Groth:
Art and I haven’t talked about it before, but, briefly, it was this: Art referred to both Harvey Kurtzman and George Herriman as examples of pure cartooning or pure cartoonists, and you [Kevin Huizenga] expressed skepticism at the idea of “pure” cartooning.

Huizenga:
At the time I had received this exhibition catalog of the Krazy! exhibition. There was a couple times in that book where you [Spiegelman] referred to something as “pure comics.” I wrote a quick blog entry about how I have an issue with the whole concept of purity. Whenever someone starts talking about purity, I always take notice, because it’s one of my pet peeves. In the time since I’ve written that entry, I’ve realized that obviously you don’t think that there’s such a thing as “pure comics.” I mean, you’re the guy who talked about the whole concept of mix, “co-mix,” with an X. So it’s not that I think that you have this idea of “purity,” it was more just that in that exhibition catalog you use “pure comics” a few times and I used that to as a springboard to sound off.

Spiegelman:
I think, if I was trying to parse my words better, I would have called it essential cartooning, maybe, rather than pure. There’s not like, “Oh, and I don’t like the impure stuff.” But, to me, the essence of comics is a little bit like what we were talking about just a minute ago when we were talking about an architecture. It has more to do with things that aren’t like anything else that are the essential aspect of what makes it itself.

As it happens, in the Reader, there is an essay by the distinguished literary theorist W.J.T. Mitchell which takes up this very issue of purity in comics. Mitchell argues that no art form is “pure”, that all media are mixed media. I think Mitchell’s arguments are congruent with Huizenga’s sense of things. Here is an excerpt from Mitchell: