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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, we'll get to hear some live music from The War and The Treaty. The married duo will be here in studio to share some music from their new album. You should see the setup over in Studio 5. Get ready for a great performance. Writer and director Osgood Perkins will join us to discuss his latest film, a Stephen King short story turned into a black comedy called The Monkey. That's the plan, so let's get this started with a film about Art Spiegelman.

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Alison Stewart: When Art Spiegelman finished Maus, he assumed someone would eventually discover it posthumously. Well, he was wrong. Maus, a comic that tackles the trauma of the Holocaust won the Pulitzer in 1992 and it changed how readers and critics thought about comics as an art form. A new documentary tells Art Spiegelman's story. We learn about a kid from Rego Park, Queens, who fell in love with drawing, and how a young artist began his journey drawing for children's magazines. We learn about how difficult his relationship was with his parents who both survived the Holocaust, and how he wrestled with his mom's suicide. And we meet the artists he inspired, and the woman who inspired him, his wife, Françoise. It's called Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, and it premieres tomorrow at Film Forum. Art Spiegelman is with me now. Hi, Art.

Art Spiegelman: Hi. Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us are co-directors Molly Bernstein. Hi, Molly.

Molly Bernstein: Hi.

Alison Stewart: And Philip Dolin. Hi, Philip.

Philip Dolin: How are you doing? Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. So, Molly, Philip, my first question is for you. What are your first memories of experiencing the art of Art Spiegelman? Molly, you go first.

Molly Bernstein: The art of Art Spiegelman, I experienced when I first read Maus as many people did, and I'm not sure exactly when that was. I think it was around the time it came out. I remember reading part one and then the full Maus and was mesmerized.

Alison Stewart: How about you, Philip?

Philip Dolin: You know, I don't think I read Maus until adulthood, shortly before we started the film, and it's very deep, and it was really an amazing experience to read it.

Alison Stewart: Art, what question do you have for these filmmakers when they first came to you and said, "We want to make a film about you?"

Art Spiegelman: I can't recall. By the time I met them, I already had mutual friends that knew them, and very specifically, Ricky Jay. They'd just made a fantastic documentary called Deceptive Practices with him, so he said, "You know, you should do it," so I take him seriously. I was amazed by that one, so I just let it happen, even though, as I think back on it, what on earth did I need a documentary for? But I'm glad it's out there to a degree.

Alison Stewart: Molly, why did we need an Art Spiegelman documentary?

Molly Bernstein: Well, it's a good question. We met Art initially. We filmed a performance of his called Wordless, which was a theater performance that he put together with a jazz band about the history of the Wordless novel, which is a great piece. We filmed it to document it, and I guess doing that opened up that world for us, and we felt this really should be expanded into a bigger story, and one that's not filming a theater piece.

Alison Stewart: Philip, I was curious with the-- how you basically went with the chronological order of Art's life. You saved the big news about Maus being banned and everything for the last quarter of the film. Why did you decide to go that route?

Philip Dolin: Well, I think we felt that we had to really give the background into where this masterpiece came from. That was one of the questions we wanted to answer as directors, where did this wooden mouse come from? In order to do that, we had to start from the beginning and get in Art's family background, his love of comics, as you mentioned. That was his window into American culture. We had to get his involvement in the underground comic scene, which was pushing him to break boundaries and smash taboos. All those things came together to create his early work, Hell Planet, and then also Maus. We really wanted to show that.

It was like we wanted to show everything that led to the creation of Maus, and then we wanted to show everything that resulted from it, both in terms of his work and the people he inspired and so forth.

Alison Stewart: Art, how did it feel to go back and relive those early years?

Art Spiegelman: Like daily life.

Alison Stewart: What do you mean?

Art Spiegelman: Well, one way or another, I'm stuck reliving it ever since Maus came out, and that remains true. Since my work has an autobiographical lens very often, I find myself now with a Maus mask permanently stuck on my face. Even the most recent thing I did, I'm representing myself in a collaboration I did with Joe Sacco about Gaza with my Maus mask in place.

Alison Stewart: There's a scene in the film where you're speaking at Skidmore and you say that you learned from comics as a kid. Let's listen to it and we can talk about it from the other side. This is from Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse.

Art Spiegelman: And, you know, I was a scholar of comics since I was a little kid and basically everything I know, I learned from comics. I learned how to read from looking at Batman and trying to figure out whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. I went on to learn about sex, contemplating Betty and Verona, feminism from Little Lou, economics from Donald Duckman, philosophy, that I got from Peanuts, politics, I learned from Pogo, and basically, ethics, aesthetics, and everything else from Mad Magazine.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think comics were offering you these kinds of lessons rather than other mediums?

Art Spiegelman: Well, when I was a kid, we didn't have a TV early on, so comics were the medium pretty much singularly for kids, even before rock and roll. I discovered it before I could learn how to read, and I just, as I've said since somewhere or other, Mad was the key, and I thought of Mad as an acronym for Mom And Dad, because my parents really couldn't tell me about America. They were Greenhorns. As a result, I used it as kind of a textbook to find out what was going on around me.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, which premieres at the Film Forum tomorrow. My guests are Art Spiegelman filmmakers Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin. Let's talk about early in Art's career, Philip. We see some of his early comics. We see how he draws. What did you observe about those early drawings that gives us clues into how Art's-- how he would develop as he got older?

Philip Dolin: Well, his early drawings are very impressive, and then especially the stuff he did in the newspaper when he was 15. We get to show that. I was fascinated by his commitment to drawing and also his finding of his cohorts, his friends, Jay Lynch and other people. As he said, they created little fanzines on purple ink in those methods that used to be used for school tests and so forth. It was this driving desire not only to draw, but also to get it out there, to share their work. I thought that was just fascinating to see in such a young person.

Alison Stewart: Yes, there's many, many people are in this film, Molly. Who did you know you had to get to be part of this film?

Molly Bernstein: I would say, other than Art, Françoise Mouly, Art's wife and collaborative partner. We really wanted to include her in this. They have such an unusual partnership, and have worked together for so long, and lived together and had a family, and it was just really great to be able to sit down with her and talk, even though she's probably the busiest person in the world.

Alison Stewart: Art, you smiled as soon as Françoise's name was talked about.

Art Spiegelman: Well, yes. I mean, we really have at this point been married for over 40 years and through thick and thin, we've had to keep reinventing ourselves to make that true. But at this point, I can't imagine it without her. I was smiling because after the first screening of the documentary at a festival in the fall at the IFC, there's a little get together afterwards, and our daughter Nadja, who's also in the film, came over with glowing eyes and said, "Oh, it's so sweet. It's a love story."

Alison Stewart: That's really sweet. Did you think it was a love story?

Art Spiegelman: Well, I thought it was really sweet.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Did you mean--?

Art Spiegelman: And sure, on some level.

Alison Stewart: Did you mean to Philip, to make a love story?

Philip Dolin: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was just-- again, it's one of those things. Without that partnership, there wouldn't have been Maus for starters, but so many things came out of that. And the way that Françoise came to New York open to anything and she discovered, having studied architecture, she discovered she could find her creative fulfillment through books, the 3D creation of books, and so that was so interesting.

They had a printing press in their loft, so it was really in the days where they did it. they just made it happen on their own, and that was incredible to follow. Also, they did the magazine raw, which was kind of a groundbreaking compilation, kind of an arts comic magazine.

Alison Stewart: Art, how did you meet Françoise?

Art Spiegelman: Well, the first time I met her, it was me visiting New York from San Francisco, where I still lived with my friend from Chicago, Jay Lynch, that was just mentioned by Philip. We joined a few friends for dinner and she was part of the group. Basically, I was introduced to her by Ken Jacobs, who's a very important figure for me, the filmmaker, and that mutual friend made it happen. But I got to say that the first time we met, I was still jet lagged. I was working for Topps Bubblegum. That's why I was in the city. I wasn't really focused. She's told me after that all she knew about me was I talked way too fast for her to understand a word I was saying. That was meeting number one.

After that, because of our vector at the time, which was a place called Collective for Living Cinema, we began seeing each other there and at some point, went out for dinner together. She was horrified that she had forgotten her wallet. It didn't mean a thing to me, but it did lead to her insisting that we have another dinner where she could bring her wallet. That was the beginning of a relationship.

Alison Stewart: Molly, what did you observe about the way that-- I feel bad talking about you because you're here, but what did you observe about the way Art and Françoise interact?

Molly Bernstein: I think just so-- Well, one thing that Nadja said when we interviewed her is that they're always-- they're still able to make each other laugh, and I think there's this amazing mutual sense of humor that it seems to me has been a big part of getting them through a lot of difficult things like the creation of Maus, which was, from Françoise's perspective, rather ruling, I would say. I think the humor, and also, I was going to say before, just this passion for the printed object is something that really came through with both of them and many of the people in the film. That's something we really wanted to try to communicate with the film and the way that we show the comics.

Alison Stewart: Philip, Molly said we had to have Françoise for the film, but the other thing I really took away from the film was how many illustrators, cartoonists, people who write comics about what Art Spiegelman meant to them.

Philip Dolin: Yes, of course. This is a big part of Art's legacy. He influenced so many people in different way. We tried to show some of that, both kind of like Marjane Satrapi, who saw Maus and learned that she could express her family history through that medium. We have Robert Sikoryak, R. Sikoryak, the comic artist, who is also an editor, associate editor at Raw, who discovered Art's early work as a young person and that really had an effect on him, so it was very interesting to see those threads.

I think part of it probably had to do with Art really, as he said in the movie, at a certain point in his career, deconstructing the meaning of comics and really exploring what is the comic language, how did it develop, what can I do with it, and always trying to push those boundaries.

Alison Stewart: Art, was there one comic writer who influenced you?

Art Spiegelman: Well, the name that keeps coming to mind is Harvey Kurtzman, because he was directly the creator of Mad as a comic book. Then after that-- and not the magazine. By then I was already beginning to fade out, paying attention. But also, these kind of anti-war war comics. It's from the same publisher that did Mad. That was certainly there, but then after that, I just became obsessed with seeing old comics, seeing how comics developed.

I'd go after school every day when I was at the High School of Art and Design to a newspaper library that used to be very far west on 42nd or 43rd Street before they had microfilm. I just spend my days starting in, whatever, 1918, and then reading up to about 1945 of all the strips I could find and then trying to find out about those artists and those strips, which was still about the only thing I really know about. Everything else is like much more partial knowledge.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn by going through those comics from 1918 to '45?

Art Spiegelman: Yes, actually, it started earlier, but around then. What did I learn? Well, I learned that grammar of comics we were talking about, and I learned how many different ways comics could be. That was essential for me to understand. If anything, I'm not sure I have a style, because my style is basically just the accumulation of my inadequacies as an artist, but it definitely is shaped by seeing how other people did it and what it could mean to make comix, C-O-M-I-X, to mix words and pictures together and do it in a new way so that every one of these great comix artists reinvented what a comic could be and added to what became a kind of evolutionary chain led us into underground comics and after.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about a new documentary, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're speaking about the new documentary, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, which premieres at the Film Forum tomorrow. We're talking with Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin. They are the filmmakers as well as Art Spiegelman. Where does the title come from, Art, Disaster Is My Muse?

Art Spiegelman: Oh, it was a line in my introduction to a book called in The Shadow of No Towers after September 11th, which for me went on until way after September 11th, well into 2003 or so. I began putting my recollections and thoughts down about it, publishing it as a kind of tabloid or sheet page in various newspapers around the country and around the world. I realize here I am again, poking at end of the world stuff, and I just use that as a grandiose line. Now, I'm not so sure anymore. I think I'm not sure that Armageddon is my muse.

Alison Stewart: Philip's laughing. Molly, why did you decide that that was the right title for this film?

Molly Bernstein: It really just struck us as a great line of Art's and one that speaks to the art and hopefully will pull people in to want to know.

Alison Stewart: The film deals with your family life, Art, your parents. This actually is a question for Philip. How much of the film did you decide would concentrate on Art's parents, on his mother having died by suicide? It's a very serious topic. It's a very serious subject. How much did you decide of the film and what went into that decision?

Philip Dolin: Well, yes. I mean, one of our main goals was we had to, of course, deal with Maus, but we wanted to deal with other things as well, such as, like I said, the development, the things that led to Maus and the things that came after. There's so many details in Art's life. I mean, if you look at a chronology of his life, it's very packed and so we had to pick certain things. The tragedy of his mother's death was key to his life, so we had to get that in there. A lot of this is dealing with this comic called Prisoner on Hell Planet, which is one of Art's early works and really groundbreaking work, and that comes a lot in the film, and it deals with that issue.

We felt the audience had to understand. They had to understand his background, that that happened to him. They had to understand that he had had a brother who didn't survive the war and these things were complicated to get in there, but the people needed the background just like they needed the background in comics. They had to know. They had to see Mickey Mouse and they had to see Donald Duck, and they just had to get a sense for Art's world in that sense too, so we had many different worlds.

We always joked that we had three majors on this film. We had to major in the history of comics, we had to major in the history of the Holocaust and representation of the Holocaust, and we had to major in history of Art's life. We had a lot of work to do and a lot of weaving of those stories.

Alison Stewart: In The Prisoner On The Hell Planet, Art, you say in the film, "In order to understand it, I'm going to have to draw it," talking about your mother's death?

Art Spiegelman: Yes. You know, I realized when Prisoner on the Hell Planet just came up, that that was actually at the core of the answer I didn't give while blathering on about how Françoise and I met. Well, part of the story very specifically is when Françoise came to New York, she really spoke very poor English and she thought the way she could learn to speak it better, because she liked reading comics in France would be to read comics, because it was smaller bursts of language. She looked around, but only found these superhero things that didn't especially interest her.

So again, our friend Ken Jacobs pulled out some of the underground comics he had. He had a pretty good collection of all of my stuff, and he began reading those things. When he read Prisoner on the Hell Planet, which was originally published in 1972 in an underground comic, she was kind of floored. She did something very uncharacteristic of her at the time, which is she called. She doesn't like phones because she wasn't speaking well enough to use them, but she just needed to talk to me about that thing, like how dare I do a strip like that that was so-- I don't know what the word would be. Unsympathetic, unsentimental in a certain way to the events that happened.

We talked for about six hours on the phone because I was open to it, and I was attracted to her, so that made it easier. But that conversation is what really made everything move to another level of connection.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned Ken Jacobs a couple times in this interview. He's a professor of yours in college. Art, what did he teach you about creativity and art that you still use today?

Art Spiegelman: Well, a lot, because when I'm bragging about how much I know about comics, I knew almost nothing about capital A, art. I was kind of a slob snob devoted to things printed on newsprint. It was through Ken that he dragged me to look at some Picasso paintings near the university in Upstate New York and kind of decoded them for me. He just said, "Look, just think of them as large comics panels and start from there." He humanized it for me so I wasn't as suspicious of high culture as I had been, Although, in literature, it was easy for me and the visuals that included things like Cy Twombly in art and Jackson Pollock and on and around, not so much.

That didn't-- I'm definitely more interested even now in representational art of one kind or another than genuinely abstract art, but he opened me up to all that and opened me up really to take what I was doing more seriously, because he did.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about the new documentary, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. My guests are Art Spiegelman as well as Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin. They are the directors of this film. I want to talk a little bit about Maus, about book banning. First of all, Molly, what did you think when you-- why do you think some people saw Maus as a threat, a threat to their children, Tennessee specifically? That's in the film.

Molly Bernstein: I think that's a better question for Art, actually, because he read the minutes of the school board. He really studied it. I'm going to hand that off to Art, if he doesn't mind.

Art Spiegelman: So what was the question that started all this now that I have to answer it?

Alison Stewart: Now the question was why do you think some people see Maus as a threat to their child?

Art Spiegelman: Well, it's a complicated answer, but I spent a year trying to answer it so that I was on interviews, shows, I was writing about it, I was going to libraries and schools and giving talks about it. Actually it led to a year where I just stopped drawing completely and it took me another year and a half to learn how to do it again because I felt more like I was running for office or something because I had became the-- Maus became the poster boy for why books shouldn't be banned because it was easier to-- in some ways at the time, it's changing now, but at the time, it seemed QED one needs to learn about the Holocaust and so on.

Then to find out that it was-- at the time, it was easier to talk about than gender, race in more general terms for people who were uncomfortable with the whole thing. But then when they looked at Maus, it was too difficult probably because-- well, first of all, it is quite horrific. I never made it for kids. It just somehow ended up being there as well. But also, because it was a-- at its heart, as much of my work is, it was very anti-authoritarian and school boards like having authority, even if it's just the measly amount you get for being on a school board.

That was the, I believe, real reason, the ostensible reasons where you can't ban things for that reason, it's anti-authoritarian, but you can ban it if it has any sexual content, or cursing, bad language. It took some doing, but they-- and they didn't read the book, but they kept looking for some bad language and some pornographic images. They did find one naked breast that one could see over the shoulder of my mother dead in a bathtub, but it was just tiny and a little dot. That was strike one, and strikes two and three were the word 'bitch' and 'goddamn', I think. That gave them the excuse to do what they did, because, as I said at the time, they just wanted a cozier and friendlier Holocaust to teach.

Alison Stewart: Did it change the way you felt about your country, the people who live in your country and make decisions?

Art Spiegelman: Yes, but that's been a problem for me since at least the '60s. It just keeps getting worse, but, yes, of course. And the fact that it was so coordinated, these Moms for Liberty who were trying to do this all over the country and exercise the thought control that doesn't let minds grow.

Alison Stewart: Philip, what did you notice about the groups that wanted to take Maus out of the classroom and out of libraries?

Philip Dolin: Well, as Art said, it's very complicated, and it's part of the whole swirl of things going on in the country right now. There was a movement to take lots of books out of libraries and to threaten to arrest librarians who had books in. That was part of it, but on the flip side, as is always the case, when the book was banned, I think it sold more. It shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. There's always that issue of we have a very divided country, so some people were banning it and other people were buying copies and sending them to those states.

Art Spiegelman: I seem to have been one of the few beneficiaries of this scored was it got so much publicity that all I can say is thank you to the school board because, yes, it was helpful.

Philip Dolin: Yes, that's true. Art did make a point of saying that he might be lucky, but other people weren't so lucky. Some people's books were banned and they didn't become bestsellers. One of the things that the film shows, and this is true of all books, the book really is a person's life. They pour their life into it and their experience. It's on the shelf for everyone to look at and to enjoy seeing the full quality of someone's life, so when books are banned, you're really, really silencing voices. That was one thing that--

Art Spiegelman: When I was talking about all this stuff in public, I made a point of trying to expand the subject because as I said, somehow at that time, but I think in 2023, that's sadly changing quickly. Anti-Semitism wasn't as popular as it is right now. I made a point from the beginning to say that, yes, on the one hand, Maus was a very granularly factual book, but it did have cat and mouse heads representing Nazis and Jews, and therefore it had a fable-like aspect. On that level it seems that it was a strong example of what it means to other, whether it's for their people's sexual preferences or because of the color of skin or whatever. It had that metaphoric value as well and it made it useful in schools where kids are wrestling with that, whether school boards and teachers in the south like it or not.

Alison Stewart: Art, was there ever a controversy about either your New Yorker cover or something that you've drawn that makes you question what you did?

Art Spiegelman: Well, I question what I did each time, but I think that the main thing it did was it encouraged me to keep being an anti-authoritarian. It was nice work if I could get it because it got my brain juices flowing. I think the one that's the most difficult to me is the one that just came out because that took nine months to make and that was published in the New York Review of Books, The Guardian and now in happening in various other languages called Never Again… and Again… and Again. There was this jam with Joe Sacco who did the Palestine Book, graphic novel, and was difficult to do. It took me nine months to make a three-page strip working with somebody who's providing at least one and a half pages of that.

I now realize part of me was just when you're rusty, stopped drawing for a year or so while doing this tour of talking in libraries and so on, that it was also a kind of-- it was basically an attempt to grapple with these things in a way that was broader than just "The Holocaust" and I couldn't avoid thinking about what was happening in Gaza. It was horrifying to me. And as it says in one balloon of that strip, I just didn't want Maus to be used as a recruiting tool for the Israeli army, and that's what pushed me. It's not that I'm an expert-- by far not an expert on Gaza or even Israel. I was not a Zionist. I went there once at 13. I didn't especially like my visit. It was better to be visiting Paris on the way back with my parents. That was fun.

I for a long time just tried to avoid thinking about it or reading about what was happening in Israel but this thing brought it front and center and there was no avoiding it. Fortunately, I had a much more knowledgeable partner who spent a lot of time in Gaza, has friends in Palestine and it allowed for there to be a conversation in which as Joe said, "Well, you know, people know where I'm coming from, less of them know where you're coming from, so I'm going to put on my interviewer hat again," and it worked in that direction.

I think that's the one that is probably the one that took so long because I was at war with myself. On the one hand, my superego insisted that I do this because of the aforementioned reason. It's very specifically because not only is disaster my muse, but I was getting obsessed with what this all meant and how to frame it and how to think about it. Also, because, well, my superego wanted me to do it, saying, "Look, you'd much rather be Dashiell Hammett during the HUAC years than Elia Kazan," so it just was shoving me forward. But my head on the other hand, was saying, "Who needs the goddamn grief with all those-- everybody at the Internet yelling at me?" and it seems like that's sort of what's happening. I met my ambition, but it did probably slow it down in terms of stopping the war within myself to cover that war one way or another.

Alison Stewart: The film is called Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. It premieres tomorrow at Film Forum. Thank you very much to Art Spiegelman, Molly Bernstein, and Philip Dolin. Thank you so much for your time.

Molly Bernstein: Thank you.

Art Spiegelman: Thank you.