Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

Early on in Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, Art Spiegelman narrates one of his quick little comics from Breakdowns. His father Vladek is insisting on packing the luggage correctly before a trip, and emphasizes the importance of space economy. It's important to know how to pack! Many times I had to run with only what I carry! Young cartoon Art cheerfully morphs into Tubby, noting how “you have to use what little space you have to pack inside everything what you can” was the best advice he had ever gotten as a cartoonist. Old documentary Art reflects on how this was one of the few times in his life that he could understand and accept his father's advice at face value. The absurd, underspoken context of both the documentary and the comic naturally lies in how Vladek is nonchalantly talking about the Holocaust as if it was just a metaphor useful mainly for parental advice- a clear building block for Maus, albeit one that's easy to lose sight of where Art Spiegelman is mainly known for Maus, and the weird artistic context of the sixties and seventies he came from isn't as well-known in the New York Times bestseller circles that made Maus a household name.

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse attempts to resolve this contradiction with a fair amount of success, although I did find myself wondering to what extent the documentary really expands on Breakdowns, compared to just covering the same information with more formal biography. Breakdowns is a weird little book Spiegelman managed to publish shortly before Maus hit the big time that collects pretty much all the short little drawings he's ever done. Modern, post-Maus editions of the book, currently published by Pantheon, also contain later drawings. 

These comics represent a very literal genesis to Maus, in that it's quite easy to see Spiegelman showing these comics to his artist friends and their responding more enthusiastically to this biographical backstory than the explicitly fictional gag comics or absurdist nonsense more typical to artists like Robert Crumb, who Spiegelman cites here as a clear influence. Another name that doesn't often come up in connection to Spiegelman even though it really should is Bill Griffith of Zippy the Pinhead. Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse discusses their friendship and collaboration. It's actually quite hard now for me to unsee the similarities between Maus and Zippy the Pinhead in terms of how both deal with warped distortions of childhood memories, even if Maus is anchored to something as serious as the Holocaust.

Spiegelman at work

This is the core irony of Spiegelman's work at large. He's a comic artist largely to make sense of his own life, yet the main man that Spiegelman has to relate to in order to accomplish this seems genuinely incapable of understanding the concept or relevance of genre. Another bit in Breakdowns features Vladek discussing one of Art's comics with his Holocaust buddies, for lack of a better term, and they start getting into technical details that Art starts taking notes on. At no point do any of these older Jewish men notice or comment on the fact that the Jews in Art's comic are drawn like anthropomorphized mice. A single panel in Maus features a conversation with Vladek suggesting that Art's comic could change the world...like Walt Disney, an exchange so absurd Art immediately notes that he needs to go write the conversation down before he forgets it.

These are all my interpretations, though, and I find myself referring to Breakdowns more often than I did when I first started working on this piece mainly because Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse is at its most compelling when it's quite literally just featuring Art Spiegelman narrating and contextualizing his own comics. The biographical detail is compelling mainly to the extent it connects to Spiegelman's earlier work, probably because, as awkward as it is to admit this, Spiegelman's later work (New Yorker covers mostly) just isn't that interesting in comparison. The documentary format is also awkward here since the main reason Spiegelman's work is so strong and has aged so well is because it's loaded with ominous subtext that's tedious to explain in words alone.

This isn't to say that the latter material Disaster Is My Muse discusses isn't important, although it is a little weak. Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse didn't have as much to say about In The Shadow of No Towers as I was expecting, but then, In The Shadow of No Towers isn't that long a book to begin with. Almost half of it is just old giant sized prints of newspaper comics from a hundred years ago. This isn't a complaint about the quality of the book, to be clear. I don't think I ever quite understood why cartoonists like Spiegelman were so influenced by Little Nemo until In The Shadow of No Towers showed me how very different those comics look in gigantic living color as opposed to a computer screen. Once again, though, this isn't a nuance that can be easily communicated through the documentary format. 

What else is there, aside from Spiegelman's neurotic reactions to September 11? Well, there are some mostly level-headed reactions to President Trump (the first time around) and also various attempts to ban Maus from libraries. While these are worthy topics in their own right, they feel a bit tacked on here. I don't mean to sound too harsh on Disaster Is My Muse as a documentary film. The main issue is that it can't quite decide whether it wants to be an introduction to Spiegelman or an exploration of the background to his work to someone that's already familiar with it. Disaster Is My Muse is at its strongest when its focusing on the latter, depicting Maus as the sanitizing of Spiegelman's neuroses by providing an epigenetic explanation for his paranoid existential fear. Seeing that common thread through all of Spiegelman's work, well, it just explains a lot, is all.

Spiegelman and the 1973 collaboration between himself and Bill Griffith, courtesy of

That broader arc still just pales in comparison to grim depictions of death in a single panel, with Spiegelman adamant that such panels should never be reproduced out of context. The formalized biography of Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse understates the grim humor of the tradition that Spiegelman was writing in. At one point there's a discussion of how Robert Crumb pioneered this idea of comics that don't even have punchlines, which isn't exactly wrong, but grim absurdist humor works precisely because it goes beyond punchlines. While aptly working to raise perception of Spiegelman's work, Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse fails to do as much justice to the artists that influenced him in turn, and is mainly just Art Spiegelman himself and Art Spiegelman-inspired scholars and artists rather than people elucidating the larger tradition he derives from.

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