go unnoticed upon first viewing. He sees comics as "very condensed thought structures", more akin to poetry than prose, which need careful, time-consuming planning that their seeming simplicity belies. Spiegelman's work prominently displays his concern with form, and pushing the boundaries of what is and is not comics. Early in the underground comix era, Spiegelman proclaimed to Robert Crumb, "Time is an illusion that can be shattered in comics! Showing the same scene from different angles freezes it in time by turning the page into a diagram—an orthographic projection!" His comics experiment with time, space, recursion, and representation. He uses the word "decode" to express the action of reading comics and sees comics as functioning best when expressed as diagrams, icons, or symbols. Spiegelman has stated he does not see himself primarily as a visual artist, one who instinctively sketches or doodles. He has said he approaches his work as a writer as he lacks confidence in his graphic skills. He subjects his dialogue and visuals to constant revision—he reworked some dialogue balloons in Maus up to forty times. A critic in The New Republic compared Spiegelman's dialogue writing to a young Philip Roth in his ability "to make the Jewish speech of several generations sound fresh and convincing". Spiegelman makes use of both old- and new-fashioned tools in his work. He prefers at times to work on paper on a drafting table, while at others he draws directly onto his computer using a digital pen and electronic drawing tablet, or mixes methods, employing scanners and printers. Influences Harvey Kurtzman has been Spiegelman's strongest influence as a cartoonist, editor, and promoter of new talent. Chief among his other early cartooning influences include Will Eisner, John Stanley's version of Little Lulu, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and Bernard Krigstein's short strip "Master Race". In the 1960s Spiegelman read in comics fanzines about graphic artists such as Frans Masereel, who had made wordless novels in woodcut. The discussions in those fanzines about making the Great American Novel in comics later acted as inspiration for him. Justin Green's comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) motivated Spiegelman to open up and include autobiographical elements in his comics. Spiegelman acknowledges Franz Kafka as an early influence, whom he says he has read since the age of 12, and lists Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein among the writers