Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman | S3, E9 | DIALOGUES PODCAST

♫ Dialogues Theme ♫ [Lucas Zwirner] From David Zwirner, this is "Dialogues," a podcast about artists and the way they think.

[R. Crumb] So these things would come to me intuitively.

I didn't analyze, I didn't work out some political rationale for what I was doing.

I wasn't promoting a cause.

I wasn't on a crusade.

I just kind of would-- the thing would just come out intuitively and I can't explain it.

[Art Spiegelman] An illustration was one step up from comics.

And if you're climbing the ladder, tattoo artists were at the bottom and abstract painters were at the top of whatever hierarchy I understood to exist, yeah.

[Lucas] I'm Lucas Zwirner, and every episode features a conversation.

We're taking artists, writers, philosophers, designers, and musicians and putting them in conversation with each other to explore what it means to make things today.

This week's pairing, the cartoonist, R. Crumb,

and the cartoonist, Art Spiegelman.

It's really special to have these two major figures of the comics world together on the podcast, because they also happen to be old friends.

Crumb is one of the founding fathers of the alternative comics movement and Spiegelman is equally influential having authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, "Maus."

🎵 Dialogues Theme 🎵 Robert and Art, thank you so much for being here today.

It's so great to have you both in the studio here.

[Art] My pleasure. [Robert] Pleasure.

[Lucas] So I thought we would start by going back a little bit and hearing a bit of the backstory behind both of your careers.

Robert, how did you first get into the work that you do, the comics that you do?

And maybe talk a little bit about what you do for people who might not be familiar with it.

[Robert] I draw comics and drawings.

I make drawings mostly.

I do painting once in a while, but I grew up on comics.

I was a child of popular culture.

Lower middle class background, and then I had this older brother who was a fanatic about funny animal comics in the 50s, Disney and Bugs Bunny and stuff.

So he was always drawing comics and thinking of comic stories, and he made me do it.

I was a year and a half younger than him and he was very extremely charismatic and domineering, and I just had to do it.

[Lucas] So he just employed you, basically?

[Robert] Yeah, yeah, and he said, "Oh, your 'Brombo the Panda' comic is not ready for the February deadline.

Come on, get on it."

[Lucas] But at that point it was just for you.

It wasn't for a bigger audience.

I mean, were you making them?

[Robert] No, they were just for us.

We were just pretending to be published and everything.

We had the 'Animal Town' publishing company and my brother of course was president of the company.

[Lucas] What were you, did you have a title?

[Robert] I was the vice president and my younger brother, Max, and he was the supply boy 'cause he couldn't draw.

[Lucas] And how old were you when you started the 'Animal... Town'--?

[Robert] 'Animal Town' publishing company?

I was about nine, maybe eight or nine.

If it wasn't for him, I'm sure I probably would not have ended up drawing comics for a life's work.

I don't know what I would've done.

A postal clerk or something, I don't know.

[Art] Supply boy. (laughter)

[Lucas] And Art, did you have-- I mean, did you start early as well?

[Art] Very early, I can't quite remember exactly when, but I was attracted to comics and my mother would play this game with me of making a scribble on a piece of paper, and I'd have to turn it into something.

So as a result, I never learned how to draw.

I just learned how to hallucinate onto scribbles and bring them into focus, but I've had a life in comics as well.

And I guess the main catalyst where I knew I was doomed was something that happened to Robert as well which was 'Mad Comics.'

There's a paperback that came out when I was seven years old and it was called I think 'Inside Mad.'

And it had little covers of comics that I thought were just made up, but then I found out it was an anthology of older books.

And there was a one-inch high picture of this creature, this horrid, strangely, made-of-turds, woman's face, kind of crosshatched very carefully.

[Robert] The first time you saw it was on the cover of the 'Inside Mad,' yeah?

[Art] That big. That big. Yeah, and it was across the room and I was like 'Oh my god.'

[Robert] Oh, I remember that cover.

Yeah, that was a powerful cover.

[Art] It was like it changed my life, you know, because I wouldn't leave the store without it.

I was like seven years old. [Robert] Wow.

[Art] The attitude of it was like nothing I ever got before, so, you know, I began to think that 'Mad' was an acronym for Mom and Dad because I couldn't trust them, but I could trust what I was reading in 'Mad' 'cause it was telling me that everybody was lying to me, including them.

And so I began copying it and stuff.

Unfortunately, maybe, I didn't have an older brother who made me work really hard or get beaten up.

So as a result I'm much less productive and not as compulsively a drawer as Robert, but I just love that comics language and I've been doing it ever since.

[Robert] I remember seeing, actually, that very same cover when it originally came out in the newsstands, the issue of 'Mad' number 11 with the Basil Wolverton cover, and yeah, it was an eye-opening experience.

Exactly what you said.

Suddenly you realized that, wow, this put a big crack in reality, you know?

In the 1950s context of magazines, TV was coming on strong, but magazines and comic books were still a very strong, powerful medium which I mean, you can't imagine the prestige of 'Life Magazine.'

It was huge, everybody looked at it and it was powerful.

So here's this comic book that looks just like a 'Life Magazine' cover, the red square at the top, but it says 'Mad' in the title, not 'Life.'

And this grotesque drawing that says something like a beauty contest or something that was supposed to be by this 'Mad' artist, Basil Wolverton, who just did the grossest looking...

[Lucas] After the kind of like being whipped into work by your brother, at what point does making comics become kind of a profession, as it were?

Or at what point do you mean to think of it as something that you're going to.

[Robert] Well, by the time I was 17 years old, I realized I'm such a weirdo, nerd, social outcast, loser, this is all I have.

Only thing I got going.

I could barely tie my shoes, but I can draw pretty well and I like comics, so, you know, I had this idea I'll try and become a commercial artist of some kind, I don't know.

I had this idea of myself as being a successful commercial artist in New York and I would change my name to my middle name.

It's Dennis, so I was going to call myself Bob Dennis.

[Art] See, I did something similar.

When I found out that Al Capp's real name was Kaplan and that he was Jewish, I went Art Speg.

That's the future.

They'll never know.

[Robert] Say that again.

[Art] Art Speg, S-P-E-G, because it was a one syllable name.

It didn't have the I-E which would-- it lasted for exactly one strip.

[Robert] Doesn't have very good ring to it, [Art] No, it's not right.

For me, the professional part of it happened real early because it seemed to me that being a cartoonist meant being printed.

It wasn't enough to just make a drawing and have it.

[Robert] Sure.

[Art] So very early on I started a terrible, really a 'crudzine' they called them, a very bad crudzine.

[Robert] 'Crudzine,' I remember that term, 'crudzine.'

[Art] A very bad fanzine that I was doing when I was 14 and 15 called "Blasé" which was going to be, like, I thought, like a sophisticated 'Mad'-like title.

[Robert] Collector's item now.

[Art] Yeah, 40 or 50 copies only.

But the thing was that from there, I started drawing for the junior high school newspaper and then I had a big break that changed my life-- Oh, here's a good story.

I wanted to get professional work.

I was really much worse than I am now 'cause I've had years of practice.

But at the time, I had a portfolio.

I went up to the local weekly Queens LeFrak City newspaper called "The Long Island Post."

I showed them the portfolio and then much to my humiliation, they ran an article called "Budding Artist Wants Attention."

(laughter) Oooh.

[Art] But they did print one of my drawings, you know, so two years later I went back and I got a job from them.

[Lucas] Right, but then I guess the question, the follow-up question is, what was the underground world like?

Because that is really where you guys were both-- if not embedded, interested and free to make work.

[Robert] Well, once the hippie culture blossomed out, they just started putting out all these underground newspapers and they would print anything.

They'd print any junk anybody gave them, so it was wide open.

So they took your comics and 'Oh, yeah, sure, we'll print it.'

And hardly anybody was drawing hippie comics yet.

There was only a couple people actually.

It was wide open.

And then the comics that I did in the underground papers, people liked them, so then a guy said, "Hey, do a whole comic book."

I was like, "Wow, really?" he said, "Yeah, we'll print the whole comic book."

That was, you know, a thrilling moment for me, that was '67.

[Art] Yeah, I think I met you around then, '67 or '68.

[Robert] '68, yeah, '68.

[Art] But to back up for a second, for me what happened was I got offered a syndicated comic strip while I was still in high school.

[Robert] You did? Holy Toledo...

What!

[Art] I went to a special commercial art high school in the city called Art and Design.

[Robert] See the thing was he was in the middle of New York.

[Art] I was in New York. [Robert] I was from Podunk.

I didn't have these kind of opportunities at all.

[Art] So I just-- what happened was in the cartooning class which is the only high school in America that had a cartooning class.

It was a 1930s-style vocational school to learn the commercial arts.

Not like the la-di-da music and art high school that taught painting.

[Robert] Bozart, right?

[Art] Yeah, this was the bozo arts... (laughter)

But in any case, some ex-graduate who was a syndicate editor came to see the comic strips we were doing and he said, "This is really good.

Could you do two more weeks and bring them up to see me?

I'll groom you for syndication."

[Robert] When I worked at a greeting card company, half the guys drawing these crummy greeting cards had dreams of doing a syndicated comic.

[Art] Yeah, and I did too until I got the offer, and then I couldn't do two weeks.

I was going, 'If I have to do this for the rest of my life, I'll kill myself now, you know?'

[Robert] So what'd you do?

You went around trying to invent a character, or what?

[Art] No, I had the characters, they liked what I did for the class.

[Robert] What were the characters?

[Art] The Mad Hatter, and a talking termite, and an ink blot.

[Robert] Okay, imagine doing a talking termite for 30 years.

[Art] I did. I never got past about the eighth script, you know?

It was useful to me because it made me know what kind of cartoonist I didn't want to be.

I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I could've been okay with gag cartooning or something like that, maybe?

[Robert] Right, yeah. [Lucas] Interesting.

[Art] But as a result, my work even while I was still in high school started getting a lot stranger.

There wasn't a word like underground comics in 1965.

[Robert] No. [Art] But after I graduated, there was an underground newspaper for the first time.

the 'East Village Other' had just started.

And I went up to see this guy, Walter Bowart, who was the editor, showed him my work.

He said, "Oh, this is good.

Could you do stuff with more sex and drugs in it?"

But for me it was like, "Sex and drugs?"

I knew nothing, I knew a lot about comics history (laughter) but I didn't know anything about sex and drugs.

So I had to go to college to learn that, and came back a year later and started working for them.

[Robert] When did you first take LSD?

[Art] It must have been '67.

When did it make get made illegal, '66?

[Robert] '66.

[Art] Yeah, so '67.

[Robert] I first took it in '65 and that was a huge breakthrough in psychedelic inspiration for comics.

[Lucas] And it was a breakthrough for you personally or no?

[Robert] Yeah, yeah, huge. Yeah.

[Lucas] In what way?

[Robert] Just suddenly I was able to step outside of reality and see it differently, you know?

[Art] It changed your drawing enormously-- [Robert] It did, yeah. It did, yeah. [Lucas] Wow.

[Art] And in fact, I only knew Robert's earlier style of drawing when I met him in, I guess, you said '68, was that it or?

[Robert] When I met you?

[Art] Yeah, like I was out in San Francisco.

Because Robert had worked for Woody Gelman, as I had, I looked him up and at that time I was already making very surreal comics for my college paper.

I had no idea what to do with all this and then when I saw Robert's work, he explained that his work had changed, and it had.

I looked at it and it had a lot more to do with Basil Wolverton and knobby knees and bare light bulbs.

[Robert] Older style of cartooning, yeah.

[Art] Crosshatching, which-- of a kind that was like totally repressed and that less-is-more, Post-Bauhaus cartoon moment.

All of a sudden, it was a scritchy-scratchy, strange, beautifully drawn-- to me-- stuff and the content wasn't necessarily about punchlines or anything.

And when I saw it, I was kind of exhilarated.

I was still taking drugs at that point and I decided there's no room for me to become the cartoonist who will change the world.

That's Robert's job now, so I'm going to go and become the Buddha.

There's a certain moment, I don't know what year it would be, where Robert's work affected every cartoonist.

Even somebody like Saul Steinberg, all of a sudden he's drawing big-legged women as part of his abstracted cartoon art and it was across the board.

[Lucas] But then, sort of the two questions I would have is, were you aware that that was happening at a certain point?

At what point did it become clear that something had happened to you which was affecting a group of peers?

[Robert] It happened pretty fast, it happened pretty fast.

I published 'Zap Comix' first time in early '68, by the end of '68, yeah, I was aware that it was a big splash.

[Art] Oh, the comics were happening because of Zap, you know, so just a cartoonists of that generation, we were all there.

[Lucas] And then the question that's maybe harder to answer is I'm not sure I understand the connection between the psychedelics and the stylistic change if that makes sense.

[Robert] That's a whole other discussion, it's complicated, complicated.

[Art] I would call it the return of the repressed.

That style couldn't have been in further eclipse.

The height of cartooning would be, on the one hand, if you're, well, somewhere between Charles Schulz and Jules Feiffer.

[Robert] Those minimal style of comics that were appearing in adult stuff and then there's the superhero stuff, the Jack Kirby approach, and that was about it really, at that time.

So I took LSD and this one crazy weird, bad LSD trip I had where I just got completely pulled back down this vortex into this 1930s murky world of popular cartoon styles, and the lettering styles, and everything from this older time.

[Lucas] And how aware were each of you of the art world as an entity?

As a separate world that exists-- I mean, was that even remotely on the radar now that we are at this point where you, Robert, are showing in a mainstream art gallery, to your chagrin?

[Robert] I tell people I was in New York in '66.

They say, "Oh, you must have hung around the Factory with Andy Warhol."

I had nothing to do with that world.

[Art] I lost my first girlfriend, I lost my high school girlfriend to the Factory.

[Robert] Oh, geez, that's sad.

[Art] Oh, yeah, but I was aware of it.

I wasn't that interested in it.

Like I was kind of a slob snob.

Like if it wasn't on newsprint, the hell with it. (laughter)

[Lucas] I mean, what's interesting is we talked a little bit about the stylistic change, but how about the subject matter?

I mean, how did each of you come to the subject matter that ended up sort of defining?

I mean, in your case, Robert, we would say let's say erotic subject matter to make it?

I mean, it's a little bit a blanket statement as it were.

[Robert] Well, I, when I was young, I had a high level of sexual obsession and I just couldn't keep it out of the work.

I just couldn't help it.

And I was quirky, and weird, and crazy, and full of neurotic anger, and angst, and shit, so it all just poured out.

Once I saw S. Clay Wilson's work, I said oh, I'm just going to let it all out.

I'm not going to hold anything back anymore.

[Art] And for me, I first had to work through some bad influences like Crumb's for where I was going.

[Robert] Yeah, I remember that period of your work.

It was kind of weird, it was kind of weird.

[Art] I just like was oh, okay, you got to do sex stuff or-- [Robert] I could tell it was kind of forced for you.

[Art] It wasn't natural, I didn't know where to hit it from.

But it was an influence on I think both Robert and me in one of the gang of underground cartoonists named Justin Green was doing clearly neurotic, bordering on psychotic confessional comics.

[Robert] Extremely personal.

[Art] Very personal, and it was autobiographical, slightly shifted just so they could get it stranger.

It was really like looking at something you're not allowed to see, the inside of somebody's brain, you know?

And that steered me toward what became the work I ultimately got known for, things that were just much more personal.

But I still have an interest in being a communicator, an entertainer of some kind, and it's mixed with that.

[Robert] Yeah, sure, that's right, it's mixed together.

It's hard to separate the deeply personal thing you want to do with it and the earlier training to be entertaining and readable.

It's not like the Abstract Expressionist art, which is the artist is really at a distance from the viewer, so the viewer has to figure out what the hell's going on there, you know?

It's not like that.

[Art] What it is is, for me, it's like, when I got to know some people who were painters and those kind of non-narrative filmmakers, anytime I'd used the word communication, it was as if I'd farted in the room because communicating is commercial art, the communication arts which became a euphemism for advertising or something.

But ultimately that notion that you're supposed to be in touch with the reader, I never met a writer who gave me a problem with the word communication, but painters and fine artists think it's more like you are the shaman, and you put out your entrails, and it's somebody else's job to figure out why they're there.

And that's not the tradition that either Robert or I come from.

[Lucas] It's a tension also between the tradition of a narrative art and a non-narrative art.

I mean, cartooning is ultimately a narrative art.

[Robert] Narrative became a mortal sin in the world of painting. [Lucas] Exactly.

[Robert] Oh, it's narrative, it's no good or that's mere illustration, that's no good.

[Art] But illustration was one step up from comics.

If you're climbing the ladder, tattoo artists were at the bottom and abstract painters were at the top of whatever hierarchy.

[Robert] The visual arts, right?

That hierarchy is sort of broken down somewhat, but people I'm sure in the fine art world are afraid of the hierarchy breaking down because then the value structure, the price structure is going to break down because if a nice, skillfully done portrait of somebody is as valuable as a Cy Twombly, then everything loses its sense of value.

[Lucas] How has the, in your case in particular, Robert, the subject matter, the reception of the subject matter changed?

So we are both, weirdly enough, in a moment that is hyper-accepting of a variety of different styles let's say within visual art, but much more, I think, much more cordoned off or much more unwilling to accept things that transgress certain boundaries, right?

[Robert] Now you're talking about political correctness?

[Lucas] Yes, effectively, but I'm curious first, what did it feel like when you were first making the same cartoons that we are looking at now let's say?

What was the response?

Did people take it, was there more humor?

Would people laugh it off more or was it still?

[Robert] No. [Lucas] No.

Really?

[Robert] No, it was immediately condemned by many women, immediately, that-- when I started opening up all my crazy sex fantasy stuff, it was immediately, because it was also the beginning of the rise of feminism though, the first wave of feminism.

[Art] But there was a wide, voracious audience for your comics in the '60s.

[Robert] It was all boys, there was very few girls.

[Art] I met girls who liked it.

[Robert] You did, huh?

The girls that I started to be successful with after I got famous.

Before I was famous, I was a complete loser with girls.

But after I got famous, these girls were interested in me because I was famous.

It had nothing to do with the work.

[Lucas] What was the tipping point?

This is apropos of nothing.

When you say when I became famous, what is the moment you were thinking of?

[Robert] Late 1968, it happened very quickly.

Suddenly I was in a different world than I'd been in before.

[Lucas] And what exactly was-- can you pinpoint?

Was it just this stylistic shift we talked about?

Or is it something, was there a specific...?

[Robert] Well 'Zap Comix' caught on, and it started getting written up in, it got written in 'Playboy' and other places.

[Art] Now that's the thing.

A world that had 'Playboy' in it when it was showing naked lady centerfolds was kind of the normative one, not the avant-garde feminist world that was beginning to permeate.

And so in that kind of twilight moment as one was receding and one was ascending, I think Robert's work was widely embraced.

Maybe mostly by men, but it wasn't limited to that.

At that time, like in '68 or so, if you wanted to be cool, you had to have some underground comics in your house.

You needed a box.

[Robert] Yeah, college kids had underground comics next, yeah, next to their dope pipe, you know?

[Art] And the art world just seemed very remote, and now the art world cool is all Robert's.

At this point, it works fine.

But the general world, there's been a very intense generational divide that's made itself felt just in the last several years where I would say under 30, they find that work repulsive.

[Robert] You said the other day, under 25.

Anybody under 25, they got to throw away their Crumb coms. [Art] Well, yeah, you know.

It comes from probably good intentions of wanting to change the world which I wanted to do in my 20s as well, but it has a kind of side to it that feels very Jacobean.

You know, like the 'Off with his head.'

[Robert] Well, yeah, I think what's happened is something that we can't really know too much about because we're too old.

[Art] Well, fortunately I have a daughter who's right on the cutting edge of all this stuff.

Yeah, Nadja understands it and tries to explain it to me and just goes, "Oh, Dad."

It sensitized me to it.

Like I'm not just dismissive of it, I'm just trying to figure out how can I reconcile it with my needs to work, you know?

[Robert] Yeah, I'm not dismissive either, but you have to really understand that in their world, the 20-somethings, that all these gender differentiations have become very, very important.

[Lucas] Part of one of the-- one of the most delicate things to maintain or to discuss in any piece of art is the context in which it's received or the context it makes for itself.

And if you're unable to control that which you can't, as time passes, then of course, it feels to me like everything that is satirical now, in the wrong way, is being taken as completely flat and literal.

[Robert] Well, I work intuitively, or I did, it's all in the past at this point, but these things would come to me intuitively.

I didn't analyze, I didn't work out some political rationale for what I was doing.

I wasn't promoting a cause.

I wasn't on a crusade.

I just kind of, the thing would just come out intuitively and I can't explain it.

[Art] There's a faction of this stuff that's happening now that is so completely humorless.

[Lucas] That's what I mean-- [Art] --and I'm frightened by it.

[Robert] They're humor impaired, right?

[Art] Yeah, to misquote Emma Goldman, "If I can't laugh, you can keep your fucking revolution" [Robert] (laughs) I think she said "dance."

"If I can't dance, I don't want any part of your revolution," right?

[Art] But it makes it very hard to be interested in being amusing because who are you being amusing for, you know?

And it makes it very hard to deal with what's in your head because you're asked to repress a lot of it.

Self-censorship is difficult to, you can't-- [Robert] Well, art is supposed to be a place where you can do that, you know, where you can let these thoughts out and it's not, unless you're like lying and deceiving people, it's-- anything should be allowed.

[Lucas] The point is obviously not that the stories that-- the whole thing is that the great benefit, the world is probably a better place, certainly a better place, that actually people of a varying, people have had to repress themselves and their identities for centuries, thousands of years are now actually able to express some of those things and be accepted.

The question is-- how do you still have multiple conversations happening at once where not everybody is being required to present the same party line.

[Art] Yeah, that intersectionality stuff, whatever you're doing in one direction is going to hurt from another direction and cartooning is built on stereotype, basically.

[Lucas] That's actually really interesting too, yeah.

[Art] It's just built on it, you know?

and I managed to escape it by falling into doing that 'Maus' work where all of a sudden everybody's just wearing masks and their identity is defined by their mask, and it does have to do with victim culture in a very deep way because the victimization of Auschwitz is hard to contest except on the absolutely lunatic-- [Lucas] Lunatic framework, yeah, exactly.

[Robert] Come on, didn't you get flack from the Polish people for-- [Art] Polish people, I did.

[Robert] --for portraying them as pigs.

[Art] And I did try to explain.

I did try to explain very, very often in fact. You know?

[Robert] Real often, really? Often, wow.

[Art] Yeah, and you know, when I'd go into public, it would happen, I would have the conversation.

The book is available in Poland and now finally it's sold above ground. (laughter)

It used to be you couldn't even get it shown in bookstores.

[Robert] Really? Wow. [Art] There was a change, the way underground comics made a change.

I think 'Maus' had the biggest effect, although there was 'Watchmen,' 'Dark Knight,' and a couple of other things where all of a sudden in '86, there were all these articles saying 'Bim, Baff, Pow,' 'Comics aren't for children anymore.'

And the thing that changed it I think was if you can take on the enormity of Auschwitz in a comic and not be totally stupid.

[Lucas] What was your interest, let's put it this way.

We've talked about the stylistic things, Robert, but what was your interest in stories?

Like, how did you become interested in the stories?

What stories made an impression on you?

[Robert] Comic books, Carl Barks, Donald Duck, the first stories I was able to get into because I was kind of dyslexic and I had trouble reading text.

I couldn't read anything with a lot of text.

I just couldn't, it was too hard, so comic books and there were great stories.

And again, it goes back to my brother though.

He was the story guy.

I was more interested in the visual aspect of art, originally, but I just had to do stories.

I was made to write and create stories.

[Lucas] But as you went on and on, I feel like you embraced, more and more embraced certainly that kind of personal, right?

I mean, you kind of turned your life and maybe Aline was, your wife, Aline, was a sort of help in going down that personal path as it were.

[Robert] Yeah, she did, seeing her work and Justin Green, I kind of bent more towards personal autobiography.

But I know storytelling, I kind of forced myself to become a storyteller.

[Art] Well, storytelling isn't as hard as stories that are worth telling.

Like I actually was always enamored of the words and pictures in combination, but I just liked looking at it.

So even comics I hate, I sort of get interested in because- [Robert] Yeah, because the visual aspect.

Sure, yeah, me too.

[Art] And it needs the language usually.

I mean, there's silent comics of course, but then the words are just transmuted into symbol pictures.

[Robert] And some cartoons are more literary and some are more visual, and there's rare ones that are both, like Carl Barks, both literary and visual.

[Art] I find it easier to write than to draw.

[Robert] Yeah, you're a literary cartoonist.

[Lucas] You found it easier to write than to draw.

[Art] Yeah, but to write comics.

I mean, I can write prose, but not fiction.

I don't think I have any interest in that, but I write essays as well as I can, you know, and I think sometimes I'm proud of a sentence, or a paragraph, or a thought.

[Lucas] And you would say you find it much easier to draw than to write?

[Robert] Not anymore, no, I've really become much more of a writer, actually.

[Lucas] I mean, when I looked at the most recent 'Art & Beauty' let's say, the most-- I mean, besides 'Genesis' of course, but recent body of work that was up in London, that was very much, there were these long paragraphs that would be copied in.

[Robert] Those aren't comics at all.

It's just drawings with text.

[Art] For decades and decades and decades, Robert's been writing a diary.

He writes his dreams down, and so it's mostly text, I mean, rather than images of the dream or something.

[Robert] Yeah, that book that came out about my dream diaries, people were very disappointed because there's not more drawings.

[Lucas] If you weren't, if you hadn't become a cartoonist, I mean, you jokingly said postal clerk, Robert, but what else could you have imagined doing?

And then I'll ask you the same thing, Art.

[Art] Criminal.

(laughs) [Robert] Shoe salesman, I don't know.

I have no idea.

[Art] I think I would probably have trained myself more to be a writer because I read a lot and I like language, and it's harder for me to draw, but the best way to express myself is to use whatever I have from both sides of it.

And as an illustrator I could make a living when they had illustrators, but I wasn't that good, I mean.

[Robert] You taught for a while too, right?

[Art] Oh, yeah.

[Robert] So I could've been a teacher.

[Art] I could've been a teacher, but I think I could've been a writer.

[Robert] You can talk, you could be a teacher.

[Art] Okay.

[Robert] Lecturer.

[Lucas] Lecturer, there we go.

Well, Robert and Art, thank you so much for talking today, this was great.

[Robert] Well, talk is cheap.

[Art] So is art unless you get lucky.

[Robert] That's right.

♫ Dialogues Theme ♫ [Lucas] "Dialogues" is produced by Davids Zwirner.

You can find out more about the artists on this series by going to davidzwirner.com/dialogues.

And if you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

It really does help other people discover the show.

I'm Lucas Zwirner, thanks so much for listening and I hope you join us again next time.