Original subtitles

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 FEATURING SKEETER GRANT'S SKINLESS PERKINS

A "SOMERSAULT" FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT!

D-D-DOT'S ALL, FOLKS!

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.