Art Spiegelman’s comics draw from a vast historical vocabulary. His masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986) — still the only graphic novel to win the award — is a memoir of his relationship with his father that also recounts the latter’s tribulations during the Holocaust through an unlikely but seamless synthesis of the underground comix movement, turn-of-the-century wordless novels, and the “funny animal” cartooning tradition. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) filters the September 11 attacks and their impact on United States society through intricately layered homages to early-20th-century newspaper comic strips. He has drawn dozens of covers for the New Yorker, and received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2022.
Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolan’s biographical documentary and exegesis on these and many other comics, is currently playing in theaters after its festival run. Ahead of the film’s opening, I sat down with Spiegelman over Zoom to discuss what it was like to have a crew following him, the language of comics and how it differs from that of cinema, Maus’s enduring legacy, and more. This conversation has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.
Hyperallergic: When did the filmmakers approach you about making this documentary, and how long were they with you?
Art Spiegelman: Gee, I’m not sure, exactly. When the documentary they did with Ricky Jay came out [in 2012], it began a rumble of conversation. I was friends with Ricky and his wife Chrisann, and I was so impressed with that film. I met [Molly and Philip]; it seemed like we had several mutual friends. Although I didn’t exactly think I needed a documentary about me, I was open to it because that film blew my mind. So it’s been maybe 10 years since [those conversations] started, which is absurd and amazing, but there it is.
They were filming me for some time, and it certainly escalated this past year or so in order for them to get what they needed. I was glad they were filming some things, because otherwise there’d have been no record of them, like a project I did with a jazz musician friend called Wordless!. It was about wordless comics and was accompanied by music and my patter. The documentary crew filmed two of the performances in New York, one at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] and one at Columbia. And the thing about performance is it evaporates, so I was glad it was recorded. I was a bit sad that couldn’t find its way into the documentary, but I guess there were too many random things I’ve done. I would say I built one skyscraper in my life, which is Maus, and then buildings of other heights, and a lot of bungalows that I like a lot. But I had to acknowledge that they were going to focus on the skyscraper. I’m all talked out about it, but people seem to still be willing to hear it.
H: Did discussing Maus for this film offer any new insight into it for you?
AS: That’s a good question, and I don’t really know the answer, because fresh perspectives keep coming at me from one angle or another, and I don’t remember which came from where. I know that over time, I’ve become much more forgiving of my father than I was back in the ’80s, and so our relationship improved after he died. I think back on it a lot, and different revelations sort of occur to me. But at this point, Maus really should be able to talk to itself, and for itself — especially after MetaMaus, which was designed to answer all the questions one might have about the book.
H: We see your father react to the work in progress in Maus itself. It wasn’t finished when he died, but did you hear more from him about what he thought of it before then?
AS: Yeah, I show him some pages in the first book, and he says, “Oh, this is really good. You’ll be famous someday, like what’s his name [Walt Disney].” He was also looking at parts of the book in progress, and it would prod memories for him. From other people, especially after he died, I got to hear — and it was the first time I really heard it — that he was proud of what I had done.
When I was making MetaMaus, I interviewed any of my mother’s friends who were still alive, and I found little bits and pieces of additional story. But I think it would’ve been too wide a trawl. I wouldn’t have known how to reel that back in, since she wasn’t there to be part of the story herself. Those interviews are transcribed and included on the now-impenetrable DVD-ROM that was part of the original version of MetaMaus.
H: Do you also have these materials backed up in some way in a personal archive?
AS: Well, sometimes, but I’m not that good at it. I have piles of rubble, and some of it’s still functional. The DVD-ROM I think is probably not readable by anybody, but a coder would know how to unravel it. And I asked [Molly and Philip], and I believe they’ll give me a complete archive of all the stuff they shot for the film, which will be great.
H: How did you feel about the scenes of you and your family members reading from selections from your books?
AS: Well, going in I explained that I really did not want to dramatize Maus, so it had to be read as flat as possible. It shouldn’t be in an AI monotone or something, but I didn’t want it to be performative, and they agreed to adhere to that. I was very impressed that they got Dash [Spiegelman’s son] to read a page [from Breakdowns (1977)]. He did it admirably, and it was moving for me to see that.
H: I did note that lack of affect. You even read the onomatopoeia in the same tone. It reminds us of how much of the experience of reading comics is personal and internal. That’s a challenge for a filmmaker, because film has a definitive image and audio.
AS: That was a thing I was dubious about, and I had to reel [Molly and Philip] in whenever they were trying to make something move, like, “Oh, there’s a lightning bolt. We could make it turn on and off in that particular page.” I’ve been turning down film offers ever since Maus came out. I just didn’t want to see it turned into something else, because comics are a fine destination for it, and the only way I could understand it. So they had to accept that [the comic recitations] would just be a way of helping the audience follow along.
H: Especially now, since comic books are the fodder for so many films, people think of them as cinematic and view them sometimes as storyboards. Which is this real misunderstanding of how they sculpt time and space, which is very different from cinema.
AS: Bravo. That’s well said and exactly right. I mean, I like going to the movies, and I tried writing a screenplay once. But comics are a complete form unto itself, and it’s a very interesting form, because it exists in a space between writing and drawing, but not with movement. The way I formulated it decades ago was that comics are time turned into space.
H: What was the screenplay you wrote?
AS: Oh god. I was working on a thing about the rise and fall of the American comic book in the mid-’50s with a filmmaker friend and a producer at Amazon who was interested. But I’m not good at dealing with notes. Producers tell you, “Well, why don’t you have a mafioso come in or something?” My friend told me, “We’ve got to just say something, we’ll figure out what they mean and how to address it.” But that was more of an impediment than a help. And it all sort of dissolved at a certain point. I think we came in 10 minutes too late for peak television, which is what this would’ve needed to be.
H: A lot of films about comics don’t quite feel sufficient because of the mismatch of form. As a staunch advocate for the artistry of comics, did you ever consider doing something like what Will Eisner or Scott McCloud did, explaining comics through comics? Obviously, some of your strips do this.
AS: I think the ABC elementary grammar book [of comics] exists at this point, and Scott McCloud was a student of mine, so he picked up a lot of what became his book from me. What I wanted to do at some point — but I don’t think it’s the most urgent thing, because I do everything so slowly — is teach people about the form by examining very specific pieces of work from an array of masters of comics. It’s different from film, where D.W. Griffith established a basic grammar early on. In comics, it was slow and accreted.
It was always useful to show certain pages by Winsor McCay and analyze how they hold together in these boxes that shift in size, to see how Krazy Kat uses doodle drawing. I think in his work for Mad and his war stories, Harvey Kurtzman gave us a functional grammar of what a comic page should be. I believe that’s better than trying to create formulations. I was talking to Scott once about his idea that there are five or six different kinds of panel-to-panel transitions. He used one of my pages as an example of one of those transitions, and I asked if he could give me another example, and he couldn’t. So I said, “Well, there’s something wrong with teaching this way, because I wouldn’t have found the sixth way if I ‘knew’ there were only five.” It’s more useful for things to be a bit more open-ended, discovering the surprises in a specific work and finding how you can use them.
H: You incorporate that concept a bit into In the Shadow of No Towers, in the way you invoke classic strips like Little Nemo or Gustave Verbeek’s upside-down comics.
AS: The original conceit for doing the book this way was that the towers came down close to Newspaper Row, and my thought was that these old comic characters’ bones were disinterred and thrown up with the other, more toxic elements that were thrown into the air in Lower Manhattan, and that as a result, they would help tell the story. I wrote that while other people took solace in poetry after September 11, I took solace in comics. The second half of that book is an homage to those old comics that kept me nourished while I was just flipping out and thinking the world was ending [in 2001]. Little did I know it would end more dramatically in the 21st century.
H: You do something similar in your strip about the story of the St. Louis refugee ship. It really seems that by being in constant conversation with comics as a medium, you’re in conversation with the 20th century itself and its image culture.
AS: As soon as I discovered that comics were made by people, I wanted to be one of those people, even if I didn’t have anywhere near their skillset. And I still don’t think I have that skill set. But the language of comics is exciting to me, the fact that it’s an annotation system. You were talking about the sound, but it’s in everything — how much time you leave between one panel and the next, how those things interact, what you see when, what different diacritical marks indicate. What shorthand do you need to indicate where the space is? The means are so economical, as you can see now, when there are so many self-published booklets, attempts at graphic novels, things online that are looked at often. Comics are a very democratic medium, and you don’t need much more than a pencil and paper, as a minimum.
H: How did your recent collaboration with Joe Sacco for a comic about Gaza come together? What was the process of making it?
AS: Well, it started as me whining to Joe over the phone about how I had spent a year turning totally into an interview subject, talking about book banning and first amendments and whatever. I became a go-to talking head for such things. By the end of the year, I totally stopped drawing, and it was very hard to get back to drawing comics again; it’s not like getting back on a bicycle. I was trying to find tricks to make myself do any kind of work, and Joe kindly said, “Well, right now I’m running on all cylinders because I just finished four years on a book about India. Why don’t we get together and jam?” “Jamming” means drawing on the same paper as someone, passing it back and forth and seeing what comes of it. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I did that a lot in the age of underground comics, and I always learned from it, because you find out how people think and work by working in proximity.
This could have become that, but it changed before it started because we started having in-depth conversations about Gaza. At a certain point, my wife intervened and said, “Do this on Zoom so you can record it and listen back to what you’ve been saying.” It was ultimately four hours of conversation, which we refined to the three pages for that piece. We had to figure out how much we could squeeze into such a small space and cover a lot of material. And then Joe came out and we began to make some drawings together, with each of us tackling a different panel or passing something back and forth, or me making a thumbnail sketch and him developing that.
I’m learning how to do this comics thing again, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to draw the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. So we horse-traded who did what as we proceeded: “Horses are hard, and you can do them really well. I saw the thing you did about World War I. I’ll tell you what, your caricature of Netanyahu isn’t that great. Neither is my first stab at it; he’s hard to draw. But how about if I do that Netanyahu panel in exchange for you doing the horses?” Joe did the lettering, I did the coloring, and it became a very fluid conversation. It took nine months, so it was like giving birth. And I think the only reason people ever have more than one kid is because the mother forgets how painful it is. So this gave me a kickstart toward making some comics again.
I’m looking around a bit online to see what the responses to it are. To some degree, everybody’s mad at me, and that seems healthy on a topic like this. But I wasn’t trying to make a polemic, and neither was Joe. [We made it] to poke at and tease and bring up questions. And as I say in that three-pager, I don’t want Maus to ever be used as a recruiting manual for the Israeli army. We always knew Joe would be more of the interlocutor than I, because everybody knows where he is coming from on this subject. He’s done so much work on it, and that’s not true of me, so a lot of it was me trying to clarify what I could say.
H: You depict yourself as a mouse in a vest in that strip, as you often have since Maus. In In the Shadow of No Towers, you draw yourself as human at first, before 9/11 causes you to become a mouse again. You joke often — including in the film — about how often people ask “Why mice?” concerning the way you use animal iconography in Maus. Does it seem like the image of a mouse is how you live on the page now?
AS: I just think it’s the avatar that people will recognize quickly. I’ve drawn myself as a bearded old gent as well. For this strip, I wanted people to identify me with Maus very specifically, because again, I didn’t want that book to ever be misunderstood as a special pleading for Israel to have the right to kill everybody around them to protect themselves.
The introductory page of MetaMaus has me always answering the same three questions over and over again, then trying to pull this mouse mask off my face, and eventually what’s left as it rips away is just the skull underneath. It’s something that grafted itself onto me, and I accept it now as a version of my signature. Not that I walk around thinking I have a tail to twitch, or large upright ears, or that I eat inordinate amounts of cheese, or whatever.
