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

This chapter tackles cartoonist-curated exhibitions of comics, in which cartoonists select examples from comics archives to frame their own histories of comics. Le Musee privee d’Art Spiegelman is a large, unique exhibition that was organized at the Musee de la bande dessinee in Angouleme, in which Spiegelman proposed his ‘vision’ of comics history, while Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History was organized at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio), drawing on the collections from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. The analysis of exhibition design and paratexts shows how ‘their’ histories is remediated in the context of the museum, which helps framing a particular discourse on the past of comics relative to the institutional context of each exhibit.