This new documentary about the Jewish American cartoonist isn’t breaking any boundaries, but gives a great insight into a pioneering mind
Art Spiegelman’s Maus utterly transformed what is possible in the comics format and greatly illuminated the notion of inherited trauma. Unsurprisingly, its origins have been much discussed, so Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s powerful, if rather conventional, documentary covers some familiar territory.
We see Spiegelman giving talks and having dinner with his early mentor, Robert Crumb. Leading lights of a younger generation of cartoonists, Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, pay tribute to him as a pioneer of unsparingly honest graphic fiction. But at the heart of the film is an extended interview with the man himself, looking back on his early work producing trading cards and Wacky Packages for the Topps Chewing Gum Company; his days in the drug-fuelled San Francisco underground ‘comix’ scene; and his worst year, 1968, when he had a major breakdown, followed by his mother’s suicide.
Spiegelman grew up with “shards of information” and the occasional “nightmare vision” of what his Polish parents had gone through during the Holocaust, but he only began working on such topics in his mid-20s. In 1972, he was invited to produce an animal-based comic strip and decided to explore the theme of racism. He abandoned his initial plans for Ku Klux Cats when he realised that he could draw on material much closer to home and, for the first time, portrayed Jewish mice persecuted by Nazi cats. A year later, he devoted another strip to his mother’s suicide, Prisoner on the Hell Planet. His wife Françoise Mouly, was bowled over by it: “I didn’t understand how someone could be so intimate on paper.”
Maus took 13 years – “a long-term disease”, as Spiegelman puts it – and inevitably exacted a huge emotional toll. Mouly describes how he was still wrestling with horribly dark material while she was captivated by the early stages of motherhood. His daughter Nadja, herself a cartoonist, generously suggests that her parents “absorbed the horrors so we didn’t have to”.
Spiegelman is a great advocate for comics as a medium. Though he obviously wanted to expand what the medium is capable of, he also wants us to take seriously the commercial end of the spectrum. He sees the schlocky horror comics he grew up with as “an early Jewish response to Auschwitz”. And he believes that Mad magazine, with its core message that “the whole adult world is lying to you”, had a major impact on what he dubbed the protest generation, which fought for civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War.
Though he's produced other important works, including In the Shadow of No Towers, about 9/11, Spiegelman long felt burdened by the fame of Maus. He never wanted to be “the Elie Wiesel of comics”, he says, and got tired of endless interviewers asking: “Why mice? Why comics? Why the Holocaust?” He even wrote a book, Meta-Maus, trying to answer these recurring questions once and for all.
Hardcore fans, therefore, may not learn much that they didn’t already know before, but there is still much to enjoy. Now in his mid-70s, the once tormented artist is engaging and surprisingly mellow, though still worried about American politics. He even seems reconciled to the fact that he will always be known primarily for Maus.
By Matthew Reisz
Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse is out in cinemas now and available to stream on Amazon. artspiegelmandoc.com