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Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse
Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse
Art Spiegelman complains that his father accused him of doing everything wrong, even when packing for vacation. “Sometimes I had to run with everything I could carry,” Vladek told young Art. “Make the best of space,” he insisted. As a cartoonist, Spiegelman transmuted dad’s advice into a visual aesthetic. And as an adult, he finally understood how the Holocaust had damaged his family.
Maus (1986), his adaptation of his family’s Holocaust story, shook up the publishing world and spurred the advance of graphic novels as a recognized medium. As documented in the insightful Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, Maus was preceded by a long career in cartooning, and if the 1986 publication defines his work for many readers, Spiegelman shows no signs of standing still.
Directors Philip Dolin and Molly Bernstein give center stage to recollections by Spiegelman and his wife-collaborator Françoise Mouly, cutting to interview snippets with cartoonists such as Bill Griffith and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and illustrating the biographical chronicle with archival stills and footage.
Growing up in Queens with few pennies to spare, Spiegelman’s reading consisted largely of comic books. The first turning point came when he discovered MAD. Perhaps the most subversive publication in ‘50s America, MAD made fun of comic books with their square-jawed heroes and nefarious villains—and spoofed virtually everything else in the country’s conformist society. As Spiegelman points out, MAD told kids that “the whole adult world is lying to you,” prodding readers “to deeply question things.”
Spiegelman began drawing for local papers and DIY fanzines before being drawn to the flourishing subculture of late ‘60s-early ‘70s underground comix. According to Griffith, with whom he collaborated, comix artists saw “transgression as a liberating force,” adding that in the right hands, radical cartoons robbed transgression of its power.
Artful and Entertaining
Mentored by avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Spiegelman’s eyes were opened to the sort of art not peddled in drugstores but displayed in museums. The affinity between Max Beckman and George Grosz with Will Elder and Robert Crumb became apparent. Cartoons can be artful as well as entertaining; drawings coupled with text can do the storytelling work of film, and with his closeups and shifting perspectives, Spiegelman was often cinematic.
Spiegelman’s ‘70s output became darkly autobiographical. With the sharp edges of an Expressionist woodcut, his
“Prisoner on a Hell Planet” (1972) depicted events surrounding his mother’s suicide. With comics anthology magazine RAW, which began in 1980, Spiegelman and Mouly juxtaposed explosive work that influenced new generations of artists.
The Holocaust was a closed book for Spiegelman until the trial of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann brought genocide out of the closet and into the TV news. A three-page prototype of Maus was published as early as 1971 with anthropomorphic mice as Jews and cats standing for Nazis. The idea germinated slowly before Spiegelman finally sat down with his father in 1978 and began tape-recording the old man’s memories. The Maus that emerged was about both the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s quest for his family’s tragic, formative history. He has been compared to novelist Primo Levi and documentarian Claude Lanzman for his account of the Holocaust.
As honors and acclaim poured in following Maus, Spiegelman continued to cartoon, producing denunciations of civil rights violations within the U.S., jihadism and mindless American xenophobia, as well as the nation’s drift into authoritarianism. At a public rally featured at the end of Disaster is My Muse, Spiegelman read the lyrics from Frank Zappa’s pointedly ironic lampoon of complacency, “It Can’t Happen Here.”
The Milwaukee Film Festival will present Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse at 5 p.m. Sunday, April 27 and 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 29 at the Oriental Theatre and 12 p.m. Wednesday, May 7 at the Downer Theatre.
