Curating Canons of Comics: Daniel Clowes and Art Spiegelman's 'Private' Museums

As guest of honor at the 2012 International Comics Festival in Angoulême, Art Spiegelman did not only have a retrospective exhibition devoted to his work, but was also invited to act as the curator of the CIBDI museum’s archive, producing his own ‘private’ museum, as suggested by the exhibition title Le Musée privée d’Art Spiegelman. Similarly, for Daniel Clowes’s retrospective exhibit in Columbus, the Wexner Center of the Arts hosted Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History, based on Clowes’s curatorial choices from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In each case, the cartoonist literally frames the history of comics and exhibits his personal canon of comics. As Spiegelman put it: “I have been allowed to highjack the Centre of Bande dessinée Museum to replace what is primarily the Francophone patrimony of comics with my own perverse and private map of what comics are.” This quote clearly embodies the dual facet of such exhibitions – collective and singular, shared and idiosyncratic – foregrounding the anchorage of individual graphic novelists within traditions of comics. Articulated around personal canons, these two exhibitions offer fresh perspectives to think about canonization in the comics world. Albeit focused on two 'canonized' graphic novelists, this case study nuances the auteurism of comics scholarship: not only are these exhibitions the result of collaborative work, they also recast the author in the role of curator. The key aspect of these exhibitions lies in a canonizing act of selection that circulates in varied material forms showcasing the authors’ influences. Mapping out how Clowes and Spiegelman frame their entanglement with the past of comics within the contexts of institutions that store its archive, I will examine the specificities of these exhibitions in relation to a body and style of historiography I call ‘authors’ histories of the comics.’