He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee
and wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can
think. He offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering
June day, but then keeps getting distracted from making it by his own
anecdotes. He takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room
that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had
a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted
by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just
above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed
onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and
prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?”
Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to
Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every
room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere. Sophie McBain, The Guardiana settembre uscirà una nuova edizione di In the Shadow of No Towers di Art Spiegelman presso Penguin
