Thread by @shallowbrigade

Let's take a closer look at Spiegelman & Sacco's garbage cartoon, in light of the artists' previous work and the ethos of their comics milieu. I think a lot of people looked at this comic and wondered where it all went so wrong

I think first of all it's fair to describe Spiegelman as the first/primary author. The jocular tone, cartoonish style, old-fashioned gags, and meta foregrounding are all hallmarks of his work. At a glance this looks like a Spiegelman comic

In the past Spiegelman has used those devices to great effect. Depicting disasters in this particular tone is his entire thing. Cf his upcoming documentary, the hilariously titled Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

The key to employing a cartoonish style and self-deprecating tone to a disaster is that it's *your* disaster. It works... less well for someone else's

The central mistake that both artists make is in laying claim to a victimhood that isn't theirs

This is a huge departure from Maus, where Spiegelman's constant interrogation of his right to tell the story *is* in many ways the story

An interesting question is how self-aware the artists are with regard to how they come across. And I would argue: they're not oblivious! The beginning and the end of the comic, in particular, are meant to be self-deprecating

In fact I take one of the main points of the comic to be the inadequacy of imagination and the artistic impulse in the context of material destruction

This recognition of impotence and distance is also brought home by Sacco reading out a series of horrifying texts like he's on Love Island or something

Sacco, whose entire body of work is about subjectivity in journalism, is foregrounding his own comical uselessness

None of this can land because of the comic's stunning lack of empathy (and misguided both sides-ing). Which is a generational problem imo with some of these autobio-ish artists

Chris Ware once wrote that "we understand others only as refractions through the optic of ourselves"

But he was wrong. We have to at least seek to understand people as individuals in their own right. Otherwise our art and our worldviews are just narcissistic trash