Art Spiegelman discusses Maurice Sendak

Sasha Weiss in The New Yorker:

In 1993, Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak spent a rambling day at the older artist’s house in Connecticut. What emerged from their conversation—along with an ongoing and affectionate friendship—was the idea for a collaborative comic strip (reproduced above, click to expand) about the nature of children’s fears, that ran in The New Yorker in the September 27, 1993 issue. Working in Spiegelman’s studio in New York some weeks later, they sat side by side while Spiegelman drew on one half of a panel and Sendak worked on the other. I spoke with Spiegelman about his encounters with the creator of the Wild Things.

How did you come to know Maurice?

I came to know of Maurice’s big interest in comics through a guy named Woody Gelman, a very significant collector of old paper when old paper wasn’t really being collected, who had gathered together all the Little Nemo Sunday pages when nobody knew what they were. Woody was in touch with Maurice, who was very excited about them. They grew into being “In the Night Kitchen.” And so I would get news of Sendak way before I ever met him. This was in the late sixties. I am a little bit too old to have grown up with his kid’s books, but I saw them and was really jazzed by what I saw—a kindred spirit in the sense of somebody who was making kid’s books, drawings, but that had a comics inflection somehow.

More here.