All language subtitles for Art Spiegelman el desastre es mi musa (2025) [HDTV 1080p][Esp]-eng

This is one of the sequences in Portrait

of the Artist, which was memories

related to me becoming a comics
artist and what kind I became.

It's a sequence called Packing...

Rego Park, New York City, circa 1959.

'Come Artie, help me to
pack for our vacation.'

'Aww, I'm learning how to draw Tubby.

I'll help later!'

'Don't be always so lazy!

Better you learn something useful!'

Groan.

I hated helping him.

It mainly consisted of him explaining

that I did everything wrong.

'First we choose what
absolutely we need and fold,

so the big pieces don't take extra room.'

'Uh-huh.'

'The shoes you put into the
corners with small things

in the shoes and... acch!

It's important to know to pack.

Many times I had to run
with only what I can carry!

You have to use what little
space you have to pack

inside everything what you can!

"This was the best advice I've
ever gotten as a cartoonist!"

It still holds then?

Yes, it still holds.

And it was one of the few times I

was able to find some kind
of rapport with my father

where I wasn't at war with him.

HIGH SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN
NEW YORK CITY, 2019

- Hi, Art Spiegelman.
- Hi.

I'm Barbara.

Hi, Barbara.

Nice to meet you.

- Awsome.
- Thank you.

And go on in.

Wow.

Thank you so much.

Something I've read so
many times over the years.

I can't thank you enough.

- Thanks.
- All right.

Enjoy the day.

Thank you.

Hey, you're drawing a mouse.

Art Spiegelman is the guy that reinvented
comics as a medium

that people took seriously.

He showed that comics
could express the darkest,

most tragic, most complicated,
most true things about history,

about our relationships, about family.

Because it is comics,

and it is drawn right
from... as if you took a pen

and put it in the heart,
and the heart drew this.

You can read this difficult stuff.

Art Spiegelman
is one of the most important

cartoonists in the world working today.

He tackled a subject that was enormous,

and he established the medium
as a serious literary form.

Piles isn't the same thing as archiving.

I've now discovered.

I grew up with just shards of information.

There's such a thing as Hitler, and
there's such a thing as World War II.

And they were concentration camps,

and somehow my parents were in them.

And they had these
numbers on their arms,

and my father would
wake up screaming often.

Yet, I didn't have a context for all this.

Little picture.

Washington Heights, New York City.

A Hired Car Ride Home, circa 1954.

Those little V's translated text was

showing that the characters
were speaking Polish.

'What a fancy affair.

Everybody was invited, even Janek!'

'Yes, but nobody would sit near him!'

My parents always spoke
Polish to each other.

Brr... poor guy!'

'Who's Janek?' 'So, the
picture with the big ear is listening!'

'Why don't people sit with him?'

'In Auschwitz, he
was a Sonderkommando.

He threw Jews into the oven.'

'Why!?' 'If not, the Germans
will throw him in the oven!'

'So it wasn't his fault, right?'

Yeah, but it's rumors he put to
the ovens his wife and his son,

so nobody wants to sit!'

Take a nap again, Cookie!

"It's still a long drive, and
we're just having grown-up talk!"

BBC JEWISH BOOK WEEK PODCAST, 2022

I think it's not an exaggeration to say
that of the several truly great works of art

that are related to the Shoah,

I think there are three that
people continue to come back to.

One of them is Primo Levi's
novel If This Is A Man.

Another is Claude Lanzmann's
documentary Shoah,

and Maus by Art Spiegelman.

It is a work that has not lost any
relevance in the nearly 40 years

since it was first read.

What I would have known
of comics before this

was Marvel and DC, Superman
and Batman, that kind of thing.

But you and Maus was coming out
of something very different.

The younger Art Spiegelman
addresses that point.

Let's watch this first clip.

Instead of a ritualized
story told over and over again,

there's such a thing as finding
new stories and finding indeed

what makes a story.

I don't have ongoing characters
that have repeat from strip to strip,

except maybe myself,
and it seems like a tradition

that's well-rooted in 20th
century art, The Artist is Hero.

There's actually something pernicious

about this idea of the hero
being foisted off on kids.

There's these good guys,
and there's these bad guys,

and they bash each other out.

And the good guys are sure to win.

And, well, things just ain't that way.

It's a fairly simple thing to say,

but things just ain't that way.

Prisoner On
the Hell Planet A Case History.

Trojan Lake, New York, 1968.

'In 1968, my mother killed herself.

She left no note!'

'My father found her in the bathtub

when he got home from work,

her wrists slashed and an
empty bottle of pills nearby.

Oy, Gott!'

'I was living with my parents
for the most part' as I agreed

to do on my release from the state
mental hospital several months before.

I had just spent the
week-end with my girlfriend.'

My parents didn't like her.

I was late getting home.

'I suppose that if I'd
gotten home when expected,

I would have found her body.

When I saw the crowd,
I had a pang of fear.

I suspected the worst, but
I didn't let myself know!'

I now understand that to be
one of the central traumas of my life.

But at the time, I was
just coming home late

and a cousin of mine
corralled me to take me

to our family doctor,
who was the person who

had to explain to me that my
mother had just killed herself.

There's ghosts hanging
over the household.

She came from a large,
closely knit family,

and none of it was around.

There was just so much loss.

I think that it finally caught up with her.

Robert sold in his own shop.

Come on in.

Excuse me.

Pardon me.

Sorry, the whole thing's set
up in the most cramped part of.

Where should I put my coat?

I - think on the other side.

Can I help you do something here?

No, just put your stuff on the other side.

All right.

My mother really partially survived
because she shared her food.

She didn't care if she lived or died,

so she would share it
with the other people.

But as a result, the other
people there took care of her.

They made sure that she would
get through these things.

She would explain how when
she had to take a piss...

you're only allowed to
piss at certain moments.

And if somebody finds you
in the fields pissing,

that was a death sentence.

Jeez.

And so what would

happen is the other women would
stand in a circle around her

and be working there so
she could squat down and do

what she had to do.

I find this out when I'm a
really little kid walking down

63rd drive to the supermarket,
and she's pulling me along.

And she says, I'm going to have to pee.

I can either make it to the supermarket

or we should turn around.

And she tells me that anecdote.

I had no context whatsoever.

Oh, my God.

- Yikes.
- Wow.

That's why you had to tell that story.

Yeah, that's right.

MAUS VOL. 1: MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY
PUBLISHED 1986

Maus is a twin story.

So it's about Art Spiegelman's
father, Vladek's experience

in the Holocaust.

Another thread of the book is the story

of an adult cartoonist who is struggling

to visualize the
Holocaust in comics form,

and is also profoundly

struggling with his
relationship with his father.

On the indicia page, there's a quotation.

'The Jews are undoubtedly a
race, but they are not human.'

Adolf Hitler.

Rego Park, New York, circa 1958.

It was summer.

I remember I was 10 or 11.

'Last one to the schoolyard,
is a rotten egg!'

I was roller skating with Howie and Steve

till my skate came loose.

'Ow!'

'Hey!' Wait up fellas!'

Rotten Egg!

Ha ha!' 'W-wait up!'

'Snf, snf.'

My father was in front, fixing something.

Artie, come to hold this
a minute while I saw.

Snrk?

Why do you cry, Artie?

Hold better on the wood.

I... I fell, and my friends
skated away w... without me.

He stopped sawing.

Friends?

Your friends?

If you lock them together in a
room with no food for a week,

"then you could see what it is, friends."

So that sequence was there

to frame what happens in the
rest of the book, which is

a difficult relationship
with my father and one in which

nightmare visions drop out
of nowhere into my kid life.

I vest you with the hood.

I will slip it over your head from behind.

OK, sure.

Could turn into a murder mystery
if you just tighten it properly.

I have done this a few times.

Let's hope I can make it...

So I don't have to worry

about moving a tassel from side
to side because it's permanently attached.

I hereby confer upon you

the degree of Doctor of
Letters, honoris causa.

Dean Breslin will invest you with a hood

that symbolizes your degree.

And it is my pleasure to
present you with this diploma.

Cool. Thank you.

I need to get into my civilian...

You think I'd know how to
operate a mouse now that I'm...

a doctor of letters.

I thank you for this honor.

And 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 Veronica,

feminism from Little Lulu,
economics from Donald Duck.

Philosophy, that I got from Peanuts.

Politics, I learned from
Pogo, and basically, ethics,

aesthetics, and everything
else from MAD magazine.

The comic book company is called
EC Comics, these first MAD comic books.

They also produced these horror comics,

like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of
Horror, The Haunt of Fear.

And people who had an
investment in raising children

the right way thought
this was bad for them.

I, of course, looked at this
and saw it as an early secular

Jewish response to Auschwitz,
of the dead coming back to life,

of atrocities taking place
in the midst of daily life.

My mother took me with
her on her chores.

We went into a drugstore.

I was looking at a spinner
rack of paperbacks.

There was a tiny little
image on this book that

was just in a rack, and I
couldn't get my eyes off it.

It was only that high.

And I was like, wow,
that's an amazing thing.

Then my mother was getting ready
to cart us out, and I said,

I've got to have this.

And absolutely not because she was

on a very tight leash with
spare change and money

in my father's household.

And I just wouldn't go without
it, and so she let me have it.

And it's the picture that changed my life

because then as I looked
through the insides

and found things like a parody
of Mickey Mouse

called Mickey Rodent.

It's like I had never seen anything
like that in all my five years.

And it just became a touchstone for me.

And I decided that whatever these...

there are people that do this.

I want to be one of the people
that makes this kind of thing.

That cover was the cover
that launched a thousand

misbegotten thoughts and brains.

Both of us were
warped by a very specific cover of MAD.

- Which one?
- Number eleven.

They had that covered
by Basil Wolverton.

It was the one where

there's a drawing of Lena
Hyena kind of character

against the photograph of a building.

It's made to look
like a Life magazine with...

The mad logo with this
red rectangle, just like Life.

And I thought, oh, my god,

they're making fun of Life magazine
in this most wacky, goofy way.

It was just completely...

Shocking.

It put a big crack in my world.

Me, too.

This, of course,

was the very first
issue of MAD magazine.

Started off as a comic book,
which a lot of the readers don't realize.

Harvey Kurtzman was a cartoonist,

a comics writer, and an
editor and invented something

profound and important in the world,

the style and humor of MAD.

A MAD RECORD IT'S A GAS!

It's a gas.

GOOD HOUSEBREAKING

WHEN THEY SAY... THE LEGALIZATION OF
MARIJUANA WOULD BE A NATIONAL CALAMITY!

IT REALLY MEANS...
I OWN A LIQUOR STORE!

BITTER HOMES AND GARDENS

SEE THE NEW 1958 UNDERGROUND HOME

"LOOK, MOM! NO MORE CAVITIES!"

YOUR SON IS RUNNING AROUND WITH A TEEN-AGE GANG...
ONE OF THESE DAYS, HE'LL GET HIS TEETH KNOCKED OUT!

Basically, the message embedded in it

was, the whole
adult world is lying to you.

And we admit, we're
adults, so good luck, kid.

So it basically was asking
you to deeply question things.

And I believe it was an important aspect

of what led to the generation
that protested the Vietnam War.

By the time we moved to Queens,

I was about nine years old.

In my parents' bedroom,
there was a large blow-up

of a very small photo they
had of my brother, Richieu,

and it was there all the time.

So I knew I had a brother
who didn't survive the war.

Richieu was about four years
old in a ghetto

with my mother's sister, his aunt.

And when the ghetto
was being cleared out

and the people were
being sent to Auschwitz,

Tosha, my mother's sister,
poisoned her own children,

Richieu, and herself, rather
than let them go to the gas.

My parents spent a lot of time
after the war looking for him

because they couldn't
believe he had been poisoned.

I knew he was a good-looking kid,

but I didn't know much about him.

And the implication... I don't remember

it being said in so many
words... was, oi, we had a kid.

He was fine.

What do you need this one for?

When I was growing up in the '50s,

the term Holocaust did not really exist.

That was never mentioned in school.

I knew a lot of that stuff from my mother,

who had had relatives who were
able to get out of Vienna.

But this was not really something

that people talked about.

And I think that for a lot of people,

this is why the Eichmann
trial was so important.

The Germans went
from one house to the other

and took the Jewish
men from their homes.

They didn't care how old they were.

My father, too.

They loaded them onto a
truck and drove them away.

I ran after them into the woods.

All the Jews who had been
taken were already dead.

My father was
also dead, shot many places.

And that was the first time

I was getting a sense of some
more textured detail about what

my parents had gone through.

And it's when I'd hear my father talking

about passing through
Mengele for the selections.

So they were to that.

Sometimes we'd watch it at our house,

sometimes with other survivor families.

He was 13 in 1961.

And this was a global televised event.

After he watched the Eichmann trial,

he went looking in his parents' bedroom

on their forbidden bookshelf.

And that forbidden bookshelf, of course,

was catnip for me.

And so it included things
like Lady Chatterley's Lover

and a book called The Black Book,

which had some photographs in it
that were incredibly disturbing.

There were small booklets
that came out after the war,

giving aspects of the Jewish
disaster in various towns

and cities, books with
little drawings by survivors.

That was very, very vivid for me.

I started making comics,
first, copying others,

then using joke books to get
jokes that I would illustrate

in comics form.

When I was about 11 or 12,
I was getting published

in children's magazines.

There was a local paper in Queens

that published a little column that says,

budding artist wants attention.

Maybe two years later, I
went back and got a job

at the Long Island Post.

And soon, I was doing stuff
for my junior high school paper,

then editor of my high school paper.

- AND WHAT (PRAY TELL) ARE YOU?
- I, TO BE SURE, AM A PHILOSOPHER...

A ROVING SOUL, OBSERVING EXISTENCE
THROUGH THE BAY WINDOW OF MORTALITY...

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR!

I'd been doing some drawings
for Paul Krassner's Realist magazine.

I started working for
fanzines like Wild! And Smudge

with my friend, Jay Lynch,
who was a seasoned veteran two

years older than me.

We were being published in
purple ink on these very

inexpensive copying methods and finally

started my own called Blasé.

And at the time, I was fixated
on artists that are still

important to me to one
degree or another, which

is the core of the EC MAD gang,
which was Jack Davis, Wally Wood,

and Bill Elder.

At some point, I'm
looking at a baseball card

and realizing that the tiny drawing

on the back with the stats,
it was clearly Jack Davis.

And I went, gee, I'd love to
have something by Jack Davis

to look at an original of.

And so I call up, and they put me

through to this guy, Woody Gelman,

who's the head of the Creative
Development Department.

I mentioned that I'm doing this
amateur magazine called Blasé,

and I'm going to the High
School of Art and Design,

and I want to be a cartoonist.

And he says, well, why don't you come

down, bring me a copy of your magazine,

and I'll give you a couple of
those baseball card drawings?

So I cut school, and I went
there as soon as I could.

He took me to lunch in a little
lunch commissary of Topps,

and we started talking.

I gave him my magazine.

We had a very long lunch.

And that was pretty much the
end of it until I turned 18.

And at that point, a letter comes

in the mail from Woody
Gelman, asking me

if I would like to get a
job working for Topps Gum.

It turns out that Woody
had kept the Blasé

and had clipped a piece of paper
to it, saying, call this kid

when he turns 18.

He asked if I wanted to work there.

And I really wanted to do
that, but I had to tell him,

I have to go to college.

Otherwise, I'm going to get drafted.

He said, fine.

Just work for us for the summer.

And so I did.

I saw that they were doing another series

of funny Valentine cards, things
like, your teeth are like stars.

You flip it over, they come out at night.

I said, can I try some of those?

I had the thrill of
seeing the finishes done

by Wally Wood, who was another
one of the MAD artists.

This was really exciting
for an 18-year-old me.

And Woody just became
my surrogate father.

All through my trying to figure
out what kind of cartoonist

I could be, Topps Bubble
Gum was my Medici.

I worked at Topps from 1965
as a summer job to 1986.

And so it gave me a gig
whenever I wanted it.

HARPUR COLLEGE, SUNY BINGHAMTON, 1965

I do have a
strong memory of Art's dorm room

at Harpur College, later
the State University

of New York at Binghamton.

And he had his comic books there.

And so I remember going there
and smoking pot and reading Doctor Strange.

I had written
a paper for my Art 101 History class.

I analyzed the story
called the Master Race

by Bernard Krigstein.

It was singular.

The Holocaust, on any level,
was just not a serious subject in comics.

And all of a sudden, there was a
story taking it very seriously,

presented in a comics language

that wasn't like any other
comics language I knew.

When he was trying to show something,

whisking by and moving, he
wasn't using speedlines.

YOU OUGHT TO SEE ME WHEN I REALLY TRY!

YOU CAN HIT!

He was using Nude
Descending a Staircase

as a model of how to show movement.

So he was just inventing, wholesale,

a new set of vocabularies
that could be applied

to comics, mind-blowingly.

I'd done a long paper explaining
how significant this was.

An underground filmmaker, Ken Jacobs,

who was teaching at Harpur
College, saw this piece

and sought me out.

Of course, Ken loved

the idea of underground comics.

And so they hit it off right away.

He was smart as can be and profound,

somebody who felt things very deeply.

"Avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs."

The high school dropout who
became a distinguished professor

at SUNY Binghamton, my mentor,
and irascible best friend

for over 30 years.

He taught me how to look at art
and to see myself as some sort

"of an artist."

He was basically

getting me past my slob-snob self of
being willing to concede

that art might exist in museums,
as well as on newsprint.

"Stop being such a slob-snob, Art.

Just think of the paintings
as the giant comic panels.

Ohh."

As I was open to it,

certain painters struck me as
having a family resemblance to cartoonists.

Max Beckmann and
George Grosz seemed

like they were no different than Jack
Davis and Bill Elder in some ways.

I feel like I'm at last finishing off one
of the world's longest-standing incompletes.

I never even finished my
undergraduate studies.

And therefore, I never got to sit
anywhere near where you're sitting now.

While I was still a freshman,
I inherited the editorship

of Harpur's Humor magazine.

When it was delivered to the printers,

they confiscated the
boards because they

considered some of the cartoons
I had drawn blasphemous.

I had been on the dean's list.

I had also been on every
psychedelic substance that found

its way into the tri-state area
in those wonder years called the '60s.

And I left not in a blaze of glory,

but in a blaze of ambulance
sirens and flashing lights.

I was convinced I was god.

And Harpur's school psychiatrist thought

I should do some advanced
theological studies

at Binghamton State Mental Hospital.

What happened to me the
winter I flipped out

was that I had gotten the bends.

I had surfaced too quickly
from the overheated bunker

of my traumatized family into
the heady atmosphere of freedom

and possibility offered
by this amazing place

at that amazing time.

SIGN PETITIONS TO END THE WAR NOW!

It was 1968, Lower East Side,

and we were taking a photo shoot.

What I thought of at the time as a little,

old Jewish man in a long woolen
coat came over to watch us.

And it turned out, of course, that he

was a little, young Jewish man.

He was Art Spiegelman, and he was 21.

He gave us a photocopy of his comic.

And I said, I do comics, too.

We became real friends at that point.

And it launched me into being
one of the underground comics set.

I had done Maus originally
as a three-page comic strip

for an underground comic
called Funny Aminals in 1971.

The only requirement was that it
used anthropomorphic characters.

At the time I was trying to figure this out,

I went to sit in on some
classes of Ken Jacobs showing

some old animated cartoons with
cats and mice romping around.

And then he was showing some
racist cartoons from the same period.

And it became clear that there
was a connection between the two.

At that point, I said, I have it.

I'll do a comic book story about
the Ku Klux cats and

lynching of some mice and deal
with racism in America

using cats and mice as the vehicle.

And that lasted about 10
minutes before I realized

I just didn't have enough
background knowledge

to make this thing happen well.

And instantly thereafter,
the synapses connected,

and I realized that I had
a metaphor of oppression

much closer to my own past.

The entire Nazi project,
the Final Solution,

ended up dividing humanity
into various species.

What was involved was the
extermination of the Jews,

and extermination is a
word reserved for vermin.

It's not what happens to people.

What happens to people
is they get murdered.

This is an underground
comic that came out

in 1972, Funny Aminals.

I was in it.

And it was very important
to me because the cover was

by Robert Crumb, and he was the
god king of underground comics,

setting that whole medium
and idiom in motion.

But it had other great
cartoonists in it as well,

so it was a gathering of a tribe.

It starts, incidentally, with
a drawing based on a photo

by Margaret Bourke-White that was

the prisoners at Buchenwald
being released in Life magazine.

And that photo is quoted
here with the mice.

And there's a little arrow toward one

of the mice in the second
row that says Papa,

and it's all framed as
being in a photo album.

So I'll read it to you.

"Maus."

When I was a young mouse
in Rego Park, New York,

my papa used to tell me bedtime stories

about life in the old
country during the war.

And so Mickey Die
Katzen made all the mice

to move into one part from the town.

It was very crowded in the ghetto.

Golly!

It was fences put up all around.

No mouse could go out from the ghetto.

No food and no medicines could go in.

They treated us like
we were insects, worse.

I can't even describe.

"Psst, you vant a potato to buy?"

I was really proud to be in
this comic when it came out.

And I realized I'd crossed the
rubicon into a different area

of comics making.

I would say, this is
the end of my juvenilia

and the beginning of
whatever comes after.

I found myself moving
out to San Francisco.

The San Francisco
underground comics scene

was something really new
fermenting and exploding.

PROXIMITY SUSTAINS A MOVEMENT:

UNDERGROUND COMIX ARTISTS & COMPANIES
IN THE MISSION DISTRICT, 1972-1973

About a year before, I
got to Topps Bubble Gum.

And I was going to the
same offices in Brooklyn.

Woody found out I was going
to San Francisco, and he said,

you might want to look up Robert.

Look, he's a good guy.

So I took his address
and went to see him.

This was shortly after Crumb's LSD trip

that changed his approach
to comics and his life.

We started talking about
Woody, about comics, and stuff.

And then he said, do you want to
see the stuff I've been doing?

And he showed me the pages of Zap

that hadn't been published yet,
and they totally blew me away.

Seeing Crumb's work was
a kind of revelation.

Crumb brought that blue
collar, crosshatched,

gritty style back that
hearkened back to the comics

of the '20s and '30s, but
also, much more importantly,

began to discover and show that
comics didn't have to have punch

lines, and they could be about anything.

Robert, in effect, took

comic books from the industrial
place where they were,

which was aimed mostly at children,

and brought it into
the world of grown-ups

and into the world of the
cartoonists as artists.

So we were trying to make comics
that were the work of artists,

the work of people wanting
to express themselves,

and do it completely uncensored.

For me, it's always the printed book

is the finished thing.

I don't care that much
about the original art.

It's different from fine art, where

you see a thing on the
wall and the original art.

But to me, this is the finished art.

And there's was always a big
thrill to see the printed book.

There's this great moment
when the book's arrived,

and you got to see how it
actually turned out in print.

Sometimes it's like, oh,
no, the colors aren't right.

No, the registrations aren't...

I was happy if the page was right.

Ron Turner used to get the page
order wrong a lot of times.

I couldn't believe it.

It was terrible.

I met Art at the
San Francisco Comic Book Store

on 23rd Street in the Mission District,

which was where I met
pretty much everybody.

We went to a little lunch
place a few blocks away.

That eventually became the cover
of Short Order Comix Number 1.

So, I don't know, within
an hour of meeting,

we were already plotting
to put out comics together.

Art and I are the characters
in this six-panel comic.

And Art says, "I tell ya, Griffy,

comics are this year's hula hoop.

If we play our cards right,
our mag will be in every

dentist's office in the country."

And I say, "Yeah, right."

But what do you say, let's
blast a few ducks, huh?

Sigh.

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!

An editor's lot is not an easy one.

You're all wound up, Art.

Relax.

Frisco's got everything.

"After this, we go for a cable car ride."

Art and my personality are
pretty clearly illustrated here,

I have to say.

Yeah, we ended
up creating an underground comix manifesto.

"It is the artist's responsibility

to hate, loathe, and despise formica.

Comics must be personal!

It is the reader's responsibility

to understand the artist.

Gibber-gabber-blort!

It is also the artist's responsibility

to understand the artist.

Mental instability is a tool, and it

must be kept well shortened.

Comic books are their own lesson.

We serve no master.

Efficient and callous capitalist
exploitation must be condemned

and deplored at every turn
and replaced by inefficient

"and humane capitalist exploitation."

THE OLD ORDER - READ!

THE NEW ORDER

SHOT ORDER

We were all worried about making a
living out of doing our kind of comics,

but Art always seemed
to be OK with money.

So one day he asked me,

how would you like to work on Wacky
Packages with me?

So Art had created Wacky Packages,

which were parodies of consumer items.

They were little stickers that came

with a square of bubble
gum sold by Topps,

and they were a huge hit with kids.

I said, OK.

Well, what do I do?

We take a product, put it
in front of us on a table,

and try to think of how to make fun of it

from the perspective of
a seven-year-old boy.

This was a very low form of humor.

Art told me the way to think
about working for Topps Bubble Gum

was that you have to realize
that children at an early age

go through three stages that
you have to commercialize.

The first stage, when they're very little,

you can describe by the word hello.

They just, hello, I'm here, benign.

The second stage has to
get a little bit older, is,

I'm great, when they develop an ego.

That's really prime Wacky Package age.

And the final stage, which
comes a little bit after that,

is fuck you.

So hello, I'm great, fuck
you describes the market

for Topps Bubble Gum products.

GARBAGE PAIL KIDS, 1985
CREATED BY ART SPIEGELMAN

ADAM BOMB ASHLEY CAN

MICK DAGGER POTTY SCOTTY

JUST A PIECE O' SHIT!

GRUNT! UNNF!

I was working on a really terrible comic

for Short Order called Just a
Piece o' Shit about a talking

turd, trying to be one of the
real underground cartoon boys.

And it was awful.

I was living with Michelle, I think.

Oh, yeah.

So she said something

that triggered me to
start screaming at her

and slam the door to my studio room.

And then I realized
that was pretty stupid.

She didn't do anything.

So I went out to apologize, and
I said, obviously, I'm angry.

I have no idea what I'm... oh,
yeah, I'm angry about my mother.

And then all of that stuff that
had happened about four years

before came flooding back
because if somebody asked,

I'd say, my mother killed herself,

but I didn't remember any
of the events around it.

They'd been cauterized.

And so at that point, I just started

writing it all down and then figured

in order to understand it,
I'm going to have to draw it.

And that led to Prisoner
on the Hell Planet.

I'd been looking at a lot
of woodcuts, very anguished

and expressionistic style.

And they had literal gravitas.

They were engraved images.

And so scratchboard allowed me
to do something like a woodcut

but without getting my hands bloody.

I found it was a good
vocabulary to work in

for that particular piece.

In 1976, I met Art

because I got Prisoner on Hell Planet.

And that blew my mind.

I just was so moved by
it and curious about it.

I didn't understand how someone
could be so intimate on paper.

It was mind-blowing in a
way that really opened up

so much new territory for me.

When you read something
that's meaningful for you,

it does bring you into the
psyche of the person who

has written it.

I had never experienced
this to that extent,

and certainly never in a comic.

I did something which
I never did at the time

because my language was very poor.

And I don't like the
phone, but I called him up.

When she read
The Prisoner on the Hell Planet,

she was deeply and
genuinely shocked by it.

She didn't understand how
somebody could make something

like that and even express anger
at a mother who had suicided.

I asked him,

how could he talk about things
that were so private?

I do remember that it was relentless.

It was like, how could
you say such a thing

about somebody who died?

I said, well, I don't know, I
was angry, and I was in turmoil.

And I explained how I first
recovered that as a memory.

You're showing
your father and the despair

and your father climbing on the coffin,

and other people accusing you of having

a part in his mother's suicide.

He's supposed to feel guilty.

And the fact that he turns
the table on his mother,

where he says, "Well,
Mom, if you're listening",

congratulations.

You've committed the perfect crime.

You put me here, shorted all my
circuits, cut my nerve endings,

and crossed my wires.

"You murdered me, Mommy, and you
left me here to take the rap."

You're in jail.

You're in a mental jail.

And then he adds, "Pipe down, Mac.

Some of us are trying to sleep."

So he actually ends on a joke.

I mean, it was so layered and so intense,

and the conversation lasted hours.

And that's one of the things

that got us to actually
spend time together.

Autobiography had been entered directly as
a possible

genre very late in the game.

It was part of the
underground comics world.

Really, confessional, problematic memoir

and autobiography came from
Justin Green, a comics artist

who was a good friend,
who more and more was

using things that can't be
said clearly about himself.

And it culminated in a
masterpiece called Binky Brown.

Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.

It was like 36 or 40 pages.

And it was turning each
of these little panels

into confession booths, dealing
with the psychosexual guilt

and the obsessive
compulsiveness that came

with his brand of Catholicism.

Justin's work

showed me how something
really personal and truthful

could be so powerful.

It showed me a way that
I could write a story.

The thread that ties

most underground comics
together is transgression,

and transgression is a liberating force.

So by showing, in your comics, stuff

you're not supposed to
show, stuff you're not

supposed to deal with...

the culture outside is telling you,

don't go there... by doing it,
you're robbing it of its power.

OK, here is a folder
called Art Spiegelman.

This is just many, many pages of
tiny, little scribble from Art.

He would tell me of his progress
on whatever he was doing.

So while he was doing
it, he would tell me

how many times he had redone
the third panel on page 3.

And he would just go into great detail.

"I wish it was going faster.

I'm suffering hot and cold
running anxiety attacks

in my championship game
of beat the clock."

It's all he cared about, was his comics.

It was hard to sit at the drawing table.

It's like pulling teeth for Art. It's torture.

Look at the cover of
Breakdowns, with him drinking

a bottle of Indian ink.

That's not a joke.

That's a statement about
anxiety and suicide.

SPIEGELMAN MOVES TO N.Y. "FEELS DEPRESSED!"

I was just back in New York

from my San Francisco days.

And I didn't want to let my father know

I'd moved back because
I'd have to go over there.

And I was, as a result,
staying in touch with him,

using a trick I'd learned
from Dick Tracy's.

Crimestoppers' Textbook.

And I learned that if you put
a towel over the receiver,

it would sound like a long-distance call.

Then for Thanksgiving, I certainly

wasn't going to go out to
Rego Park if I didn't have to.

So I called Francoise and asked what

she's doing for Thanksgiving.

And she said, Thanksgiving?

What is that?

So I said, well, it's a custom in America

where you go to Chinatown
with somebody you like.

Would you be interested?

So that's when we became an item.

He was incredibly charismatic,

and he was passionate.

When she came over,

I began pulling things out to show her.

He was showing me Little Nemo

and then not just reading
me all of the balloons,

but explaining the architecture
of the page and the choices made

by the artist.

I had the impression that he
had discovered a new land.

It was like, my god, everybody
should see this and know this.

It was around that time

that I was planning on giving
a talk at the Collective

for Living Cinema, which was my history

and aesthetics of comics.

It's too grandiose to call
it the theory of comics,

like the quantum theory of the world,

although I did take comics
very, very seriously.

And I thought they were
time turned into space,

a perfect container for memory,
and an incredibly maligned art form.

And without being pretentious about it,

I thought that this was
as valid as anything

that happened in literature,
or in painting, or in cinema.

But I was interested
in the fact that comics

tended to be simplified drawings, icons.

It all comes from a dictionary
definition of comics,

or a narrative series of
cartoons used to tell a story.

The dictionary definition had
a picture of Nancy in the side.

The fact that they used Nancy had

something to do with the iconic
nature of comics drawing.

From there, I began thinking more

about what a comics page was in
a more articulated way, things

I'd learned from looking at my
masters, like Harvey Kurtzman,

at that time, Will Eisner.

And it led to the work and breakdowns,

where I was deconstructing the
language of comics consciously.

ZIP A TUNES AND MOIRÉ MELODIES
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I - stumbled upon an anthology

of his early work called Breakdowns,

which really blew my mind.

The story The Malpractice
Suite took panels

from the very square daily
comic Rex Morgan, M.D.

and cut them up and expanded
the drawings outside

of the parameters of the original panels.

And somehow, Art had taken
the thing that MAD might do,

where it would make fun
of an existing comic,

but instead of redrawing it,
he took the original panels

and expanded them out
and blew out the story.

Art was such a student of the medium

that he's able to build
on pre-existing work,

but to comment on it at the same time,

similar, in a way, to somebody
like Jean-Luc Godard,

who understood film history as a text

that he could revise, he could
elaborate on, he could derange,

he could criticize.

That's true with Art and comics.

He was working on this book,

and he was conceiving of this
thing of color separations.

And he explained to me the basis.

And then I discovered a whole new level

of this, which had to
do with the production

because color separations
were done by hand,

by cutting Zipatone.

It actually isn't in color until it's printed,

so you have to conceive
of it in black and white.

I loved that.

I loved how abstract it was.

And I loved this work.

I just saw it like, OK, here is the image.

And then here is putting together

the blue and the yellow plates, the cyan

and the magenta plates, the
magenta and the yellow plates.

And then he starts playing.

And there's so, so many jokes
and so much information,

I found a connection that
really worked for me.

When I met Francoise,

she was playing hooky
from the Beaux-Arts

in Paris, where she was
studying architecture.

And she was supporting
herself in New York,

working all kinds of odd
jobs, ranging from electrician

and plumber, to cigarette
girl in Grand Central,

to acting in a Richard Foreman play.

Eventually, she said she
was interested in books.

And I said, well, why not publish?

So she went out and
learned how to print,

and we soon had a printing
press in our loft.

This is some of the things

that I could print on my press.

I set up as a small business,
little books and graphics.

We ended up having to get
married because of immigration.

They were going to deport me.

I - was really against it

because we were getting along great,

and I just thought that
this would completely

destroy our relationship
because I thought that

the moment that we were married,
I'd have Dagwood Bumstead

tufts of hair implanted on each side

that she would be given as
a wedding gift, a rolling

pin like Maggie's, in order
to whack me over the head.

The idea of being married
seemed irreconcilable

with having a lover.

We went down to City Hall and
had a shotgun wedding of sorts.

Marriage number two took place when.

Vladek was informed
that we were married,

but it wasn't a marriage he could accept

because she wasn't Jewish.

Francoise had no problem deciding

to convert because it
was meaningless to her,

but she knew it would
be meaningful to Vladek.

She's a much better person than I am.

I was just going, he has to get over it.

I mean, religion just isn't
important to me or to you.

She said, no, no, we can do this.

I actually got along relatively well

with Vladek.

And I understood that it
was unbearable for Art.

He wanted to do an expansion
of what he had done

as a three-page strip, Maus.

And at that point, he
needed to talk to his dad.

There was a
generation canyon between us.

He grew up in a milieu that was
more like 18th or 19th century

shtetl life and then went
through the central maelstrom

of the 20th century.

And me, I was listening to rock
and roll and reading MAD comics.

As an adult, I just had no relationship

to speak of with him and wanted one,

wanted a way to come to terms with him.

And this book afforded that by giving me

the relationship of
interviewer and interviewee

to replace son and father.

We knew that
we were going to Auschwitz.

You knew that Auschwitz was a definite?

Yes, but we
knew that we would go there,

and we'll not come out anymore.

We knew that they will
curse us and burn us.

Did you know about the shower?

Yes, sure.

We knew everything.

The war started in 1939.

And this was 1943 already.

And we knew everything
what was going on.

A - lot of the early part

of Vladek's story, as I got it on tape,

was told to the accompaniment
of him on an exercycle.

And that image really stayed with me,

of him pedaling madly to
nowhere in order to survive.

So I found a wonderful
way to start the story

in the wheel of the exercycle.

And although it's
subliminal, I think in a way,

you get to see an analog to a
cinematic effect of a whirling

wheel, where Vladek
begins to spin his yarn.

And you enter into the
past for the first time

through that wheel.

This page is
showing the scene of testimony.

And it's showing Vladek's
entire body across panels,

and yet disarticulated by these panels.

This ability that comics have to show us

a large image but to fracture
it gets at that sense

that Vladek is a fractured person.

He's a survivor, but parts
of him haven't survived.

In this panel, we see Vladek's
arms on his exercycle.

And he's framing his son,
who looks very small,

within his arms.

So there's something about
that posture and that drawing

that's evocative of their relationship.

And I think that's evocative of
how Vladek makes art feel small,

not only in his difficult personal manner,

but also in the sense
of encountering history.

It was a complex relationship

that I had with my father in his
decline, as he was an old man.

I interviewed him and
re-interviewed him from 1978

till he died in '82.

So as soon as we'd finish,
I'd make him go over the story

again to get more details.

I'd never heard my mother's story fully.

It's a horrible absence
in that my mother, when

I was growing up, showed me
diaries always meant for me.

She said, you may not
be interested in it now,

but you may be someday.

And I was when I began doing this book.

I kept asking my father about them

and found out eventually, in a
moment of grief after her death,

my father burned them.

And at that point, I get
furious, yell at him,

call him a murderer, then
vaguely, superficially reconcile

and walk off with the
fact of the matter as,

I'll never really get her story.

Art had started working on Maus.

Do you want one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he was always saying, oh,
somebody should print comics

in magazines.

Somebody should print comics
in The New York Times.

Trying to fit a letter
that goes beyond the cover.

Francoise.

And he was always

disappointed when they
never followed through.

I decided to do Raw magazine.

In 1982, put together all the ideas
that Art was ceaselessly advocating for.

The idea was to do something
that was of its moment

but also would have the
permanence of a book.

The magazine is not just a publication,

but it's also where you store weapons.

The idea here was to put
things in juxtaposition

that it could explode.

And by putting these different
kinds of artists together,

it was really possible to shape
something that became a vision.

I've been waiting since about '72

for something like Raw
because I was into modern art.

And so I thought comics
had a place in that.

This character is an amalgamation

of a lot of characters.

And it's got Nancy, Orphan
Annie, Popeye's chin,

Dick Tracy's other chin, and Duck's.

COMIC ARTS BROOKLYN, 2019

I met Art and
Francoise in maybe 1980, '81.

And I realized that they
were publishing Gary Panter.

I knew that I was going
to be in good company.

BIG BABY CURSE OF THE MOLEMEN

Reading Raw in high school

and in college, I was radicalized.

I studied every single issue.

I had them out on my drawing tables.

In college, I took them
to painting class with me.

I owe my life to Art and Francoise.

They provided an example of an art

to me when I was a kid that has
really meant the world to me.

And they've meant the world to me.

And in a lot of ways, I feel
like I'm up here with my mom

and dad in a strange way.

We put our two projects together.

I encouraged them to put
the first chapter of Maus

in the second issue of Raw.

So when we decided to
insert Maus into Raw,

we ended up having to
do a couple of things.

One is create another booklet that

would be a totally different size

and that would make it rest by itself.

And then Art had to draw a
page that the booklet would

rest on and then give us a
synopsis of the story so far.

So the shift in size was specifically

to make you stop and feel like
there was a whole other approach

to comics and graphics that was
done in a more intimate style.

A - chapter appeared

in each issue of Raw magazine.

The pictures are totally in
service of the story, so they're

very quiet, compared
to other comic books

and compared to other
things that I've done.

When I'm drawing Maus, I end
up working on typing paper.

I use a fountain pen and
liquid paper to white it out.

I want to feel like I'm writing, so I'm

using stationery supplies.

So it would be more like
picking up on a journal

and looking over one's
shoulder to read that journal.

To me, that's part of the intimacy
that comics are capable of.

And that intimacy is something that
was very necessary for me in the strip.

They're masks that these
characters are wearing.

And of course, my father was
a collaborator on the book,

but then so was Hitler.

And it involved taking that rhetoric

and turning this notion of
the subhuman back on itself

and letting these mice
stand on their hind legs

and insist on their humanity.

This, to me, is one of the most
important pages in the book.

Vladek Spiegelman and Anja
Spiegelman, Art's parents,

were in the city of Sosnowiec in Poland.

The Nazis have hung four Jews publicly

as punishment for trading
on the black market.

And it gives us a very large image that's

also an unbordered image.

This page is spectacular in a sense.

It's unbounded.

It's asking readers to
slow down and to encounter

a shred of the horror of what
Vladek must have felt because he

goes out to look at these people,

and these are people that he knew.

And then yet another
thing this page does

is that it gives us what Art
has called literal footnotes.

We see these men hanging.

And then we get a view in two panels

below of just their feet, which
would seem to be dehumanizing,

but it's exactly the
opposite because in the prose

below their feet, we learn
details about them as people.

"They hanged there one full week."

Cohn had a dry goods store.

He was known over all Sosnowiec.

Often, he gave me
cloth with no coupons.

I traded also with Pfefer,
a fine young man, a Zionist.

He was just married.

"His wife ran screaming in the street."

I - think of this page

as an example of Maus's
explicit anti-fascism

by particularizing not only survivors,

but particularizing victims

that the Nazis wanted to remain nameless.

Art has never separated work and life.

So of course, this is
what he thought about,

what he talked about.

And he got stuck so many times.

And all I could do was be supportive.

"I know this is insane,

but I somehow wish I had been
in Auschwitz with my parents

so I could really know
what they lived through.

I guess it's some kind of guilt
about having had an easier

life than they did.

Sigh.

I feel so inadequate trying
to reconstruct a reality that

was worse than my darkest dreams

and trying to do it as a comic strip.

I guess I bit off more than I can chew.

Maybe I ought to forget the whole thing.

There's so much I'll never be
able to understand or visualize.

I mean, reality is too complex for comics.

So much has to be left out or distorted.

Just keep it honest, honey.

See what I mean?

In real life, you'd never have let
me talk this long without interrupting.

"Hmmph, light me a cigarette."

I did see it build upon itself.

And some things were happy accidents,

like the publication of the first book

as a book and then the
extraordinary feedback

that it got early on...

it was the right thing at the right time...

and the despair that that swam in.

The success of Maus was a setback.

I literally was set back onto a couch,

staring at a stain for months on end.

Eventually, Francoise dragged
me to a shrink she had met,

who was the ideal way out.

He had survived Auschwitz.

We went to the ruins of the barracks

my mother had been in, also
to the site of the crematoria

and gas chambers.

It's an incredibly dark thing
to have to delve into day in, day out.

And there seems to be something
insane about achieving

some kind of celebrity
for working in that area.

There's no way that that
feels deserved or relishable.

Volume 1 was mostly taking
place in the ghetto,

and volume 2 is about the oxymoron

of life in a death camp.

I couldn't imagine it,
so I went to Auschwitz,

two different visits.

This is one of the four
crematoria and gas chambers.

People came down those
stairs over there,

undressed, left their clothes over there,

and were taken to a
shower to take a shower.

Over here, these were the crematoria,

where they burned the bodies.

Went up in smoke.

I began working on the second volume.

I remember
being in France in the summer,

and we had baby Nadja by then.

And I wanted to take her to the beach.

And I was very happy as a mother.

And then I would walk into the house.

And then here was Art
struggling on whatever chapter.

This was in the second book.

And I was like, oh, my god,
when is this ever going to end?

Because the second book is called.

And Then My Troubles Began.

So the descent into hell just...

it kept going further
down and further down.

I mean, reading about
Hungarian Jews arriving

in the summer of 1944, I mean,
this is the end of the war.

They were killing 10,000 people a day.

It was both inconceivable, but
it was the task at content.

I'm going to show you
these three panels first, OK?

Francoise and I are sitting
around the Catskills table with my father.

I'm drinking coffee, and Vladek is saying,

"When the Russians came near",

the Germans made ready
to run from Auschwitz.

They needed tinmen to pull
apart the machineries of the gas chambers.

They wanted to pack it all to Germany.

There, they could take all of
the Jews to finish them in quiet.

The Germans didn't
want to leave anywhere

a sign of all what they did.

You heard about the gas,
but I'm telling not rumors,

but only what really I saw.

"For this, I was an eyewitness."

You see a progressive
close-up of Vladek,

and it turns into a
close-up of the gas chamber.

There's also, as an
aside, smoke coming out

of the gas chamber, which turns
into the smoke of my cigarette.

But in the next sequence,
he's telling me what he saw

and describing as accurately
as he can the gas chamber.

And I took whatever
information I could get

to be able to visualize that.

So it included diagrams that
were in the Auschwitz history

guidebook that was on sale at the camp

to figure out what it looked like exactly.

And then he's describing
the process of dismantling.

And then he talks about how one
of the worst things that he saw

was the way the
Hungarians were treated.

They were brought in very late in the war.

And he says

he's talking with
somebody else working on the tin detail.

"What are they doing over there?"

Digging trenches in case
the Russians attack.

Trenches. Hah.

Those are giant graves they're filling in.

It started in May and
went on all summer.

They brought Jews from Hungary,
too many for their ovens,

"so they dug those big cremation pits."

And my father says, "The holes
were big, so like the swimming pool"

of the Pines Hotel here.

And train after train of Hungarians came.

And those what finished in the
gas chambers before they got

pushed into the graves,
it was the lucky ones.

The others had to jump in the
graves while they still were alive.

Prisoners what worked
there poured gasoline

over the live ones and the dead ones.

And the fat from the burning
bodies they scooped and poured again

"so everyone could burn better."

Jesus, I say.

Now, that was hard to visualize.

It was hard to even tell.

And I was very cautious about
how to tell and draw this.

I needed the only photograph I could

find of anything relating to
this just to begin to imagine.

It turns out there was
a clandestine photo that

was taken in Auschwitz
of the burning pits,

and it was smuggled out of the camp.

So that photograph I leaned
on for some authority.

THE OTHERS HAD TO JUMP IN THE
GRAVE WHILE STILL THEY WERE ALIVE...

AND THE FAT FROM THE BURNING BODIES THEY SCOOPED
AND POURED AGAIN SO EVERYONE COULD BURN BETTER.

This picture was one of the hardest
for me to draw in the whole book.

And I've tried my damnedest,
not always successfully,

but I've tried to not let
this picture be printed out of context

because it had to be horrible.

At some point, I had 20, 30, 40 sketches

of how to draw this thing.

And the one clue for me
was usually, almost always,

the mice are shown with their
nose at the bottom of the head

and seen that way.

And by lifting the head up and
seeing their mouths shrieking,

they became human.

There wasn't a sense of, oh, my god,

he's making a masterpiece.

I didn't perceive of it that way
because, I mean, when I met Art,

he was a master, and
nobody else knew it.

That was the basis of my love
and then my life that,

my god, this guy is amazing.

And isn't it incredible that the
world is not paying any attention?

Three tickets please... Second class...

from Sosnowiec to Auschwitz and back.

I like the idea of being able
to spit in somebody's face

and being able to say,
see, here we are, ja.

We've got a baby.

And life goes on, in spite of
everything those bastards did.

That's something.

To be able to go there and walk
away from it, that's something.

This is the family tree

of Vladek's side of the family,
one branch, before the war

and after.

I - think that there's a lot of
difficult-to-express emotions

that I feel when I see this blank page.

I've always grown up
with that feeling of we

are on a little ship with the four of us

in my nuclear family in
this existential sea.

There's an inherited sense

of loss of the enormous
family that was lost.

There was a bookshelf that contained
every book about the Holocaust

that my dad had been able to find at
the time that he was working on Maus.

And I was very much given
the impression growing up

that he had absorbed... my mother also,

in helping him with the research process,

had absorbed these incredibly
intense horrors in a way that

was like, we did it so you don't have to.

This comic that
I'm about to read for you guys

by my dad, Art Spiegelman, and
it's A Father's Guiding Hand.

"Hey, Dash, look at
what Papa has for you."

A present!

Yup.

It's been in the family for years.

My dad gave it to me
when I was a little boy.

It's old, huh?

And now I'm giving it to you.

What is it?

A monster?

It's magical.

It... it's getting bigger!

It makes you feel so worthless, you

don't believe you even
have the right to breathe.

Aieee!

And just think.

Someday you'll be able to
pass it on to your son.

"Thanks, Papa."

The 1992 Pulitzer Prizes
were announced today.

Among the winners, a special Pulitzer

was awarded to Art
Spiegelman for a cartoon book

depiction of the Nazi Holocaust
called Maus in the US.

Other renowned cartoonists

are delighted the Pulitzer
board has recognized just

what can be accomplished
in their field of work.

I think it says
something more for the Pulitzer

than it says about my field.

I mean, all honor is due to the Pulitzer.

To recognize this kind of brilliance,

well, it doesn't come around often.

Art Spiegelman's
parents survived the war.

The thing that amazed me about Maus

was the audacity to come up with this

and to be able to make this work.

It was astonishing.

What about some
people who may be offended?

I read two remarks.

One of them was that the cartoon
Maus image either trivializes

the Holocaust or, at
some level, reinforces

the rodent image appropriated
by the anti-Semites of the era.

How do you answer them?

Well, read the book, I
think, is the easiest answer.

I enjoyed reading the reviews
of Maus in different countries

because the emphasis would change.

In America, there would usually
be a paragraph saying, well, I

don't know, is it comics?

Is it tragics?

In Germany, there
was much more concern

about the propriety of using comics.

At one point, I remember
being interviewed and asked,

do you think it's in bad taste to have

done a comic book about the Holocaust?

I said, no, I think the
Holocaust was in bad taste.

I've had to come to terms with,
OK, if I have a posterity,

it's through that work.

And I am now proud of what I did.

But I had no expectations
when I was making it

that it would be discovered
while I was alive.

I really thought we would
be publishing it ourselves,

and it would be discovered
more or less posthumously.

It did leave me feeling drained, Maus.

When The New York Times put it

on the Fiction side of the Best Seller list,

Art wrote this amazing letter to
The New York Times Book Review.

They published Art's letter,

in which he says, if I had a novelist's
license working on this book,

I could have lopped
some years off of the 13

that I spent researching it.

So here's a book that was
moved to non-fiction that

portrays humans as animals.

And in that moment, these huge,
dominant cultural institutions

like The Times had to
debate, what does it mean

to take drawings seriously?

THESE DAYS, COMIC
BOOKS AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS

That was a major cultural shift that

basically allows us to
have the field of comics

that we have today.

I - did a book after Maus

called The Wild Party, which was
a very obscure narrative/poem.

It had a great, scurrilous quality,

and it was meant to be erotic.

The whole thing was to be able
to enjoy giving life to his words.

It was a move sideways, as was
joining up with The New Yorker.

ART EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER
1993 - PRESENT

Once Francoise started
working at The New Yorker,

that was the next big
platform for both of them.

When I got invited

to work for The New Yorker, I
got in a lot of trouble there.

There were scandals based
on the covers I was doing.

About the time I was
invited in, Valentine's Day

that was coming up, and I was
thinking about the Crown Heights riots

that brought the West Indian,

African American community,
and Hasidic Jews to blows.

I was just doodling.

And I was drawing that Eustace
Tilley guy with the monocle

and said, I wonder what he'd
look like if he was a Jew.

So I just put a Hasidic
hat and beard on him.

And then before I knew it, he
was kissing this West Indian

African American woman.

And that was my Valentine's cover.

Why don't they just kiss and make up?

Man, did that get people upset.

That was the one that really did it.

NEW YORKER'S FEB. 15 COVER DRAWS CRITICISM

RACIAL THEME OF NEW
YORKER COVER SPARKS FUROR

NEW YORKER COVER ANGERS BLACKS, JEWS

He's very good at comics,
which are sequential images,

but he's also really good at the one image.

It's like poetry and prose.

They're different things,
but a single image

can be used to elicit
an emotion or a thought,

and it can also be used
to really upset people.

And sometimes those
are the same things.

COPS FIRED 41 SHOTS

One of the issues

that was happening around that
time was the Hamidou Diallo case,

an African immigrant
who was coming home from work

into the Bronx, who
was surrounded by cops,

told him to freeze, then asked for his ID.

When he reached for
his ID, they assumed

he was reaching for a gun, and
they just opened fire en masse.

My idea was to have a cop
that looked like the friendly,

Apple-cheeked Casey the Cop
happily and affably shooting

at these silhouetted targets,
where it says, 41 shots, $0.10.

And one of the smartest
things about this cover,

if I say so myself, is that
the targets were all black,

but because they're silhouettes, it

doesn't read as Black Americans
versus white Americans.

It just reads as Americans are
under fire from their police.

New York is talking this week

about the image one
magazine put on its cover.

The complicated message about
cops and police brutality

depicted with an edge
sharp as razor wire.

I think it's irresponsible.

It's outrageous.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir

is furious about the latest
cover of The New Yorker magazine.

But whether you love it or you
hate it, one thing is clear.

This cover art has struck a nerve.

This fall will be the 10th anniversary

of the publication of Maus,

which I consider a true
American masterpiece.

What Maus is is it's what I guess
maybe Truman Capote would call

a nonfiction novel.

Do you believe the
you have another story

that's extraordinary in you?

I mean, I know that's a rough question.

I don't know.

I mean, this was such
a extended birth pang

getting this thing to happen,
like you said, 13 years.

I'm at the early stages
of just poking around

for something that's worth contracting

this long-term disease,
going in for a book

and coming out seven or
eight or nine years later.

So I've been doing a lot shorter
hits, one after the other,

in the hopes that one of them will flower.

Achieving something
of a super high level when

you're really young,
it's like giving yourself

a father to outlive.

And so Art's doing that,
and he's tortured by that.

I was just another baby boom boy.

I grew up in Queens.

I loved comics.

My parents survived Auschwitz.

It's all a matter of record.

I made a comic book about it, the one

with Jewish mice and Nazi cats.

Mein kampf, my struggle.

I still prowl the murky
caverns of my memory,

but now I feel like there's a
5,000-pound mouse breathing down my neck.

Remembering those who
remembered the death camps

is a hard act to follow.

We should just show the other one.

And put this one as a group of rose.

Color it black and white colors.

We'll swap these two.

And now they're actually present
in the chronological order

of when they were made.

So what do you think?

Maybe that could still be a fit.

It could if we have a
certain aesthetic to it.

I mean, these are rare, but I have that.

That's the actual cover
of The New Yorker.

Yeah.

And you can really go for a long time

without knowing whether
there's anything on there.

Depends on how the light hits it.

And all of a sudden, it goes
to the towers, comes in.

IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS

My high school was right underneath

the World Trade Center.

And it was my second or third
day of high school when 9/11 happened.

And it was a very difficult
day, which my dad then

wrote about in this book.

The school was shaking.

The lights were going on and off.

Teachers were running
out of classrooms.

Some kids were glued to the
windows watching people jump.

And my parents came to get me.

We went dashing down there.

We got her out and began walking
to the West Side Highway.

We turned to see the towers.

At that point, the other
tower was on fire as well.

And what we saw was so
astonishingly unreal-looking.

My dad and I and my mom, as well,

witnessed something that
you never see in the footage of 9/11.

It looked like all of the
gray of the tower fell first.

And then there were
these bright red beams

that hung in the air for a really long time.

And then those bright red
beams slowly disintegrated.

And I remember seeing that so vividly.

And the fact that my dad saw
it, too, and then drew it

is really beautiful.

"Equally terrorized

by al-Qaeda and by his own government,

our hero looks over some ancient
comics pages instead of working.

He dozes off and relives
his ringside seat to that

"day's disaster yet again, trying
to figure out what he actually saw."

What I did find myself
doing almost immediately

was hide out in what I understood,

which was the old comics that

nurtured me.

And so I was just looking at the
old Sunday terror sheets that I had.

And those just gave me a
feeling that civilization

was worth saving.

The conceit that
occurred almost as soon

as I started working on it was
that in the shadow of the towers

was the Hearst building
and the Pulitzer building,

the newspaper buildings that published
the first Sunday comics in America.

So my notion is when the towers fell,

it disinterred the bones
of the comics characters

that lay beneath the city.

Art always seems to be standing
at this point in these histories.

It's hard to remember the
atmosphere that was going on after 9/11.

Anything even mildly critical

of the government was
seen as almost siding with the terrorists.

Saying that the war
fever that quickly ensued

was as big a threat as anything
that bin Laden had come up with

was also not sayable.

I couldn't get anybody
interested in publishing it.

And then when it did
come out in Europe,

I just felt like I was an ambassador

to prove that America wasn't as
crazy as Europeans thought we were

because my attitudes
were almost mainstream there.

I was amazed because the
foreword came through.

And actually, without worrying
about my politics or theirs,

I got the back page whenever I wanted.

We published an
issue of World War 3 within months of 9/11.

Here's the issue.

This is the pre before we went
into Iraq and Afghanistan,

where we said, hey, let's not do that.

This is a terrible idea.

And there's Art on the inside cover.

In the introduction to.

In the Shadow of No Towers,
he talks about this idea

that disaster is my muse.

THE SKY IS FALLING!!

It's true that Art has a degree of comfort

with misery.

One thing that he heard from his parents

clearly is it can all
be taken away from you

from one day to the next.

So he expects the sky to keep falling.

And sometime it does.

His father wanted
to teach him to keep his bags

packed in case the world grid crumbled,

which was precisely a lesson
that Vladek had learned from World War II.

That seemed to be
happening during 9/11 for Art.

25 years ago, Art
Spiegelman published Maus.

Now he's published
MetaMaus, a book and DVD

about the making of Maus.

You produced MetaMaus, partly, I think,

because you thought it was time to draw

a line underneath the
whole episode 25 years on.

Yet here we are, still talking about it.

Is this something you
can ever put behind you?

I - like to think so.

And I know you
wrote MetaMaus so that people

would no longer ask, why pigs?

Why mice?

But I'm going to ask
the question, why mice?

"The book seems to loom
over me like my father once did."

Journalists and students
still want answers

to the same few questions.

Why comics?

Why mice?

Why the Holocaust?

Yikes.

Or to quote my forefathers, 'Oy.'

But I thought I'd finally try
to answer as fully as I could.

That way, when asked
in the future, maybe

I could just say, never again.

And maybe I could even get
my damned mouse mask off.

I can't breathe in this thing.

Unff.

Urk.

Oof.

Grunt!

"Aah."

MetaMaus is a
book about the making of Maus.

Art and I just talked to
each other for two years.

And then I edited the transcripts.

The book has three threads.

It's about the aesthetic
research that went into Maus,

the historical research
that went into Maus,

and the family research
that went into Maus.

I think he had a sense
when he was doing Maus

that he was going to do it, and he

was going to bury these
memories in panels.

In the very last page of the book,

after you see
Vladek and his birth and death

date and next to him, Anja's
birth and death date, just as it

looks on their tombstone, below that

is the signature of when I started.

Maus and the death date of
the book, when I finished it.

He had to think about all this stuff again

for MetaMaus.

It made me realize that he doesn't

want to talk about it again.

And just because it exists
in public form in Maus

doesn't mean that it's easy for him

to revisit as an individual person.

That really changed
after Trump was elected.

So I was stumped
when I saw that Trump won.

My idea of resistance was that picture

on the left, afraid to get out of bed.

But my women folks in my
family, my daughter and my wife,

who's here, Francoise,
decided to go into action.

And they published a free
newspaper of cartoons and comics

called Resist that was given
away at the women's march.

I just didn't want to draw Trump.

So I did one comic strip about not

wanting to draw Trump, which said,

"Even a tower full of Tic Tacs can't mask

the toxic stench of fascism.

I resisted drawing Trump's
smug and ugly mug till now

because narcissists thrive
even on negative attention.

I hoped he would just burn out.

Billionaires Lives Matter.

But now he's got his grubby little mitts

on the steering wheel and seems
set to drive us all off a cliff.

"To be, sob, continued."

So after that, I really, for the most part,

refrained from drawing
anything publishable of Trump.

It's too grave for that kind of joke.

In this Trump and post-Trump moment,

he recognized how useful
Maus was as a text for people

explicitly reacting to and fighting fascism.

My name is Art Spiegelman.

Thanks.

I'm going to read a
poem by Frank Zappa,

hopefully, next year's posthumous
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,

from the
1966 Mothers of Invention album.

Freak Out!

"It Can't Happen Here."

So I apologize for not being
able to read properly off key.

"It can't happen here,

It can't happen here,

I'm telling you, my dear,
that it can't happen here,

Because I've been checking it out, baby,

I checked it out a couple of times,

And I'm telling you, it can't happen here,

Oh, darling, it's important
that you believe me,

Bop, bop, bop, bop,

"That it can't happen here."

A Tennessee school board

has banned the critically
acclaimed graphic novel Maus.

I was flabbergasted, and then angry,

and then flabbergasted again.

A 10 to 0 vote removed
the novel about the Holocaust

from the classroom, citing profanity,

nudity, and scenes deemed too
inappropriate for children.

Here you are now on a news show

after a year of pretty constant interviews,

having to discuss the
banning of Maus or people

who don't want people to read it.

Let's talk more about
that, that you are now

the story about the story.

Yeah. And I've made a...

I've taken great pains
to expand it from Maus

to talk about all the other book banning

that's going on because I've been

puzzled by the focus on Maus.

Joining me now is Art Spiegelman,

Pulitzer Prize-winning
artist, Illustrator, and author,

and Jerry Craft, Newbery Medal-winning

illustrator and author of New Kid,

a graphic novel pulled by
a Texas school district

after a white parent complained

that it promoted critical
race theory and Marxism.

It's a Black kid going to private school.

There's no cursing.

There's no sex.

There's no drugs.

New Kid's in 13 different languages.

So you could read it in Spanish,
French, Korean, Romanian,

German, Albanian.

You just can't read it in
parts of Texas or Florida.

I never thought
I would live to see something

where America, which saved
my parents after the war

and gave them a new start in life,

could be tilted toward
a new kind of fascism.

And it's what I see
everywhere I look now.

But you know the images
of Nazis burning books

in the '30s in Germany.

And now books are
being thoroughly banned

in libraries in Missouri,
in Florida, in Texas,

and in Tennessee.

It's like destroying memory yet again.

When I called my father a murderer

for murdering the written word, the diary,

it's what we're doing to our entire culture

by murdering the books, banning
them, taking them off shelves.

RED STATES THREATEN LIBRARIANS WITH PRISON
AS BLUE STATES WORK TO PROTECT THEM

I think we're in for a fascist society,

unless things change
around 180 degrees.

This is really dangerous times.

I never thought I'd see
anything like this again.

It won't take exactly the same form,

but it's clear that, as Faulkner
said, the past is not dead.

It's not even past.

And that informs all of this thinking.

This is an image I made called
The Past Hangs over the Future,

me with my daughter mouse,
Nadja, when she was very young

and hanged Jews hanging behind it.

Nothing like a Lifetime
Achievement Award

to make me feel like
my lifetime might be over.

My year culminating in this
award has been really sobering.

I'd always vowed to not become
the Elie Wiesel of comic books.

In fact, in the years after Maus,

I would draw myself trying
to outrun a 500-pound mouse,

trying to either evade
or supersede that work.

But now I have had to
try to become a mensch.

It's been a long march to turn
around and embrace the 500-pound mouse,

while fascist storm clouds gather
yet again all over our frying planet.

So I'm even grateful that Maus may now

have an afterlife as a cautionary tale

that it might make readers insist never

again in the future, even if
the past for other minorities

has often been a matter of
never again and again and again.

EIGHT AUTHORS ON HOW IT FEELS
TO HAVE THEIR BOOKS BANNED.

THE WRITERS OF AMERICA'S
MOST FREQUENTLY BANNED BOOKS

TALK ABOUT THE THREAT TO
CREATIVITY AND DEMOCRACY

After being the poster boy
for books being censored, what

I was calling the Tennessee
waltz while it was going on,

I eventually stopped drawing altogether.

And as a result, my hand froze.

It's not like a bicycle.

You don't just get on and
remember how to stay balanced.

When I was a kid, one of the things

that first made me enjoy
making marks on paper

was a game my mother
would play with me.

She'd make a bunch
of scribbles and say,

what does that look like?

Draw it.

And so I'd look around and
then just draw something.

And then I'd do a scribble for her.

And, I mean, she kind of cheated.

She would just make more scribbles

and make it into a hairdo.

And then she could draw a
profile of a woman's face

that she knew how to draw.

So it was always just
different hairdos on that head.

Recently, I was messing
around with watercolor.

I just make a bunch of
scribbles, but in color,

or at least in gray for many of them.

And then I'd let it dry.

And then I was looking at clouds,

and I'd just start making something.

So it helped me overcome
my recent inhibition

about drawing anything at
all because it was always

getting me into trouble,
this drawing stuff.

So this was one of the first ones.

This one was, "Meanwhile,
in a universe next door,

the Earth is destroyed by
a giant-sized chicken."

I didn't understand it
right away, but part of it

really was getting in
touch with my mother again.

Getting in touch with
my mother and father

was part of reliving Maus for
that year and a half of having

to talk about it in public
from a different angle

than I ever had to before.

So I'm doing these weird drawings,

and I figure, OK, I'll just
make a bunch of shapes.

But afterwards, I'm going
to look for a mouse head.

And I began to just draw around
it, and it grew into a picture.

And it's a mouse suspiciously looking

like the one that represents
me in the book with a vest.

And there's a Ku Klux Klansman
holding a very large wild cat.

And the cat, which is, of
course, a symbol for fascism

in Maus, is scratching my face.

It was an image of book
burning and banning with a pig

breathing flames, small cat in
the background with a Hitler

mustache somewhere.

And it's just finding
what could happen around

this image of the cat scratching.

And voila, there we have the
bonfire of the 21st century.

But this could look like that
from the same edge, right?

One of the things that I
really love about Art's work

is that at a time when most
artists just plagiarize

from their last success...

they just find one thing that works,

and they do it over and over
and over again until they die...

Art is the exact opposite of that.

He opened up a door
that a lot of us went through.

FOOTNOTES IN GAZA

PERSEPOLIS
THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD

The book that made me

become a cartoonist was Maus.

It is true because I didn't have
any idea about what comic was.

It was when I read Maus that I
was like, oh, my god,

you can do that, too.

Everybody doing graphic novels

owes Art Spiegelman this debt.

You wouldn't even be
doing a graphic novel

if Art had not done Maus.

It completely changed my life.

It put an idea in my head
for something to shoot for,

which I don't even think I've reached yet.

MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS

I was assigned Maus
at the Art Institute of Chicago.

And I realized, this is the medium

that I can use to say
things I really need to say.

NEW KID

He sent me Maus.

I was absolutely floored at
what you could do with a comic.

It really opened my eyes
and my mind and my heart

as far as, I can really take my stuff

and push it to a whole other level.

Thank you, all,
and see you in the funny papers.

Before I get the hook, I want
to thank, most especially,

Francoise, my better
half for over 40 years,

my love, my tech support,
and my most astute editor.

Merci beaucoup for putting up with me.

Francoise, you get half the medal.

Thank you.