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Legendary VICE Cartoonist Anna Haifisch On the Life of the Artist

Haifisch returns with a new omnibus edition of her comic series The Artist, an ongoing send up of the art world from the inside.

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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........

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