I know exactly where I was: sitting on a tattered couch in the living room of my rental house in Austin, Texas, 1989. The ninth issue of the experimental comics magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, had been released, and I’d bought it at a local comics shop and brought it home to read, safe from the scrutiny of the University of Texas fine arts department. For a young student of painting with ambitions to tell serious comic-strip stories, the annual appearance of the magazine in which Spiegelman’s “Maus” was being serialised was a genuine event – like a gallery show, but exploring a medium that at that time had yet to be afforded aesthetic legitimacy.