Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse

Today is Yom HaShoah, Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day. It takes place on the 27th day of Nisan (sundown April 23 into April 24). This is distinct from International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, which was created by the United Nations. Today seemed an appropriate day to recommend the new American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse.

I was working in a bookstore when the second volume of Maus was published (1991), and thus was one of the many who grappled with the famous problem that attaches to this unique book: where to shelve it? I’m pretty sure that the art section won, though history, memoir, Jewish studies, and other categories were tempting. A prominent publication even initially categorized the two volume work as fiction, because its characters are all animals, but the editors were quickly schooled. Maus is indeed impossible to pigeon-hole, but its defining feature is that it is expressed through a visual medium, so “art” seems best. The form of the book proved both controversial and influential. To discuss the most serious topic in the world — genocide — through the instrument of what is essentially a comic book (the term “graphic novel” didn’t gain wide currency until after its publication) was a bold, pathbreaking act. Some thought it a heresy of sorts, but those were mostly people who hadn’t read it. But it ranked high on best seller lists and was the first (and still only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Maus is based on conversations Spiegelman had with his father, who recounted his experiences up to and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman had been born in Sweden in 1948, and was raised in Queens throughout the 1950s and ’60s, and heretofore had known about his parents’ ordeal only through occasional remarks and allusions. The events haunted the entire family. His mother committed suicide when he was about 20. Spiegelman himself had been institutionalized. Its reverberations were clearly still being felt by him, if only at second hand. And yet he was able to turn the darkest of subjects into something valuable, a rumination on human nature, and a first-hand account of an experience foreign to most Americans.

Hence the subtitle of the new documentary by Milly Bernstein and Philip Dolin. I’ve reviewed one of Bernstein’s previous films here, Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2012) . Like that film, the Spiegelman doc benefits from having its subject as an active participant in the film. Contrary to expectation, Spiegelman is not a drag. When I worked at New-York Historical Society, I helped plan an event with him as part of our 9/11 related series of exhibitions and programs, around the release of his book In the Shadow of No Towers, and of course there was that famous all-black, or nearly all-black, New Yorker cover he designed. At the time, he was reported to be “difficult”. He wouldn’t do the event unless he could smoke onstage, which is of course illegal, contrary to best practices at a museum, and was already socially frowned on indoors even back then. But it was non-negotiable. So I thought he might come across as jerky in the movie, rigid and demanding. Instead, like most cartoonists and illustrators, he seems a very specific combination of funny and reserved. In my experience, they’re all pretty much like this. They have funniness inside, but it is channeled into the kind of art one makes at a desk, with pen and paper. If they were more outgoing they might have become comedians or actors, but they prefer to do their performing on the page. Their actual personalities tend to be mild-mannered.

Thus it is interesting to see Spiegelman perform his own art for us by reading some of his panels aloud, a kind of sub-motif throughout the film. It anchors the material in the particular and the personal. It makes it real. Many another voice joins him in solidarity, some of whom I’ve had the honor of knowing, like the late Jules Feiffer, some of whom have even drawn me (Molly Crabapple and R. Sikoryak), and some of whom, like R. Crumb and Bill Griffith, I merely admire. There could hardly be a stronger argument for Spiegelman’s significance as an artist than the combined testimony of those eminences.

And while Spiegelman was one of the key figures in the Underground Comix movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, I would be false both to myself and to my generation if I didn’t disclose the area in my life where he made the biggest impact, and please don’t think any the less of me for it: his was the primary creative hand in the creation of Topps’ Wacky Packages, those stickers that came with bubble gum that spoofed popular products from the supermarket. Spiegelman disclosed that his target audience for those was seven and eight year olds and that was me! At their height, between 1973 and 1977 I was between the ages of 8 and 12. In the film we learn of the importance that early Mad Magazine, and Harvey Kurtzman had in the formation of his sensibility. The film convincingly makes a connection between the subversive sensibility that drives such parody, and existence as a vulnerable outsider within a hostile majority culture. (For a parallel argument, I refer you to my piece on Mel Brooks and Spaceballs).

I am also a fan of Spiegelman’s 1994 illustrated version of Joseph Moncure March’sThe Wild Party. It was the version I referred to for this project.

Just a couple of years ago, Maus was banned in the McMinnville County, Tennessee school district, much to my chagrin, for some of my people come from there. It’s pretty plain there ought to be more copies of the book distributed throughout the United States, not fewer, as we randomly send planeloads of people to concentration camps.

In related news, go see Cabaret in Captivity at Torn Page this weekend!