How Art Spiegelman and 'Maus' Changed Comics

Summary

Podcast Summary: All Of It – "How Art Spiegelman and 'Maus' Changed Comics"

Introduction to the Episode

In this episode of ALL OF IT, hosted by Alison Stewart from the WNYC studios in SoHo, the spotlight is on the influential figure of the comic art world, Art Spiegelman, and his groundbreaking work, "Maus." Released on February 20, 2025, the episode delves into Spiegelman's journey, the impact of his seminal work, and the making of a new documentary titled "Art Spiegelman, Disaster Is My Muse," which premieres the following day at Film Forum.

Exploring the Documentary: "Art Spiegelman, Disaster Is My Muse"

Alison Stewart introduces listeners to the documentary by film directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolan, who join her alongside Spiegelman. The documentary chronicles Spiegelman's life, from his early days in Queens to the creation of "Maus," offering a comprehensive look at his artistic evolution and personal struggles.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [00:04]: "Listener support, WNYC Studios."

Art Spiegelman's Early Life and Artistic Beginnings

Spiegelman's passion for drawing began in his childhood in Rego Park, Queens, where he first engaged with comics through children's magazines. His early work for publications like Topps Bubblegum laid the foundation for his later masterpieces. Despite his creative pursuits, Spiegelman faced significant personal challenges, including a strained relationship with his Holocaust-surviving parents and the tragic suicide of his mother.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [05:10]: "Like, daily life?"

Alison Stewart [05:15]: "What do you mean?"

Art Spiegelman [05:18]: "Well, one way or another, I'm stuck reliving it ever since Maus came out..."

The Creation and Impact of "Maus"

"Maus," a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel published in 1992, revolutionized the perception of comics as a serious art form by depicting the Holocaust through anthropomorphic characters. The documentary explores the genesis of "Maus," highlighting Spiegelman's deep dive into the underground comic scene and his relentless pursuit to push the boundaries of the medium.

Notable Quote:

Philip Dolan [04:14]: "We really wanted to show everything that led to the creation of Maus, and we wanted to show everything that resulted from it..."

Personal Relationships: Francoise Mouly and Collaborative Partnerships

A significant portion of the documentary focuses on Spiegelman's relationship with his wife, Francoise Mouly, a pivotal partner in his creative endeavors. Their collaboration on projects like the avant-garde magazine RAW and the establishment of a printing press in their loft underscores the symbiotic nature of their partnership.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [10:43]: "The first time we met, I was still jet lagged...She was horrified that she had forgotten her wallet. But that was the beginning of our relationship."

Influences and Philosophy on Art and Comics

Spiegelman attributes much of his artistic philosophy to his early influences, particularly Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD magazine. Spiegelman's extensive study of comics from 1918-1945 at the newspaper library enriched his understanding of the medium's grammar and potential, shaping his approach to storytelling and visual narration.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [06:37]: "I learned how many different ways comics could be. So that was essential for me to understand..."

Book Banning and "Maus" as a Symbol of Free Expression

A pivotal discussion in the episode revolves around the controversy and banning of "Maus" in some educational settings. Spiegelman elaborates on how the book became a symbol in the fight against censorship, highlighting the contradictory motivations behind its removal, such as the discomfort with its anti-authoritarian messages and explicit content.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [23:43]: "It's anti-authoritarian, but you can ban it if it has any sexual content or cursing, bad language..."

Spiegelman's Reflections on Authoritarianism and Free Speech

Throughout the conversation, Spiegelman expresses his enduring commitment to anti-authoritarianism, a stance that has sometimes alienated him but also reinforced his dedication to artistic freedom and expression. His experiences with censorship have only solidified his resolve to challenge oppressive structures through his work.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [25:54]: "The fact that it was so coordinated, these Moms for Liberty who are trying to do this all over the country and exercise the thought control that doesn't let minds grow."

The Significance of the Documentary's Title

The title "Disaster Is My Muse" stems from Spiegelman's reflections on his role as an artist in turbulent times. The phrase encapsulates his inclination to draw inspiration from chaos and tragedy, a recurring theme in his work, including his collaborations addressing contemporary conflicts like those in Gaza.

Notable Quote:

Art Spiegelman [16:51]: "It was a line in my introduction to a book called in the Shadow of no Towers after September 11..."

Conclusion: The Legacy of Art Spiegelman

As the episode wraps up, the conversation underscores Spiegelman's monumental influence on the world of comics and beyond. His ability to intertwine personal trauma with broader historical narratives has not only elevated the medium but also provided a poignant lens through which society can examine its past and present.

Notable Quote:

Philip Dolan [22:50]: "Art's legacy. He influenced so many people in different ways. And we tried to show some of that."

Final Thoughts

This episode of ALL OF IT offers an in-depth look at Art Spiegelman's life, his influential work "Maus," and the challenges he has faced in advocating for artistic freedom. Through engaging discussions and insightful quotes, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of Spiegelman's contributions to culture and the enduring power of his storytelling.

Transcript

[Art Spiegelman]

Listener support, WNYC Studios.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for sharing your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, we'll get to hear some live music from the war and the treaty. The married duo will be here in studio to share some music from their new album. You should see the setup over in Studio 5. Get ready for a great performance. Writer and director Osgood Perkins will join us to discuss his latest film, a Stephen King short story turned into a black comedy called the Monkey. That's the plan. So let's get this started with a film about Art Spiegelman. When Art Spiegelman finished Maus, he assumed someone would eventually discover it posthumously. Well, he was wrong. Maus, a comic that tackles the trauma of the Holocaust, won the Pulitzer in 1992, and it changed how readers and critics thought about comics as an art form. A new documentary tells Art Spiegelman's story. We learn about a kid from Regal Park, Queens, who fell in love with drawing and how a young artist began his journey drawing for children's magazines. We learn about how difficult his relationship was with his parents, who both survived the Holocaust, and how he wrestled with his mom's suicide. And we meet the artist he inspired and the woman who inspired him, his wife, Francoise. It's called Art Spiegelman. Disaster is My Muse, and it premieres tomorrow at Film Forum. Art Spiegelman is with me now. Hi, Art.

[Art Spiegelman]

Hi. Hi, Alison.

[Alison Stewart]

Also joining us to co directors, Molly Bernstein. Hi, Molly.

[Molly Bernstein]

Hi.

[Alison Stewart]

And Philip Dolan. Hi, Philip.

[Philip Dolan]

How are you doing? Great to be here.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm doing well. So, Molly, Philip, my first question is for you. What are your first memories of experiencing the art of Art Spiegelman? Mala, you go first.

[Molly Bernstein]

The art of Art Spiegelman I experienced when I first read Maus, as many people did, and I'm not sure exactly when that was. I think it was around the time it came out. I remember reading part one and then the full mouse and was mesmerized.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

How about you, Philip?

[Philip Dolan]

You know, I don't think I read Maus until adulthood, shortly before we started the film. And it's very deep, and it was. It was really an amazing experience to read it.

[Alison Stewart]

What question do you have for these filmmakers when they first came to you and said, we want to make a film about you?

[Art Spiegelman]

I can't recall. By the time I met them, I already had mutual friends that knew them, and very specifically, Ricky J. And they just made a fantastic documentary called Deceptive Practices with Them. So he said, you know, you should do it. So I take him seriously, and I was amazed by that one. So I just let it happen. Even though, as I think back on it, what on earth did I need a documentary for? But I'm glad it's out there to a degree.

[Alison Stewart]

Molly, why did we need an Art Spiegelman documentary?

[Molly Bernstein]

Well, it's a good question. We met Art initially. We filmed a performance of his called Wordless, which was a theater performance that he put together with a jazz band about the history of the Wordless novel, which is a great piece. And we filmed it to document it. And I guess doing that opened up that world for us, and we felt this really should be expanded into a bigger story and one that's not filming a theater piece.

[Alison Stewart]

Philip, I was curious with the. How you basically went with the chronological order of Art's life. You sort of saved the big news about Maus being banned and everything for the last quarter of the film. Why did you decide to go that route?

[Philip Dolan]

Well, I think we felt that we had to really give the background into where this masterpiece came from. And that was one of the questions we wanted to answer as directors. Where did this wooden mouse come from? And in order to do that, we kind of had to start from the beginning and get in Art's family background, his love of comics, as you mentioned, that was his window into American culture. We had to get his involvement in the underground comic scene, which was pushing him to break boundaries and smash taboos, and all those things kind of came together to create his early work, Hell Planet, and then also Maus. So we really wanted to show that. It was kind of like we wanted to show everything that led to the creation of Maus, and we wanted to show everything that resulted from it, both in terms of his work and the people he inspired and so forth.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Art, how did it feel to go back and relive those early years.

[Art Spiegelman]

Like, daily life?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

What do you mean?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, one way or another, I'm stuck reliving it ever since Mouse came out, and that remains true. And since my work has an autobiographical lens, very often I find myself now with a mouse mask permanently stuck on my face. And even the most recent thing I did, I'm representing myself in a collaboration I did with Joe Sacco about Gaza with my mouse mask in place.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

There's a scene in the film where you're speaking at Skidmore, and you say that you learned comics from comics as a kid. Let's Listen to it and we can talk about it from the other side. This is from Art Spiegelman, Disaster Is My Muse.

[Art Spiegelman]

And, you know, I was a scholar of comics since I was a little kid. And basically everything I know, I learned from comic books. I learned how to read from looking at Batman and trying to figure out whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. Then I went on to learn about sex, contemplating Betty and Verona, feminism from Little Lulu, economics from Donald Duckman, philosophy that I got from Peanuts, politics I learned from Pogo, and basically ethics, aesthetics, and everything else from Mad magazine.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Why do you think comics were offering you these kinds of lessons rather than other mediums?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, when I was a kid, we didn't have a TV early on, so comics were the medium pretty much singularly for kids, even before rock and roll. And I discovered it before I could learn how to read. And I just, as I've said since somewhere or other, MAD was the key. And I thought of MAD as an acronym for mom and dad because my parents really couldn't tell me about America. They were greenhorns. And as a result, I used it as kind of a textbook to find out what was going on around me.

[Alison Stewart]

We're discussing the film Art Spiegelman, Disaster Is My Muse, which premieres at the Film Forum tomorrow. My guests are Art Spiegelman filmmakers Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolan. Let's talk about early in art's career. Philip, we see some of his early comics. We see how he draws. What did you observe about those early drawings that gives us clues into how art. How he would develop as he got older?

[Philip Dolan]

Well, his early drawings are very impressive, especially the stuff he did in the newspaper when he was 15. And we get to show that I was fascinated by his commitment to drawing and also his finding of his cohorts, his friends Jay lynch and other people. And as he said, they created little zines on purple ink, you know, in those methods that used to be used for school tests and so forth. So it was kind of this driving desire not only to draw, but also to get it out there to share their work. And I thought that was just fascinating to see in such a young person.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Yeah, there's many, many people are in this film, Molly, who did, you know, you had to get to be part.

[Molly Bernstein]

Of this film, I would say, other than Art. Francoise Mouly, Art's wife and collaborative partner. We really wanted to include her in this. They have such an unusual partnership and have worked together for so long and lived together and had a family. And it Was just really great to be able to sit down with her and talk, even though she's probably the busiest person in the world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Art, you smiled as soon as Francois's name was talked about.

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, yeah. I mean, we really have at this point been married for over 40 years. And through thick and thin we've had to keep reinventing ourselves to make that true. But at this point, I can't imagine it without her. And I was smiling because after the first screening of the documentary at a festival in the fall at the ifc, there's a little get together afterwards. And our daughter Nada, who's also in the film, came over with glowing eyes and said, oh, it's so sweet. It's a love story.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

That's really sweet. Did you think it was a love story?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, I thought it was really sweet, yeah. Did you mean. And sure, on some level, did you.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Mean to Philip to make a love story?

[Philip Dolan]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was just. It was just. Again, it's one of those things. Without that partnership, there wouldn't have been Maus for starters. But so many things came out of that. And the way that Francoise kind of came to New York open to anything, and she discovered, having studied architecture, she discovered she could find her creative fulfillment through books, the 3D creation of books. And so that was so interesting. And they had a printing press in their loft. So it was really in the days where they. They did it, they just made it happen on their own. And that was incredible to follow, you know. And also they did this, the magazine Raw, which was kind of a groundbreaking compilation, kind of an arts comic magazine.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Art. How did you meet Francoise?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, the first time I met her, it was me visiting New York from San Francisco, where I still lived with my friend from Chicago, Jay lynch, that was just mentioned by Philip. And we joined a few friends for dinner and she was part of the group. So basically I was introduced to her by Ken Jacobs, who's a very important figure for me, the filmmaker. And that mutual friend made it happen. But I got to say that the first time we met, I was still jet legged. I was working for Topps Bubblegum. That's why I was in the city. I wasn't really focused. And she's told me after that all she knew about me was I talked way too fast for her to understand a word I was saying. So that was movie number one. After that, because of our vector at the time, which was a place called Collective for Living Cinema, it began seeing each other there and at some point went out for dinner together, and she was horrified that she had forgotten her wallet. And it didn't mean a thing to me, but it. But it did lead to her insisting that we have another dinner where she could bring her wallet. So that was the beginning of a relationship.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Molly, what did you observe about the way that I feel bad talking about you because you're here, but what did you observe about the way Art and Francois interact?

[Molly Bernstein]

I think just so well. One thing that Nadia said when we interviewed her is that they're always. They're still able to make each other laugh. And I think there's this amazing mutual sense of humor that it seems to me has been a big part of getting them through a lot of difficult things, like the creation of Maus, which was, from Francoise's perspective, rather ruling, I would say. So I think the humor, and also I was going to say before, just this passion for the printed object is something that really came through with both of them and many of the people in the film. And that's something we really wanted to try to communicate with the film in the way that we show the comics.

[Alison Stewart]

Philip, you know, Molly said we had to have Francoise for the film. But the other thing I really took away from the film was how many illustrators, cartoonists, people who write comics about what Art Spiegelman meant to them.

[Philip Dolan]

Yes, of course, this is a big part of art's legacy. He influenced so many people in different ways. And we tried to show some of that. Both kind of like Marjan Satrapi, who saw Maus and learned that she could express her family history through that medium. We have Robert Sikoriak, our Sikoriak, a comic artist who was also an editor, associate editor at raw, who discovered Art's early work as a young person. And that really had an effect on him. So it was very interesting to see those threads. And I think part of it probably had to do with Art, really, as he said in the movie, at a certain point in his career, deconstructing the meaning of comics and really exploring what is the comic language, how did it develop, what can I do with it? And always trying to push those boundaries.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Was there one comic writer who influenced you?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, the name that keeps coming to mind is Harvey Kurtzman, because he was directly the creator of Mad as a comic book. And then after that, and not the magazine that's. By then I was already beginning to fade out, paying attention. But also these kind of anti war war comics. He didn't. The same publisher that did Matt, those. That was certainly there. But Then after that, I just became obsessed with seeing old comics, seeing how comics developed. So I'd go after school every day when I was at the High School of Art and Design to a newspaper library that used to be very far west on 42nd or 43rd street before they had microfilm. I just spend my days, like, starting in, whatever, 1918, and then reading up to about 1945 of all the strips I could find and then trying to find out about those artists and those strips, which was still about the only thing I really know about Everything else is sort of like much more partial knowledge.

[Alison Stewart]

What did you learn by going through those comics from 1918-45?

[Art Spiegelman]

Yeah, actually, it started earlier, but around then, what did I learn? Well, I learned that grammar of comics we were talking about, and I learned how many different ways comics could be. So that was essential for me to understand. If anything, I'm not sure I have a style, because my style is basically just the accumulation of my inadequacies as an artist. But it definitely is shaped by seeing how other people did it and what it could mean to make comics C O M I X to mix words and pictures together and do it in a new way so that every one of these great comics artists reinvented what a comic could be and added to what became a kind of evolutionary chain, led us into underground comics. And after.

[Alison Stewart]

We're speaking about a new documentary, Art Spiegelman Disaster Is My Muse. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of It. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're speaking about the new documentary, Art Spiegelman Disaster Is My Muse, which premieres at the Film Forum tomorrow. We're talking with Molly Bursty and Philip Dolan. They are the filmmakers as well as Art Spiegelman. What is title? Where does the title come from? Art Disaster Is My muse.

[Art Spiegelman]

Oh, it was a line in my introduction to a book called in the Shadow of no Towers after September 11, which for me went on till way after September 11, well into 2003 or so. And I began putting my recollections and thoughts down about it, publishing it as a kind of tabloid or sheet page in various newspapers around the country and around the world. And I realize, here I am again, kind of poking at end of the world stuff. And I just use that as a grandiose line now I'm not so sure anymore. I think. I'm not sure that Armageddon is my museum.

[Alison Stewart]

Philip's laughing. Molly, why did you Decide that that was the right title for this film.

[Molly Bernstein]

It really just struck us as a great line of arts and one that speaks to the art and hopefully will pull people in to want to know.

[Alison Stewart]

The film deals with your family life, art, your parents. This actually is a question for Philip. How much of the film did you decide would concentrate on Art's parents, on his mother having died by suicide? It's a very serious topic. It's a very serious subject. How much did you decide of the film and what went into that decision?

[Philip Dolan]

Well, yeah, I mean, one of our main goals was we wanted. We had to, of course, deal with Maus, but we wanted to deal with other things as well, such as, like I said, the development, the things that led to Maus and the things that came after. So, you know, there's so many details in Art's life. I mean, if you look at a chronology of his life, it's very packed. And so we had to pick certain things. And the tragedy of his mother's death was key to his life, so we had to kind of get that in there. You know, a lot of this is dealing with this comic called Prisoner on Hell Planet, which is one of Art's early works and really groundbreaking work. And that comes a lot in the film, and it deals with that. With that issue. So we just wanted to. We needed. We felt the audience had to understand. They had to understand his background that that happened to him. They had to understand that he had had a brother who didn't survive the war. And these. These things were complicated to get in there. But the people needed the background, just like they needed the background in comics. They had to know they had to see Mickey Mouse and they had to see Donald Duck, and they just had to get a sense for Art's world in that sense, too. So we had many different worlds. I mean, we always joked that we had three majors on this film. We had to major in the history of comics, we had to major in the history of the Holocaust and representation of the Holocaust, and we had to major in history of arts life. So we had a lot of work to do and a lot of weaving of those stories.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

In the Prisoner on the Hell Planet Art, you say in the film, in order to understand it, I'm going to have to draw it. Talking about your mother's death.

[Art Spiegelman]

Yeah. You know, I realized when Prisoner on the Hell Planet just came up, that that was actually at the core of the answer I didn't give while blathering on about how Francoise and I met. Part of the Story very specifically is when Francoise came to New York, she really spoke very poor English. And she thought the way she could learn to speak it better because she liked reading comics in France would be to read comics because it was smaller bursts of language. And she looked around, but only found these superhero things that didn't especially interest her. So again, our friend Ken Jacobs pulled out some of the underground comics he had. He had a pretty good collection of all of my stuff, and he began reading those things. And when he read Prison on the Hell Planet, which was Originally published in 1972 in an underground comic, she was kind of floored. And she did something very uncharacteristic of her at the time, which is she called. She doesn't like phones because she wasn't speaking well enough to use them. But she just needed to talk to me about that thing, like, how dare I do a strip like that? That was so. I don't know what the word would be. Unsympathetic, unsentimental in a certain way to the events that happened. And so we talked for about six hours on the phone. I was open to it, and I was attracted to her, so that made it easier. But that conversation is what really made everything move to another level of connection.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

You mentioned Ken Jacobs a couple times in this interview. He's a professor of yours in college art. What did he teach you about creativity and art that you still use today?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, a lot, because when I'm talking, when I'm bragging about how much I know about comics, I knew almost nothing about capital A art. I was kind of a slob snob, devoted to things printed on newsprint. And it was through Ken that he dragged me to look at some Picasso paintings near the university in upstate New York and kind of decoded them for me. He just said, look, just think of them as large comics panels and start from there. And he kind of humanized it for me. So I wasn't as suspicious of high culture as I had been. Although in literature, it was easy for me. And the visuals that started in, you know, that included things like Cy Twombly in art and Jackson Pollock and on and around, not so much, you know, that didn't like. I'm definitely more interested even now in representational art of one kind or another. Thank genuinely abstract art. But he opened me up to all that and opened me up really, to take what I was doing more seriously, because he did.

[Alison Stewart]

We're speaking about the new documentary Art Spiegelman. Disaster is My Muse. My guests are Art Spiegelman as well as Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolan. They are the directors of the film. I want to talk a little bit about Maus, about book banning. First of all, Molly, what did you think when you. Why do you think some people saw Mouse as a threat? A threat to their children, Tennessee specifically?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

That's in the film.

[Molly Bernstein]

I think that's a better question for Art, actually, because he read the minutes of the school board. He really studied it. I'm going to hand that off to Art, if he doesn't mind.

[Art Spiegelman]

So what was the question that started all this? Now that I have to answer it.

[Alison Stewart]

No, the question was why do you think some people see Mouse as a threat to their child?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, it's a complicated answer, but I spent a year trying to answer it so that I was on interview shows, I was writing about it, I was going to libraries and schools and giving talks about it. And actually it led to a year where I just stopped drawing completely. And it took me another year and a half to learn how to do it again because I felt more like I was running for office or something. Because I became the Mouse became the poster boy for why books shouldn't be banned. Because it was easier in some ways at the time. It's changing now, but at the time it seemed QED one needs to learn about the Holocaust and so on. And then to find out that it was at the time that was easier to talk about than gender, race in more. In more general terms for people who were uncomfortable with the whole thing. But then when they looked at Naos, it was too difficult probably because, well, first of all, it is quite horrific. I never made it for kids. It just somehow ended up being there as well. But also because it was a. At its heart, as much of my work is, it was very anti authoritarian and school boards like having authority, even if it's just the measly amount you get for being on a school board. And that was the, I believe, real reason, the ostensible reasons where you can't ban things for that reason. It's anti authoritarian, but you can ban it if it has any sexual content or cursing, bad language. And it took some doing, but they. And they didn't read the book, but they kept looking for some bad language and some pornographic images. And they did find one naked breast that one could see over the shoulder of my mother dead in a bathtub. But it was just tiny and a little dot. So that was strike one. And strikes two and three were the word bitch and goddamn, I think. So that gave them the excuse to do what they did, because, as I said at the time, they just wanted a cozier and friendlier Holocaust to teach.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Did it change the way you felt about your country, the people who live in your country, and make decisions?

[Art Spiegelman]

Yeah. I mean, but that's been a problem for me since at least the 60s. So it just keeps getting worse. But, yeah, of course. And the fact that it was so coordinated, these Moms for Liberty who are trying to do this all over the country and exercise the thought control that doesn't let minds grow.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Philip, what did you notice about the groups that wanted to take Maus out of the classroom and out of libraries?

[Philip Dolan]

Well, as Art said, it's very complicated, and it's part of the whole swirl of things going on in the country right now. And there was a movement to take lots of books out of. Out of libraries and to threaten to arrest librarians who had books in. But. So that was part of it. But on the flip side, as is always the case, when the book was banned, I think it sold more. It shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. So there's always that issue of we have a very divided country. So some people were banning it and other people were buying copies and sending them to those states.

[Art Spiegelman]

So I seem to have been one of the few beneficiaries of this scored, was it got so much publicity that all I can say is thank you to the school board because it was helpful.

[Philip Dolan]

Yeah, I mean, that's true. And Art did make a point of saying that he might be lucky, but other people weren't so lucky. So some people's books were banned, and they didn't become bestsellers. I mean, one of the things that the film shows, and this is true of all books, the book really is a person's life. They pour their life into it and their experience, and it's on the shelf for everyone to look at and to kind of enjoy seeing the full. The full quality of someone's life. So when books are banned, you're really, really silencing voices. So that was one.

[Art Spiegelman]

When I was talking about all this stuff in public, I made a point of trying to expand the subject because as I said, somehow at that time. But I think in 2023, that's sadly changing quickly. Anti Semitism wasn't as popular as it is right now. And I made a point from the beginning to say that, yes, on the one hand, Maus was a very granularly factual book, but it did have cat and mouse heads representing Nazis and Jews, and therefore it Had a fable like aspect. And on that level it seems that it was a, a strong example of what it means to other, whether people's sexual preferences or because of the color of skin or whatever. It had that metaphoric value as well. And it made it useful in schools where kids are wrestling with that, whether school boards and teachers in the south like it or not.

[Alison Stewart]

Art, was there ever a controversy about either your New Yorker cover or something that you've drawn that makes you question what you did?

[Art Spiegelman]

Well, I question what I did each time, but I think that the main thing it did was it encouraged me to keep being anti authoritarian. You know, like it was nice work if I could get it because it got my brain juices flowing. I think the one that's the most difficult to me is the one that just came out because that took nine months to make and that was published in the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and now happening in various other languages called Never Again and Again and Again. There was this jam with Joe Sacco who did the Palestine book graphic novel and was difficult to do. Like it took me nine months to make a three page strip working with somebody who's providing at least one and a half pages of that. And it was, I now realize part of it was just when you're rusty, stop drawing for a year or so while doing this tour of talking in libraries and so on. That it was also a kind of. It was basically an attempt to grapple with these things in a way that was broader than just in quotes, the Holocaust. And I couldn't avoid thinking about what was happening in Gaza. It was horrifying to me. And as it says in one balloon of that strip, I just didn't want Mao's to be used as a recruiting tool for the Israeli army. And that's what pushed me. It's not that I'm an expert by far not an expert on Gaza or even Israel. I was not a Zionist. I went there once at 13, didn't especially like my visit. It was better to be visiting Paris on the way back with my parents. That was fun. So I for a long time just tried to avoid thinking about it or reading about what was happening in Israel. But this thing brought it front and center and there was no avoiding it. So fortunately I had a much more knowledgeable partner who spent a lot of time in Gaza, has friends in Palestine and it allowed for there to be a conversation in which as Joe said, well, you know, people know where I'm coming from. Less of them know where you're coming from. So I'm going to put on my interviewer hat again. And it worked in that direction. And I think that's the one that is probably the one that took so long, because I was at war with myself. On the one hand, my superego insisted that I do this because of the aforementioned reason. It's very specifically because not only is Disaster my muse, but I was getting obsessed with what this all meant and how to. How to frame it and how to think about it. And also because, well, my superego wanted me to do it, saying, look, you'd much rather be Dashiell Hammett during the HUAC years than Elia Kazan. So it just was shoving me forward. But my id, on the other hand, was saying, who needs the goddamn grief? All I'll do is have everybody at the Internet yelling at me. And it seems that that's sort of what's happening. I met my ambition, but it did probably slow it down in terms of stopping the war within myself to cover that war one way or another.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

The film is called Art Spiegelman, Disaster Is My Muse. It premieres tomorrow at Film Forum. Thank you very much to Art Spiegelman.

[Alison Stewart]

Molly Burstein, and Philip Dolan.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Thank you so much for your time.

[Molly Bernstein]

Thank you.