Art Spiegelman on Maus and free speech: ‘Who’s the snowflake now?’

Since his early days in the underground comix scene, Spiegleman has reveled in ‘saying the unsayable’ and subverting convention

In 1985, at the height of popularity for the faddish baby dolls, the Cabbage Patch Kids, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman debuted a subversive line of trading cards, the Garbage Pail Kids.

Featuring viscerally queasy drawings of, say, a mushroom cloud detonating from the roof of a cheery toddler’s skull, or a Raggedy Ann facsimile barfing up dinner into a pot, the Garbage Pail Kids were a sensation among edgy preteens all over the world. They were also swiftly banned in a slew of schools. To this day, Mexico has a law restricting the import and export of Garbage Pail Kids material.

“You know how Joe Manchin is a thorn in our side?” Spiegelman asked in a phone interview this week. “His uncle, A Jamie Manchin, was the state treasurer of West Virginia in the 80s. He said that Garbage Pail Kids should be banned because they’re subverting children. It runs in his family.

“It reminds me that things keep changing, but we’re still dealing with permutations of the same struggles.”