Legendary VICE Cartoonist Anna Haifisch On the Life of the Artist
· Vice
Anyone who has ever tried to make any kind of art themselves will know that it can be a thrilling, maddening, mind-numbing, anxiety-inducing, and rewarding experience, often in the space of a single afternoon. Does what you’re making mean anything in the grand scheme of things? Does it matter? Does anything? Why is the white-collar art world so demented?
These are some of the existential questions that come up in Anna Haifisch’s ongoing comic series The Artist, which renders the relationship between creativity and mental health / the strange and ever-shifting rules of the gallery scene / life at large in appropriately abject terms. Based on her own experiences as an illustrator in Germany and the United States, Anna’s bold, bizzaro style captures the fundamental fragility of art-making in a way that is both comforting and mildly distressing. Most recently, it won her the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Leipzig for 2025, marking the first time a comic artist had ever received the prize.
Beginning its life as a monthly VICE strip under the watch of former Comics Editor, Nick Gazin, The Artist is now returning to print in a new omnibus edition courtesy of Breakdown Press, collecting both the original 2016 graphic novel and its 2019 follow-up, The Circle of Life, along with additional strips.
We caught up with Anna to talk about the evolution of the project, and how much has changed in the ten-plus years since The Artist began.
VICE: A common motif throughout The Artist is the artist in bed. Artists generally have a love/hate relationship with bed, as a place where you can dream and sleep in late if you want in lieu of having a “real job,” but also the site of terrible procrastination and misery. What’s your own relationship to bed like?
Anna Haifisch: I love the images of artists in bed. There are great scenes in this [David] Hockney movie, where he is rolling around in bed feeling sorry for himself and his friends. There is Warhol with sunglasses in bed, there is Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet, and there is Mladen Stilinović’s great photo series Artist At Work. Every photo shows him as a young man wallowing in bed, fully clothed in broad daylight. Stilinović was my biggest inspiration when I thought of The Artist character. I think staying in bed is a very good illustration of denial and selfishness. It also makes a lot of people very angry to look at these scenarios. I love that. I personally hate being in bed during the day. Somebody invented sofas! I love sofas.
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You mentioned in a previous interview that you especially liked reading comics when you were sick as a kid, so I’m wondering if that ties into the bed thing as well. What did you love most about comics growing up and why did you reach for them on sick days?
I read all of these Franco-Belgian albums, like Asterix, Tintin, The Smurfs, Lucky Luke, whatever the local library had in stock. The best thing about them was there were so many! It made me happy to see that there were still 12 issues lying next to my bed, and I hoped for a longer fever so I could get through them all. Even today as an adult, when I watch a good TV series, I’m always happy to see when there are many more episodes left to be watched. It’s such a comforting feeling to know that there is plenty more of the things you really like.
How do your strips usually start? With a feeling, a facial expression, a setting?
Often they start with a real event. Some are so horrible they didn’t even make it in the book. The one about an art collector having shrunken heads on his shelf in his castle in Italy, for example. The art world can be so fucked it can’t even be described in a comic book. But when I settle on a story I usually think: What would The Artist do in this situation? And how can I make it worse for him?
So much of being an artist is just… living. Sitting around, going to the shop, doing chores. Having the space to have things happen to you that you have something to create from. As we grow older and the world becomes increasingly more productivity-driven, that space can get smaller and smaller, and if we’re not careful it can disappear entirely. How do you manage that? Is it something you’re particularly vigilant about?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. What happened to the boring things that eventually lead to thoughts and ideas? It’s my own fault that I try to be more effective. I can’t even blame the world for it. I am in charge of the 24 hours the day is offering me. I really don’t want to make use of them like I used to anymore. I am aiming to be more useless! If that is even possible as a comic artist.
“What would The Artist do in this situation? And how can I make it worse for him?”
This complete works follows The Artist from 2016 to 2021; from doodling in bed to dealing with the conventions of the formal art world, and the continual existential crises along the way. How do you feel looking back on it as a body of work?
I had to get rid of two or three episodes. They were just too bad and nobody is going to miss them. I was glad that I got to edit the whole thing again and I am extremely happy with how the book came out. It makes me feel proud of my boy, The Artist. I really like him and it’s not the end of the story, just a little hiatus.
You began working on The Artist over a decade ago. If you were starting it today, is there anything you’d do differently? Would the jumping off point be the same? What challenges or anxieties would The Artist face now that weren’t so pressing ten or more years ago?
I’d probably do The Artist a lot more boring. When I started out, I loved the pressure of finishing an episode every week for VICE and that there wasn’t much room to overthink it. Some episodes are quite raw. If I’d do the short format again with all the routine I have now, I’d have to search for the purity of the beginning and would probably fail at that. Ten years later, I have to think of a different form of storytelling when I am continuing The Artist. I think the challenges for artists have always been pretty much the same. That’s why this topic is so fun to draw and write about.
The Artist: Portfolio Edition will be published by Breakdown Press on August 3. Pre-order it here.
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