Rico's rants: Art Spiegelman, author of 'Maus'

01 May 2015

Art Spiegelman, author of 'Maus'

NPR has an article about Russian phobias:

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel (photo) about the Holocaust, Maus, has some very memorable cover art. It pictures a pair of mice representing Jews huddling beneath a cat-like caricature of Adolf Hitler. Behind the feline Hitler is a large swastika.
That last element has become a problem for Maus this spring. For Russian observances of Victory Day, the holiday commemorating the then-Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany, Moscow has purged itself of swastikas. In an effort to comply, Russian bookstores cleared copies of Maus from their shelves.
The 1980 graphic novel is the very antithesis of Nazi propaganda, as it tells the story of Spiegelman's father, a Holocaust survivor, by depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, but Spiegelman tells NPR's Robert Siegel that criticism of the book's cover is not new. He says the purge of the book from Russian bookstores is "rather well-intentioned stupidity on many levels. I'm afraid that this is a harbinger of the new arbitrariness of rules in Russia, and the result will be like what happened in the obscenity rulings that closed down a lot of theater plays. It's arbitrary rulings that make playwrights and theater owners afraid to put anything on that has an obscenity in it. So this is now extended to include: "You know, you want to put a swastika on a book? You really shouldn't do that on the cover, ever, because you might get nailed." And well beyond that, "be very careful if you're writing about anything else we decide is the red line this week. So this is a way in which I fear that Maus has been used for ends I don't approve of.
"The first time this reared its head was way back when Maus was not a known entity and the word "graphic novel" would never pass my, or your, or anyone's lips.
When Maus was offered to a German publisher, the head of Rowohlt publishing said, "We have a problem; it's against the law to show swastikas on the covers of books in Germany."
I said, "Well, we've got a problem, what are we going to do?" He said, "I'm not sure, I'll get back to you."
He then found a loophole that says, for works of serious scholarly import, it's possible to do it and convinced the government to make an exception for Maus.
The amazing thing is he then went on to become the minister of culture under Gerhard Schroeder and left his publishing post, but obviously had the diplomatic skills that the job might have called for.
The whole point of what we're calling "graphic novels" is the melding of visual and verbal information— to sound professorial for a second— and part of that information starts with the first thing you see. ... It's why when, when Pantheon didn't want to give me the right to do the cover, back in 1986 when the first volume was published by them, and there was no such thing as a graphic novel that anybody'd heard of, I was sputtering. Like, how could they do that, if the cover's part of the book, of course?
And then my friend up at Pantheon, Louise Fili, the superstar art director of Pantheon at the time, said "shut-up and don't worry about it, you'll do the cover, it goes through me."
So I did. I got a separate paycheck on top of the relatively small advance and, when the second book came out, they insisted that I do the cover, so I don't get any extra money.

NPR has a linked story about the creation of Spiegelman 's book:

When cartoonist Art Spiegelman published his epic Holocaust graphic novel, Maus, 25 years ago, a lot changed. He received a special Pulitzer Prize and became a contributor and cover artist for the New Yorker.
Maus blends the stories of Spiegelman's trying relationship with his father and a horrifying tale of Auschwitz, as seen through his father's eyes. Spiegelman drew the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats.
But Maus has continued to haunt him.
MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus is the story behind Spiegelman's signature work, complete with interviews, answers to many persistent questions, and examples of his early drawings.
"Me and my mice, we weren't dressed for success," Spiegelman tells NPR's Neal Conan. "Originally we assumed we would self-publish Maus. I didn't believe it would be read beyond about ten or fifteen thousand people. And when it got bigger, I felt littler."
"I wouldn't have made a really great ballet about the Holocaust. It wasn't in my gene structure. So to me it was obvious, but I think that's what's hard to remember, even going back to the early 1980s, just what disrepute comics were held in, the dialogues that did and didn't take place about the Holocaust in the 1970s and 1980s because it's now become such a major trope in media.
"So it just was coming from someplace so uncharted, maybe, that people were taken off-balance and tried to figure out what it was that they were in. ...
"I believed it wouldn't be really read until after I was dead. I was young and believed in posterity then. So what happened was, I just built it to last, and people were able to kind of sense that in the work."
On why he chose to represent Jews as mice: "It grew out of just being invited into an underground comic I was working on up in San Francisco, California as part of that wave of avant-garde comics of the 1960s and 1970s, where the only requirement for this particular book was to use anthropomorphic characters.
"And I was stuck until a friend of mine was showing films in his cinema class in upstate New York, Ken Jacobs, and he was showing these old racist animated cartoons. And he was showing Mickey Mouse's Steamboat Willie, when he's still a Jazz Age character rather than kind of a square, and then pointed out that Mickey Mouse is just Al Jolson with funny round ears on top, that it was kind of all a form of minstrelsy.
"And then I thought I really had the answer to the question, which was just, 'All right, I'll do something about racism in America with Ku Klux cats and mice.' And I started climbing that black hole, until I realized that I just didn't know enough to be able to do it properly.
"And then a whole other flood of images came to my mind, ranging from Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, a story by Kafka in which there's a kind of way of reading it where it seems that the mouse folk are the Jews. There's the image more basically that Hitler used of the Jews as the vermin of mankind that had to be exterminated. And, all of a sudden, I was off and running with a metaphor, with my collaborator, Adolf Hitler."
"In other books I've done, like in Breakdowns and In the Shadow of No Towers, I work larger than print size. And when it reduces down, it reduces the flaws, let's say. It looks more seamless. And I wanted all the flaws to be on a one-to-one relationship with the reader so that it would feel more like looking at a diary, although it's a forged diary, as you get to see when you're looking at all the sketches and preliminary work.
"It wanted to have that feeling of handwriting. So I was working on stationery with a fountain pen and correcting with typewriter correction fluid. And I wanted it to feel like a manuscript because that would allow a kind of intimacy to it, and it would keep me from frill and decoration in the drawing."
On Maus as a three-hundred-page-page yahrzeit candle: "A yahrzeit candle is a memorial candle lit for the dead, as I remember from the early Hebrew school classes I took before I became an apostate and taking a book tour through Rosh Hashana and New Year and Yom Kippur. But nevertheless, I remembered what a yahrzeit candle was, and it was my way of commemorating, of understanding and making a monument on paper with ink, but some kind of monument to what happened, not just to my parents but, by implication, beyond, without trying to charge that with the politics of other issues, just as an urgent thing to try to understand, not so that we just don't burn Jews in the future, but just so that we don't burn up the planet, even, for the future.
"Like how does something happen, and how does it reverberate through time? And that act of memory is important, and comics are great for memory. Like even when you have a short comic, like a three-panel comic, you've got a past, a present and a future as soon as you look at those three boxes. And that allows you to reflect and compare times."