A Ragpicker’s Art

This chapter focuses on how the sheer range of modernist forms that Art Spiegelman has built on becomes apparent. It particularly looks at jazz as soundtrack and signature key for Spiegelman's improvisational renditions of cross-racial, lowbrow Americana. Like jazz, comics mixes high and low registers. Jazz is audience-based and improvisational, creating forms that are only complete in performance. In much the same way that the audience brings jazz to life, the chapter argues that the reader helps complete a comic, closing the circle of artistic creation by filling in the gap between panels in the mind's eye. The chapter then shifts to explore how jazz accentuates one of Spiegelman's most prominent themes over the last thirty years: the rejection of the dichotomy between the high and low in the arts. His work since Maus has repeatedly returned to the arts of the twenties and thirties, to the Jazz Age and its aftermath. In bringing together his post-Maus engagements with jazz and comics, the chapter argues that Spiegelman's emphasis on Jazz Age fast living is nostalgic as well as elegiac. It delves into the intersecting American traditions of jazz, cosmopolitanism, and comics to help unravel unacknowledged continuities in Spiegelman's career, and his experimental cross-art collaborations.