On the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maus (1986), Art Spiegelman’s wife, Françoise Mouly, was quoted as telling him that, “next to making Maus, your greatest achievement may have been not turning it into a movie.”
Today, more than a decade after that remark, we have a movie. Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) is a bio-doc rather than a strict adaptation of Maus, the memoir of Spiegelman creating a comic from his father’s time in Auschwitz. Not that there’s all that much of a difference.
“I feel there’s a 5,000-pound mouse breathing down my neck,” Spiegelman says in the film, which premiered at the DOC NYC festival last month. “If I have a posterity, it’s through that work, and I am now proud of what I did, but I had no expectation while I was making it that it would be discovered while I was alive.”
The film, slated to hit theaters early next year and stream later on PBS, is dutiful public television. Yet Spiegelman’s biography and his imagination are anything but ordinary.
The audacity of a comic depicting Jews as mice and Germans as cats may explain why Maus was rejected by every publisher Spiegelman approached, even by Pantheon, which eventually agreed to publish it after he tried there again.
When Maus reached the bestseller list, the New York Times classified the memoir as fiction, possibly due to the term “graphic novel,” which refers indiscriminately to book-length comics. Spiegelman wrote to the publication that if he had known the book was fiction, he would not have spent so many years researching it.
At a tight 98 minutes, the documentary by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dollin should have been longer. We never learn from it, for example, that Spiegelman was the creator of the cheeky Garbage Pail Kids, trading cards designed to offend in the spirit of MAD Magazine in the era of treacly commercial Cabbage Patch Kids.
And as in most films on art, the shots of images are too brief.
Yet the doc will introduce viewers to Spiegelman’s early work, situating his stories and images in the history of comics. Critic J. Hoberman, who’s known Spiegelman since pot-smoking days at what is now the State University of New York at Binghamton, comments in the film on the artist’s “Godardian” signature combination of story and commentary.
“He’s very good at comics, which are sequential images, but he’s also very good at the one image — it’s like poetry,” said Joe Sacco, whose comics in Bosnia, Palestine, and Gaza blend journalism with stark visual detail in monochrome, in the documentary. “The 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.”
Plenty of those images ended up on the cover of the New Yorker, where Mouly, his wife, has been the art editor since 1993. One such image depicted a concentration camp inmate in a striped suit, on the ground clutching an Oscar statuette (after the sentimental 1997 film Life Is Beautiful won the real thing in 1999), with a guard tower in the background. Another was a post-9/11 view of the Twin Towers rising like tall gravestones in pitch black under a dark sky. It’s a terse response to the dictum that art was impossible after the World Trade Center attack. Spiegelman’s short-lived comics series in the German newspaper Die Zeit and the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of No Towers, was evidence that humor was also possible.
Another New Yorker cover for Valentine’s Day in 1993 referenced racial riots between Black Americans and Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. “I was just doodling and was drawing the Eustace Tilley guy with the monocle, and I said ‘I wonder what he would look like if he was a Jew.’ I just put a Hasidic hat and beard on him,” Spiegelman recalls in the film, “and before I knew it he was kissing this West Indian African-American woman, and there was my Valentine’s [Day] cover. Why don’t they just kiss and make up? Man, did that get people upset.”
The cartoon was “knowingly naive,” Spiegelman wrote at the time. “But once a year, perhaps, it’s permissible, even if just for a moment, to close one’s eyes, see beyond the tragic complexities of modern life, and imagine that it might really be true that ‘All you need is love.’”
More notorious was a cover that Spiegelman drew in 1999 after police from the Street Crimes Unit in the Bronx opened fire on an African peddler, Amadou Diallo, as he tried to enter his own home. Reaching into his pocket, Diallo was shot 41 times. Spiegelman drew a pudgy officer with a grin, unperturbed, shooting black silhouettes at a funhouse stand. The New York Police Department commissioner at the time, Howard Safir, condemned Spiegelman’s illustration as “irresponsible.”
Irresponsible. Satirists expect those jabs. “I vowed never to become the Elie Wiesel of comic books,” Spiegelman said in a 2011 interview. He also told me, “New York is my Israel.”
On a phone call after the documentary’s premiere at DOC NYC, Spiegelman explained the Wiesel comment, which could make him more enemies than a New Yorker cover.
Wiesel “has a lot to answer for, including ultimately putting the word ‘Holocaust’ into circulation. There was a perfectly functional word called genocide that was invented by a Jew in World War II,” he told me.
“It was part of putting this religious baggage on something that was more urgently human baggage,” he continued.
“There’s that, and also being the go-to guy for anything that’s somehow related to the Holocaust. I don’t want to be that guy.”
His next subject suggests that he won’t be. After the documentary’s premiere, Spiegelman told the sold-out audience in a Q&A session that his next comic will be about Gaza, in collaboration with Joe Sacco. He was wary of providing any details on a project that he thinks will struggle to find a publisher in the United States.
“I’ll finish this thing or die trying. I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head,” he said. “My superego says, ‘You must do this if you’re going to live with yourself’,” and my id says, ‘Who wants the grief [of] being canceled by everyone on the planet?’”
Somehow no one is likely to confuse him with Elie Wiesel.
