Art Spiegelman on Resistance, Memory, and Speaking Up

Episode Transcript

Virginia Marshall When Art Spiegelman joined us at Brooklyn Public Library’s recording studio earlier this month, I think it’s fair to say that we were a little nervous, Adwoa.

Adwoa Adusei Yeah – I mean he’s basically the person who started the graphic novel genre. His book really did change America.

Virginia Marshall Right. And on top of that, we’d both been doing a lot of reading about Maus, why it was so important … and there are dozens of essays and books and think pieces about that. So there was a lot of pressure riding on this interview.

Adwoa Adusei But he was so nice!

Virginia Marshall Yeah, even when I did my standard sound check …

Virginia Marshall You can tell me what you had for breakfast.

Art Spiegelman Oh, that would be a good question. A clementine.

Virginia Marshall Just a clementine?

[Laughter]

Adwoa Adusei No judgement.

Virginia Marshall Needless to say, it was a thrill to talk to one of the great writers and artists of our generation. We had a whole episode last week where we talked about the importance of Maus for the nation, and for the genre of comic books and graphic novels. You can go back and listen to that if you haven’t heard it yet. But today, we wanted to play the rest of our interview with Art Spiegelman. I’m Virginia Marshall

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. You’re listening to Borrowed and Returned: a podcast from Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed us, and changed America, too.

[Theme music]

Virginia Marshall We started our conversation by asking Art about the comics that he read… and the books that changed him when he was growing up.

Art Spiegelman Well the ones that really changed my life, the one that changed my life—there were others that came after—but was MAD when it was a comic book, and they had paperback versions of those. I found the paperback of the very first collection of MAD on a spinner rack with my mother when I was about four, I guess five years old—and I wouldn't leave the store without it/ And I couldn't read yet even, it was just—I was compelled by the cover because it had all of the covers of the comic book versions of MAD, and one of them was a parody of LIFE magazine with the most grotesque woman possible on the cover and a photo background. And it had a logo like LIFE magazine. And I didn't know much, but I knew LIFE was somehow authoritative, like CNN might be. And then it had that woman on it. So it was only an inch high, but I realized I could not walk out of the store without it, even if it meant a tantrum, which it did. And I got to leave with this thing and then found inside something that I didn't know it was changing my life till way after, which was a parody of Mickey Mouse called “Mickey Rodent.”

Virginia Marshall Oh, wow, okay, yeah, and that has to do with the mice.

Art Spiegelman Oh yeah, it sure does.

Virginia Marshall Another thing I was curious, too—I've been reading about kind of the history of the Comics Code Authority and like the 1950s censorship of comics. And I'm just curious, like, did that impact your reading when you were, do you remember seeing that stamp on things?

Art Spiegelman Oh for sure, but I had the good fortune of having a father who was not very well acclimated to America. And when he saw I was spending $0.10 of my allowance money for a comic book, which is what they cost, he said, “I can get them near my Diamond Dealers Club, where I work, for $0,05 apiece.” I said, fine, you get them. But what it was was they were old ones that were—and he had no idea what he was looking for. So it was really total luck of the draw. I could get like two romance comics or something, without being able to educate him on what I was looking forward to. But it was an education, finding these random comics landing on me as well.

Virginia Marshall Oh yeah, I'm sure. And from my understanding, that kind of censorship of comics led to this underground movement which you were a part of, right?

Art Spiegelman Absolutely, yeah. I think the first years of the underground comics community was cartoonists finding which were the things that you were not allowed to do and checking them off one by one. [Laughs]

Virginia Marshall Is that what you were doing?

Art Spiegelman Oh yeah, absolutely. But there really were comic book burnings.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, do you remember that?

Art Spiegelman I didn’t, from my childhood. But I knew they were being banned, and schools were collecting them for some reason, which I didn't quite understand was a bonfire. But it was clear that something changed and it was very abrupt because all the comics that kids were actually looking for had disappeared, the horror comics, the crime comics, a lot of the science fiction comics, MAD. And what was left, though, were a couple of things that were also important for me, which was Little Lulu and Donald Duck. Those were great.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei When Maus was banned in Tennessee in 2022, you went on a media tour to defend the book. How did that feel being out in the open defending it?

Art Spiegelman Oh, well, I mean, I had to do it several other ways and times, but that was a big one. I wasn't expecting it. So I got—it wasn't so much a tour as a hijacking. Like, my life stopped, and I had to lend myself to it. It even led to me having to talk to congressmen who were trying to figure out how to present this in committees and stuff. And in a way, I was fortunate in that it only increased the sales of my books by a lot. I couldn't have bought any kind of other campaign. But I was responsible for more than just my book. There were a lot of books being banned. And when I talked about it, I ended up having to move very specifically toward the idea that, look, Maus, yeah, it's about the Holocaust and stuff, but it's the othering of people. And those are the books that were being picked on. Mostly anything about gay people, Trans people, Black people, that was high on the list of what was being put in the Tennessee bonfires. Uh, so, Maus had a responsibility to be out there as well, and I got caught up in it.

Adwoa Adusei How has your relationship with speaking out changed as you've gone through your career?

Art Spiegelman I've gotten better at it because practice makes you better, and I've been put forward to explain to Polish people why pigs were there and it wasn't necessarily an insult. Ditto to Jews and mice, that it wasn't an insult at the very beginnings. Educating people that reading a comic wasn't automatically a sign of an IQ under 100. So, there were various times and ways in which I was asked to come forward and so I got better at it over the years.

Virginia Marshall I wonder if we could talk maybe more specifically about Maus. I know you've written about a lot and spoken about the responsibility you feel in being part of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and you've grappled with this inheritance. And I'm wondering, do you still feel kind of like a weight of responsibility to tell the story?

Art Spiegelman Yeah, but not exactly for the reasons said. I wasn't trying to educate anybody except me. And for me, there was no such thing as Holocaust comic books. It just didn't—there was no such thing really as graphic novels, I didn't know the word when I was doing it. I didn't know how it would get published. All I knew for sure was, now that it had sort of been discovered that one could deal with personal material in underground comics—before that it didn't exist as a genre, autobiocomics—it became more and more clear that I'd have to deal with this because it was such a heavy load to carry. But it was really about trying to understand how could I be alive if both my parents were supposed to be dead? And so it was as rudimentary as that at first. And then I had to find out more and it took a long, long time to get it in place but it was kind of threshing out, finding out what my parents had gone through as best I could and communicate that, because everything else would just be reading the few books that existed. There weren't lots and lots back in 1973 or so when I was starting to try to look into it. It was not like the Holocaust movie of the week, and the best Academy Award for a Holocaust movie and now shelves of Holocaust comic books. It just wasn't a genre, if that's the word for it.

Virginia Marshall Right, right, your book was kind of the first, in some ways.

Art Spiegelman Yeah, I mean certainly on this subject and that way—yes. It was.

Virginia Marshall And what we've been doing for this episode is talking to other graphic artists and comic artists about your book and how it has impacted their work. And I wonder, do you meet artists often who have been inspired by Maus and how does that make you feel?

Art Spiegelman Well, it depends on the work, of course. But it's amazing that it happened, because  … Yeah, I was interested in raising the stature of comics, but only because there were things I was interested in doing that didn't have anything to do with superheroes and only something to do being funny. So, it led me down this path of making something, not knowing what it was called. There was no such phrase in my head as graphic novels, but just a long comic book that needed a bookmark and wanted to be reread and tried to put everything I could into this book to try to understand what happened and what it meant for me. But it wasn't about trying to make the world a better place by, “never again, you should know, never again.” That was just something that ended up leading to a lot of other really amazing comics. Joe Sacco's historical, political comics. We just did a project together recently. To Alison Bechdel, to God, I mean, so many. Anything I say now will just be, oh, and I didn't name check so-and-so … but it's really a large zone of what happens in comics that aren't science fiction, humor or fantasy.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, actually since you just mentioned Joe Sacco, I was actually wondering if you wanted to say more about the collaboration that you and he are working on?

Art Spiegelman Sure, I was so grateful for that. So Sacco is best known for, still probably, for his first book, Palestine, but he's done many, and then he just keeps getting better, and better, and better at what he does, both in terms of how to present the research, and his drawing is just astounding. And we became friends over the years, and he's living on the West Coast, and we were talking. And I was doing what I do best, which is kvetching, just complaining about, “I can't draw anything. I'm stuck. I've just paralyzed. I don't know how to deal with the world around me right now, and I don't know how to retreat from it.”

So he just said, well, you know, really, what we should do is just jam together, which is just to draw on a piece of paper and make something happen. What we did before that was we were talking on the phone, and pretty quickly, we were talking about Gaza. And I felt a real need to do something about it, but I don't have anywhere near his expertise. He has friends there, he's gone there many, many times, and I have an ignorant layman's knowledge of almost everything but comics, so it included that. But I had to do some homework, and we did a lot of talking on Zoom. And so we had hours of recording from a few conversations that became the text for what became a relatively short comic, three pages, but it was all distilled from hours of conversation from where we're coming from. And I was grateful for the chance to do it because A, I was learning a lot. It forced me to focus, and it forced me to draw even though I'm at my most paralyzed when I get like the way I was. And fortunately it was somebody who was the opposite. He's able to do very complex things very directly. And so somehow it boosted me into making something. Unfortunately, he did his part, if you put all the days together, in about two weeks, it was only three pages. And I did my part in about nine months. But that's what it took for me to just get my hand wrapped up so I could move again and draw things that I wasn't used to drawing.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, that's kind of an instance of you speaking out and defending something. I mean, how did it feel, I guess, to make a statement in that way?

Art Spiegelman Important to me. I was, you know, I was certainly talking with my friends, talking about everything, but how do you actually make a difference? The thing is, I had to because the people who are defending the Israeli position were defending from a position of Israel being the last bastion of defense for Jews. That this was where you go and you'll be protected and you'll be fighting for your people and your religion. I'm not very religious. I have friends that are Jewish, but also some others here and there, so it's not like that. And I had no interest in Israel ever, ever, from the time I was there once as a kid. So all I knew for sure is I'm a diaspora Jew, and all I found out as I was looking at the news and hearing Netanyahu is his only big enemy besides Hamas is the diaspora Jews. We're the target. Because if you're not there fighting for the Zionist cause, you're a traitor of some kind.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, that's so interesting. Thank you for answering that question.

Adwoa Adusei I'm going to switch gears back to comics in general.

Art Spiegelman Phew. [Laughs] That's what happens every time I open my mouth. Let's just talk about comics in general. I know about it, and it's not as heavy.

Adwoa Adusei So, we realize that some of the questions that you get asked a lot are why comics? Why mice? And why the Holocaust? Answering those questions again and again, motivated you to write MetaMaus. Do you still get asked those three questions?

Art Spiegelman Over and over, and it was such a folly to believe that, oh, I can put it in a book and walk away from it. I had a lot of help. I was working with a really great academic and now very close friend named Hillary Chute, who's a comic scholar. We did it over a period of about three years, at least, of talking and then her distilling it, me distilling it further, until we finally got it down to what it seemed like since the book is, Maus is 300 pages, it would be a little bit mad to make a book about Maus that was longer than 300 pages. So we had to keep distilling down. But it was natural to ask. Those were the three categories of questions that were always being asked. And somehow, I figured if I could just answer them succinctly once, then I could refer to people, oh, you want to know about why mice? That’s page 123 to 140, or so on. And so it was naive. And yet, it's not other people's fault. It's also my fault. I haven't been really able to totally move on from Maus. It's like, oh, now that's done. Maybe I'll do a book about, I don't know um ... history of farming or something. It's just not, it wasn't as compelling for me.

So I'm stuck with it, was stuck with, and I'm struck with it partially because the book itself was a fluke in the way it developed. I didn't know I was getting in so deep into something. It was a three page comic strip originally for an underground comic, and then I had to go back to it when I was moving back to New York and could talk, had to talk with my father. For the first few months I was pretending I was still in California, but eventually I had to give up. And so the only way I could be with him and have something other than adversarial conversations was I asked about his story and I'd already done three pages based on what little I knew, and so we just talked about it every time I'd visit him for that, with a tape recorder. And it kept us in a relatively good relationship.

So, that became the anchor stone for making this thing. And I realized at a certain point, it was a fluke that I did it. I'd been invited into a comic book called Funny Animals, Aminals, actually, that had a Robert Crumb cover. And he was the god-king of underground comics. And he had done the cover, so I was very honored to be invited inside for a comic book that was supposed to be, according to the editor, supposed to about animal rights and vegetarianism and stuff like that. Not one cartoonist followed the mandate, including Crumb. It was all just, ‘Oh, anthropomorphic characters. That's fun.’ So that's where we were going with it.  And I was trying really hard to figure out what to do. And sitting in on a friend's film class that he was teaching, he pointed out that the early racist cartoons and the early Mickey Mouse cartoons had the same character in it, a minstrel-lipped little creature who would sing, and that was Mickey Mouse. As well as all of the racist caricatures that populated a lot of underground comics and animated cartoons. And so I went out, ‘Oh, I've got it, now this is fantastic, I'll do something about racism in America.’ That lasted about 24 hours before I realized, you know, I may not be the right man for the job because I realized that the metaphor of aggressor and aggressed held just as well for what my parents had been through. And that led to that first three-page version of Maus and beyond.

Adwoa Adusei What books or comics are you reading now that you love?

Art Spiegelman Oh gee, okay, um. I love everything that a lot of the artists who are in Raw, which got their start there even, or were first exposed more widely there—are still my basic reading list. I keep up with their work. So that includes Charles Burns and Chris Ware, and Crumb, and many others, including European artists. But then I'll still read Carl Barks and Little Lulu and I certainly love and continue to reread the EC comics that include Harvey Kurtzman's MAD and Harvey Kurtzman's War Comics that were not like anything else.

And the very new stuff, it's a little harder for me to … it's now a flood. So I certainly have read within that flood, but I think it's true for everybody who's following alt comics especially now, it's hard to keep up. So I try, but it’s not that obvious. The two people I'm most interested in now that I hadn't known is a cartoonist, I think he's from Belgium originally, lives in Germany, named Oliver Schrowen, a genius. And another genius, it's a 500 page book that just came out last month from Drawn and Quarterly called Cornelius and it’s hilarious for me. He's sort of obviously making it up as he's going along, but he's pretending that this is an anthology of a comic strip that he—in the introduction it actually says “started 300 years ago”—which is not really reliable information. [Laughs] But in any case, it was so interesting to follow his brain around through it, and the fact that he was making it up as he went along was really exciting.

Virginia Marshall You know, we're hoping that readers find Maus for the first time or reread it when they hear this episode. So do you have any hopes for people, like what would they take away after they read Maus?

Art Spiegelman Oh, well, gee, that's really an open-ended question. Because I can't control that. That's why I did have to insert this idea that, ‘Hey, you need to know about this, but not as a defense of what Israel is doing.’ You need to know about it because it's happening all the time. And we're living in a time and in a place where we're actually in a very dangerous zone right now. The authoritarianism that led to Hitler is amongst us now. It's dangerous, like it's about othering people, masked ICE agents grabbing people, putting them in busses and sending them off to God knows where, it's not even home, is the beginning of something that feels very much like what was happening in Nazi Germany in the 30s.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, I think people will make their own conclusions.

Art Spiegelman Yeah, so I don't have to force it.

Virginia Marshall Well, thank you so much for talking with us. We were going to end it there. It was really lovely to have you in the studio.

Art Spiegelman Thank you. Thank you. 

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei  Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Nick Higgins, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Laurie Elvove designed our logo. 

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time… keep re-reading.