Spiegelman's Shadow: UK's Guardian spotlights Art Spiegelman, whose In the Shadow of No Towers is released next week:

"Spiegelman's drawings are evocative, but they are seldom elaborate. They lack the frenzied inventiveness of some of his contemporaries in the underground comics movement, such as Crumb, inventor of Mr Natural, Honeybunch Kaminski ('Jailbait of the Month') and scores of other energetic creations. He describes his 'signature way of drawing' as 'really a result of my deficiencies'. It is partly modesty, but Spiegelman suffers from ambylopia, or lazy eye, 'which means that I don't have binocular vision, and have difficulty seeing in three dimensions. This might have been part of what made me a cartoonist rather than a baseball player. I was rotten at sports, but I found that if I could draw good caricatures of the teachers I wouldn't be doomed to be the butt of everybody's scorn.' The condition might help to explain the thickset nature of many Spiegelman figures, and their broad-stroked execution."