Maus and the Power of Images

Episode Transcript

Virginia Marshall You’ve probably heard of the graphic novel Maus. It’s the book about Jewish mice and Nazi cats, based on the cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s relationship with his parents, who were both Holocaust survivors.

Art Spiegelman It was really about trying to understand, how could I be alive if both my parents were supposed to be dead?

Adwoa Adusei This, of course, is the famous Art Spiegelman. And we actually got to interview him when he came to Brooklyn Public Library earlier this month for a book talk!

Virginia Marshall That was a truly incredible moment – and I have to say this is the first time that we’ve been able to speak with one of the authors of the books we’re featuring in this series.

Adwoa Adusei  We got to ask him about a lot of things, including what made him want to write Maus in the first place. The idea for the book, he said, came from this nagging thought: that he wouldn’t be here if his parents had perished in Auschwitz.

Art Spiegelman 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.

Adwoa Adusei In the 70s, the children of Holocaust survivors were starting to tell their parents’ stories for the first time. And there was a vibrant comics scene happening underground … meaning that the comic book artists who were pushing the boundaries of the art form were mostly publishing with independent, small presses. Art Spiegelman was a part of that underground comics movement.

Virginia Marshall So there was a lot of creativity happening in comics in the 70s and 80s… but not a lot of money or recognition. And for Spiegelman, it made sense to try to tell his parents’ story in that underground, subversive format.

Art Spiegelman We thought we'd be publishing the book ourselves. Françoise and I had a small press that did a magazine of avant-garde comics, and I just assumed that whenever I finished this damn thing — and it did take ultimately 13 years — we’d published it ourselves, and I didn't think that there was any big market awaiting this book with an embrace. It just wasn't like that.

Virginia Marshall Spiegelman and his wife François Mouly published Maus in installments in RAW, their independent comics magazine. When the series started getting critical attention, Spiegelman was able to publish the first half of Maus as a book in 1986, and the second half in 1991. It was truly a ground-breaking book, and it won Spiegelman the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first time in history when the prestigious award went to a comic book … or graphic novel, which was still a new term at the time.

Art Spiegelman 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 I 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.

[Theme music]

Adwoa Adusei We chose to revisit Maus in this series for a couple of reasons. One reason is that Maus almost single-handedly elevated comics from throw-away inserts in newspapers to a serious literary art worthy of winning the highest award in book publishing. And, it’s not an accident that this book is coming back to us now. Maus was swept once again into the public eye three years ago, when the conservative movement to target marginalized stories took aim at Maus.

The Young Turks Newscaster A Tennessee school board voted unanimously – ten to zero – to remove a book titled Maus.

Fox Newscaster On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Tennessee school district is under fire for voting to ban a graphic novel about those events.

Virginia Marshall That ban in one Tennessee school district in January of 2022 created an uproar. It made national news outlets pay attention to a movement that was already gaining ground.

Adwoa Adusei People felt that if Maus could be banned – then nothing was safe. Here’s Spiegelman again, reflecting on that time.

Art Spiegelman That was a big one andI 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. 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 … Maus had a responsibility to be out there as well and I got caught up in it.

Virginia Marshall Today on Borrowed and Returned, how Maus changed how we tell stories about resistance, memory, and authoritarian regimes. I’m Virginia Marshall.

Adwoa Adusei And Adwoa Adusei. You’re listening to Borrowed and Returned: revisiting the books that changed us, and changed America, too.

[Theme music ends]

Virginia Marshall In order to tell the story of Maus and the impact it made, we have to start with another story of American censorship. One that begins in the 1950s.

Adwoa Adusei Comics in the early part of the 20th century saw a kind of explosion. In the 1930s and 40s, there was the “golden age of comics,” with Superman and Captain America — exciting action comics in bright colors that were sold at news stands. Kids could buy them for ten cents, and they bought them in droves.

VM: And, publishers saw that there was a huge market for flashy comics. So the genre expanded to be even more eye-catching.

Jeff Trexler There were romance comics and detective comics, crime comics, horror comics. You name a genre.

Adwoa Adusei This is Jeff Trexler, he’s a lawyer, the executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and a bit of a comics historian himself.

Jeff Trexler Everything was happening in comics, and comics went from maybe a small part of a newsstand and a novelty to … they were dominating a news stand. And kids were reading them and taking them to their home. They were swapping them on the playground. They were bringing them into school. And this caused a problem. Whenever there's a new medium, specifically in the United States, there tends to be a reaction. There's often a lot of fear.

Paul Coates They read them in living rooms in Dubuque and alleys in Manhattan. They read them in tree houses, they read them tucked into their notebooks in classrooms. And at night they dream about them.

Adwoa Adusei This is a recording from a news program by journalist Paul Coates that aired in 1955. The TV report was following a growing opposition to comic books and the idea that was popular at the time: that gruesome, violent and sexual content in some comic books made kids commit crimes.

Paul Coates What a wonderful thing if they were reading something worthwhile. Something that would stimulate their desires to build and to grow. But they’re not reading anything constructive. They’re reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror. To the most despicable of crimes.

Virginia Marshall The segment follows a group of boys who are reading comics in secret in the woods. The boys start to bully and abuse one of their gang using methods they learned from comic books. The scene is melodramatic, as you can tell from the music, and clearly fictionalized. But this kind of story communicated something that adults were afraid of at the time. A fear of the other, or the obscene. Here’s Jeff Trexler.

Jeff Trexle It was a mass movement, and there were indeed comic burnings nationwide, but it was also a movement by the elite led by psychiatrists, psychologists, U.S. senators, state legislators, attorney generals, governors, business people. And it was seen as progressive because these books were destroying education. They were causing juvenile delinquency. That was a big cause back then. There were hearings around the country, Senate hearings. So it was serious business.

Adwoa Adusei There were intellectuals railing against comics, people with graduate degrees, like Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who published an influential book called Seduction of the Innocent. In that book, he connected comic books to the rise of juvenile delinquency.

Virginia Marshall And all of this debate over comics led to some very serious threats to ban comics outright, at the federal level.

Jeff Trexler The people in comics did not want comics to be illegal. They didn't want superhero comics to illegal, they didn't want horror comics, anything, to be purely illegal. So they came up with a code for self-regulation.

Adwoa Adusei This code came to be known as the Comics Code Authority, and it was a literal stamp that went on the cover of certain comic books that passed the test, so to speak.

Jeff Trexler The comics code said: right always had to prevail over wrong. There were certain images you couldn't see in terms of sexuality. You couldn't have drugs. Civic figures had to be portrayed with respect. And if it didn't have that stamp, then odds are it wasn't going to get distributed. There wasn't gonna be a market.

Virginia Marshall And here’s where the story comes back to Art Spiegelman and Maus. Because Art was a kid in the 1950s. He was an avid comics reader even then, and he noticed when some of the comics he liked to read suddenly went away.

Art Spiegelman 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…

Virginia Marshall As often happens during moments of censorship, it led to the creation of art. But the art had to be published outside the mainstream. And Spiegelman was one of those creators publishing underground.

Art Spiegelman 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.

Adwoa Adusei This was the era of Mad Magazine and R. Crumb, Trina Robbins and so many other artists who were pushing the boundaries of the form. They were drawing lewd, political, controversial, and satirical stories. And Spiegelman was right there with them. This was when he was starting to create the characters and the themes that would become Maus.

Art Spiegelman 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 would have to deal with this because it was such a heavy load to carry.

Adwoa Adusei It was a rich, complex story, one that didn’t shy away from the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also one that delved into the complexity of a father-son relationship, and the wounds  that never healed after experiencing such trauma.

Virginia Marshall When Maus did make its way into the world, it told a different kind of story. And it spoke particularly to other descendents of Holocaust survivors.

Amy Kurzweil Maus is a book I grew up with physically, like it was in my home.

Adwoa Adusei This is Amy Kurzweil. She’s a cartoonist and author of two graphic memoirs about her grandparents’ experiences as Jews in World War II. She said she was aware of Maus from a very young age.

Amy Kurzweil I remember it was my older brother's bookshelf, and I didn't really know exactly what it was. I just knew that it had a big swastika on the cover And that was really impactful for me because I always grew up knowing the Holocaust was a really big part of your identity, it's a really part of family history. But it wasn't necessarily a story that somebody sat me down and told, you know, from beginning to end. Because of course, that's not really possible with something like the Holocaust. It's just kind of like there in your family, like this big shadow, sort of leering at you. And so when I saw Maus on my brother's bookshelf, like, I would look at it kind of with that sort of like attraction aversion, you know?

Amy Kurzweil Despite the fact that her family had a similar story to the one told in Maus, it wasn’t until college that Kurzweil actually read the famous graphic novel, in a class on literature and the Holocaust.

Amy Kurzweil I remember it was me and another girl in the class who had grandparents who were Holocaust survivors. But nobody else in the classroom had a connection to Jewish history. But it was like me and this girl. And I remember kind of looking, you know, like exchanging glances with her across the table as we were reading things. I, for my final project, drew a short comic. And it was really the first comic I'd ever drawn. It was about my grandmother. And I was able to get humor into the story without feeling like I was trivializing her, her experience, or my experience with her.

Adwoa Adusei That comic grew into the graphic novel Flying Couch, which Kurzweil published in 2016.

Amy Kurzweil SoMaus was probably the most influential book in my life because it really directly played a role in my decision to write my first book and tell this Holocaust story in drawings.

Adwoa Adusei Flying Couch tells the story of Kurzweil’s grandmother as a child in Poland and how she escaped and survived persecution. But it’s also the story of the relationship between her grandmother, her mother, and Kurzweil herself, who turned to drawing as a way to process the impacts of trauma on the women in her life. It’s a family portrait as much as it is a retelling of the horrors of the second world war. That kind of complex storytelling was something Kurzweil saw first in Maus.

Amy Kurzweil I just love the fact that Art showed you those moments, like those interstitial moments in between the storytelling, where Vladaek is like, throwing away his jacket and like, you know, counting nails and being miserly, and trying to make Art feel guilty for not coming over more. All these things that our parents and grandparents do and that take on this added significance in the shadow of the Holocaust. I think my generation, maybe this third generation, we can be comforted by the fact that we're not alone in telling these stories. Like, there's been so much storytelling about the Holocaust, as there should be so much storytelling about every historical tragedy, and I do really feel like my generation has benefited from this feeling, like we can be specific about what happened in our families. We don't have to think that our one story will speak to the whole tragedy.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Maus wasn’t just inspiring for younger artists trying to write about the Holocaust. The book had broader implications for artists and cartoonists writing about horror and trauma globally.

Molly Crabapple Maus was the book that showed that comics could be used to express the most brutal, complicated, horrific, raw aspects of humanity.

Virginia Marshall This is Molly Crabapple. She’s an artist and writer who has written and drawn stories about people living through times of conflict in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza — as well as people on the US-Mexican border, people detained in Guantanamo, and in solitary confinement in the United States. And in all of these instances, Crabapple says there is a common thread: she’s depicting the implications of fascism. And that’s something she learned, in part, from Maus.

Molly Crabapple I mean, one of the things that I think is most important about understanding fascism is that there are no magic groups that wouldn't do fascism by virtue of their identity, right? Because a group is persecuted does not mean that they are incapable of becoming the persecutors. For instance, Vladek in Maus, he's a full human with all of the flaws that that is. I think the most toxic thing, and the most dehumanizing thing, is the reduction of people to cardboard angels, and the demand that people be perfect victims in order to be worthy of sympathy.

Virginia Marshall One of other important things that Molly Crabapple learned from Maus and other ground-breaking graphic narratives, is that comics can be a tool to push back against authoritarianism.

Molly Crabapple One of the demands of fascists is that they do the most ludicrous things in the most violent possible way, and then you have to take them seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, they will send you to a concentration camp. This is fundamental to all fascism. And what cartoonists do is they skewer that. They say, ‘you're a pathetic flea, and I'm going to draw your pathetic inner essence, and people are going to laugh at you because you're pitiful.’

[Music]

Molly Crabapple It's obviously a cliche, right, to say that the picture is worth a thousand words and all of that … but the picture is universal in a way that words aren't. A picture does not require translation. It goes right through your eyes and into your, like, cortex and your heart.

Adwoa Adusei The power of pictures. It’s something we talked about in our last episode, about the impact of the seminal children’s book The Snowy Day. And it’s coming up again and again because this graphic novel genre has seen incredible growth in the past few years. And, as Jeff Trexler pointed out, any time there is a new medium in the United States … that often comes with a lot of fear and confusion.

Virginia Marshall Right, and we saw that again in 2022, when school officials in Tennessee focused on just one image in Maus, which was the image of Spiegelman’s mother in a bathtub. Her breasts are exposed, because she’s in the bath, and the people in Tennessee who were voting to ban Maus said that that was the image that was obscene. But Spiegelman actually used the image of his mom in the bathtub to talk about her suicide. He uses it to talk about trauma and the impacts of the Holocaust.

Jeff Trexler Part is that adults don't know how to read graphic novels. They don't know how read sequential images.

Virginia Marshall Jeff Trexler again.

Jeff Trexler That isn't about titillation. That isn’t about, ‘Oh, look at the dirty picture.’ Think about the way that Art Spiegelman plays with clothes and nakedness in the novel. You know, what is the scene where Art Spieglemann's father finally feels human after the whole experience? He finds clothes and he says, ‘I can't get rid of these stripes.’ And so when you have the mother in the tub and she's naked, it's part of this arc for her where she has been stripped of everything by this experience to the very soul. If you don't have a way for dealing with nudity other than it's just something to hide and suppress and get rid of because it's dirty, you lose that part of the human experience.

Virginia Marshall This idea that graphic novels can and should deal in complexity, that they can show people at their lowest, and do so with nuance … I think that’s what makes the entire art form so compelling. If you look at the top books that have been banned and challenged in the past few years, many of them are graphic novels. They’re books that deal with LGBTQ+ issues, with racism, and marginality, and they do it in pictures.

Adwoa Adusei In our last podcast series Borrowed and Banned, we interviewed the authors of two of the most frequently banned books, and they also happen to be graphic novels. Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer, and Mike Curato, author of Flamer. Their books also got swept into this current wave of censorship, in large part because of images that were taken out of context and shown at school board meetings for their shock value.

Virginia Marshall Right. And Jeff Trexler was actually the lawyer who defended Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer when book banners sought to prevent that graphic memoir from being sold in the state of Virginia. He told us about how that particular censorship effort started.

Jeff Trexler One parent in Virginia, got this great idea. It was like, wait a second, they were doing these school board meetings online and on YouTube… Well, what's great about YouTube is that it's a picture medium. So of course, what the parent does is they go to a school board meeting in Virginia and they hold up Gender Queer. ‘Look! Look at this image from Gender Queer.’ And then the next day, the screenshot of her doing that gets posted online. Back then it was Twitter, and it goes viral.

Virginia Marshall Trexler also pointed out that even the arguments that are being used in these censorship cases are echoes of the ones that came up during the era of the Comics Code Authority.

Jeff Trexler There was a citation in the brief in opposition to the book, which said that graphic novels were harmful to kids' mental health, and they quoted a psychiatric paper from 1996. And I said, I can't believe this. So I tracked it down, and it turned out that the scholarly basis of this argument was a 1996 reprint from the first conference done in the 1940s. So they were using the same scientific research, long discredited, from the late 1940s and early 1950s to make their arguments to a judge in 2022.

Adwoa Adusei Jeff Trexler and Maia Kobabe ultimately won that case. And both Trexler and Kobabe have continued to fight for intellectual freedom since then, particularly when it comes to protecting graphic novels and comics.

Jeff Trexler After we won that case, a couple weeks later, there was a conference where Maia was speaking. And at that conference, Maia said, ‘Why are graphic novels so great? Particularly for LGBTQ identity?’ And e said, ‘Because with a graphic novel, I can show myself the way I want to be seen.’ And I think about that a lot. I think of what Art Spiegelman does in Maus. And he showed the Holocaust in a way that nobody had shown it or seen it before, and yet it was so real. It was personal and it was universal at the same time, which is a really hard thing to do.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei We’ve been circling this idea the whole episode, that there’s something powerful about the graphic form — the marriage of image and text — that makes comics and graphic narratives an ideal vehicle for speaking the truth.

Virginia Marshall Yeah and after Maus vaulted Spiegelman into the spotlight, he has said that he’s felt the weight of responsibility to continue drawing and writing the truth. That responsibility has been weighing on him particularly heavy in the past couple of years, especially as this censorship, anti-semitism, and the war in Israel and Gaza has come back into the news. He told us that he got stuck with his drawings, and that in order to loosen himself up, he started talking with his friend, the cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco.

Art Spiegelman So Sacco is best known for, still probably, for his first book, Palestine, but he's done many. 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'm 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. 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. But I had to do some homework.

Adwoa Adusei Their conversation turned into a three-page comic in which both artists spoke out against the devastation in Gaza, each from their own perspective. For Spiegelman, it was an exploration of his relationship with the Jewish diaspora, and with Israel.

Art Spiegelman The main thing I said within that three pages was, ‘I never made Maus to justify Israel or the Israeli defense forces.’ That's why it was called, ‘Never Again and Again and Again.’

Virginia Marshall Spiegelman said that he never intended to preach about Jewish suffering with Maus. He said that the reason he had to tell his parents’ story was both bigger and more personal than that.

Art Spiegelman I wasn't trying to educate anybody except me. 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. And, 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, not even home — is the beginning of something that feels very much like what was happening in Nazi Germany in the 30s.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Special Thanks to Joel Whitney and the BPL Presents team for inviting Art Spiegelman to Brooklyn Public Library. The book talk he gave to a packed room at Central Library is available to watch on YouTube. We’ll put a link to that conversation on our web page.

Adwoa Adusei We’re going to play our full interview with Art Spiegelman next week, in which he shared more about his comic with Joe Sacco, about the underground comics movement, and reflections on Maus forty years after it came out. We’ll also release our interview with Molly Crabapple as a bonus later on in this series.

Virginia Marshall We’re almost done with Borrowed and Returned! Our next and last book will be Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. So stay tuned for that.

[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.