Film Forum

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus is a landmark in reckoning with the Holocaust and breakthrough in serious comic art — but his full achievements are more remarkable and eclectic. ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE tracks his beginnings in the 1960s as co-creator of the Wacky Packages trading cards; his co-founding of the underground comics magazines Arcade (with Bill Griffith) and Raw (with wife Françoise Mouly); In the Shadow of No Towers, his reaction to 9/11, inspired by witnessing the attacks from his home in lower Manhattan; his controversial covers for The New Yorker (1993-2003) that prompted the NYPD to picket the magazine’s office; and his public response to Maus’s recent ban by a Tennessee school board. Spiegelman proves an eloquent guide through his provocative work, along with contemporaries (Robert Crumb, Gary Panter) and younger cartoonists (Joe Sacco, Jerry Craft, Molly Crabapple) inspired by Spiegelman’s unflinching confrontation of personally traumatic themes.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film, The Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art, and The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund

2024     98 MIN.     USA