Spiegelman gets political: The New York Times interviews Art Spiegelman about In the Shadow of No Towers, due out next month from Pantheon:

"... I think like a typical American who can get narcotized by the mass media. For me, politics was always put in a strange box, sort of like 'baseball for nerds.' But since Sept. 11, that bubble has burst. 'The personal is political,' to put it — yawn — in its most T-shirtlike form.

"That's the thing that's swept me into doing something I'd always wanted to avoid: caricaturing presidents for a living. Nothing ages faster. If you look at these old Herblock cartoons, they can only be seen in the context of marginal images in the history book. You've got to read too many footnotes to get what's going on, like, 'What is this Taft-Hartley Act, anyway?'"