years before his career as the definitive Uncle Scrooge writer-artist at Fantagraphics.
• The issue includes a review of the Superman II film by Mike Barrier ('Superman II Hits the Right Note,' p. 34), contextualizing the magazine's range: it covered both avant-garde comics culture and mainstream film adaptations.
• Multiple comics reviews in the issue cover Doctor Strange, Madame Xanadu, Eclipse Magazine, Buck Rogers, and Time Warp & Mystery in Space — meaning the superhero and classic-strip characters indexed for this issue (Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman, and many others) appear in critical review contexts rather than as story characters within TCJ itself.
• Between 1981 and 1995, The Comics Journal ran a total of 154 pages of interviews with Spiegelman; the Cavalieri interview in #65 was the opening chapter of that long critical relationship.

Cast · 40 characters

Full credits

Key issues in The Comics Journal