Documentary on Artist Art Spiegelman Worth a Watch

PBS posted the 2024 documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse on their site this week as an American Masters episode. It is available until May 14. If you have never seen something on Spiegelman or his most famous creation, Maus, it is an excellent introduction.

​Maus was the first (in 1992) and only (to date) graphic novel awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by Maus II and MetaMaus. All the books concern the author’s family in the Holocaust as Polish Jews, and the difficulties of writing (and drawing) their stories.

​The stories are horrific yet humanizing. A family tree of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, is shown, but in the next frame the tree has been mostly obliterated by 1944. During the war, Spiegelman’s aunt poisons his older brother in her care, her own children, and herself rather than be taken to the camps. His mother kills herself in 1968 without a note, and his father throws away her journals, written at least in part for Art.

The eye-witness stories that Vladek tells Art must also speak in the silence of six million Jews and 11 million other people murdered by the Nazis. This is the disaster of the documentary’s title, and Art says it continues to have a way of falling into his life from the sky. (He saw the towers fall on 9-11.)

“It’s true that Art has a degree of comfort with misery,” says his wife, Francoise, one of the most compelling figures in the film.

The documentary also ties Spiegelman’s work to current events, with discussion of book banning and other political dangers.

“I never thought I would live to see something where America, which saved my parents after the war—it gave them a new start in life—could be tilted toward a new kind of fascism,” Spiegelman says. “And that’s what I see everywhere I look now.”

Art Spiegelman (born 1948) came up on comics and loved characters such as Basil Wolverton’s Lena Hyena and Will Elder’s Mickey Rodent, which appeared in MAD.

“The message at MAD magazine was that the whole adult world is lying to you, and we’re adults, so good luck, kid,” he said.

He worked, as a teen, for Topps bubble gum, making the trading cards for Wacky Packages. (How my generation of boys used to snort and giggle over parodies such as “Crust toothpaste”!) At the same time, he began self-publishing underground zines. He moved to San Francisco for four years in the early ’70s, as the comics scene was exploding, and R. Crumb, Spiegelman says, showed him that comics “didn’t have to have punchlines, and they could be about anything.”

Spiegelman published “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” about his mother’s suicide, in 1973.“I do remember that [criticism about it] was relentless,” he says in the film. “It was like, ‘How could you say such a thing about somebody who died?’ Well, I don’t know. I was angry.”

Cartoonist Bill Griffith adds, “The thing that ties most underground comics together is transgression. And transgression is a kind of liberating force. By going there, you’re robbing it of its power.”

There is much of interest in the documentary about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough. Spiegelman has devotedly but restlessly tried many forms, from teaching to being a featured cover artist for The New Yorker.

Spiegelman says at a presentation, of his thinking about his work, “It’s too grandiose to call it the theory of comics, like the quantum theory of the world, although I did take comics very, very seriously, and I thought they were time turned into space, a perfect container for memory, and an incredibly maligned art form. And without being pretentious about it, I thought that this was as valid as anything that happened in literature or in in painting or in cinema.”

Art says his father, Vladek, “grew up in a milieu that was more like eighteenth or nineteenth century shtetl life, and then went through the central maelstrom of the twentieth century. And me, I was listening to rock and roll and reading MAD comics.” As a child and younger adult he had wanted a relationship with his father and did not have one, he felt, but during the long work they did together toward Maus, “interviewer and interviewee…replace[d] son and father.”

In the documentary, Spiegelman’s most sympathetic and touching relationship is with his wife, Francoise.

“[My husband] Art has never separated work and life,” Francoise says. “So of course this [the subject of Maus] is what he thought about, what he talked about. And he got stuck so many times. And all I could do was, you know, be supportive,” she says, understating things elegantly.

In a frame from Maus, Art says: “There’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize. I mean, reality is too complex for comics…so much has to be left out or distorted.”

​“Just keep it honest, honey,” Francoise’s character says.

When Maus became a huge success critically and financially, Spiegelman says he sat on his couch for months, staring at a stain. “[T]here seems to be something insane about achieving some kind of celebrity for working in that area,” he tells his therapist.

​Francoise says she did not know, while Art was working those years, that Maus was a masterpiece. It seems to have been beside the point for her.

“[W]hen I met Art he was a master and nobody else knew it,” she says. “That was the basis of my love and then my life….”

The documentary ends with his tribute to her, as he accepts a lifetime achievement award. Theirs is a love story, on the “existential island” the couple created to defy massive loss.