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, The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund, and The Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Films, donated by Leon Constantiner and Family

2024     98 MIN.     USA

Reviews

“An effective and exceptionally intelligent documentary…for those who have followed Spiegelman’s work for years, the documentary is particularly gratifying because it accurately traces the milieu and influences that shaped the artist…it deftly links together all the strands of Spiegelman’s life. The shape of his life shines bright: Spiegelman’s attempt to escape his past and bury his memories leading him to build works that prove that it is only by grappling with the traumas of history that we can open up a path to the future.”
– Jeet Heer, The Nation

★★★★ “A remarkably cogent and compelling presentation not just of Spiegelman’s life story but also his personality and art. The narrative of his career, with roots in San Francisco and underground comix, is related at a dinner table, with the legendary artists R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, back-in-the-day colleagues of the subject.”
– Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“Like a portal into a hidden history of comics.”
– Thom Powers, WNYC Radio, Documentary of the Week

“...the acclaimed cartoonist reflects on his Holocaust memoir, Maus, and other masterworks of subversion...Spiegelman is an entertaining interlocutor, and so are many of the artists and critics who testify to his greatness...”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A reminder that the themes running through Art’s life—fascism, illiberalism, and extremism—are not relics of the past but present threats to democracies worldwide.”
– Alan Gardner, Daily Cartoonist