Highlights from the Art Spiegelman Thing Last Night

Tons of classic Spiegelesque wit bombs dropped last night at the Benaroya Hall lecture/slide show/performance. Our favorite was the curt dismissal of Roy Lichtenstein's work at the very start: "He did for comics what Andy Warhol did for soup." Oh, Spiegelman, you dog... You get him!

There were some unintentionally funny moments, like when befuddled old geezer Spiegelman segued from talking about Will Eisner's The Spirit to Jack Cole's Plastic Man, he kept pointing his laser pointer at Plastic Man and calling him The Spirit. At another point, while describing the love triangle in George Herriman's Krazy Kat strip, he misidentified the cat as the mouse and vice versa. The audience didn't seem to mind, but our inner geek made a note to self to heap scorn on the man later on the blogs.

R. Crumb's mantra "It's only lines on paper" was the theme for the hour as Spiegelman went through a brief history of racist and anti-semitic caricatures. The strained laughter in the uptight Seattleite audience eventually puttered out into awkward silence, leaving Spiegelman with the feeble sounding segue, "It's only lines on paper, folks." We're not 100% sure, but we thought we detected a note of defeat in his voice.

We left the post-lecture Q&A early because so many of the inane questions - "Do you start your comics in pictures first or words?" - made our skin crawl and we had to get the hell out of there, but from the lobby we could hear roaring laughter and kind of regretted not sticking around longer. If we missed anything, let us know.