June 25

The second film for the June Swoon today is a documentary about the life and career of Art Spiegelman, a comic strip/book writer and cartoonist who you may never have heard about, but a man who has done more to elevate the perception of the graphic novel.

Spiegelman is most well know for his work on the graphic novels Maus I & II, which told the story of the Holocaust and the death camps through anthropomorphic animals. In Maus, the people of Jewish faith were portrayed as mice while Germans (and other Fascists) were shown as cats.

Maus is the first, and currently only, graphic novel that won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the major factors that allowed a different perspective of graphic novels among the academia. It allowed people to see what kind of stories that was capable of being told in this format.

The doc looked at Spiegelman’s beginnings as a child inspired by Mad magazine and how he wound up working as a cartoonist. They showed his work through the times of the underground comics and included the work of people who inspired him, such as R Crumb.

They outlines how the work on Maus took him years, as he struggled through this very personal story.

I wondered as I watched the doc if it would address the recent controversies of how some schools and libraries have banned Maus from their shelves. The film did have a section on this topic, with Art Spiegelman’s own comments accentuating the fear of what this could mean.

We get several comments, words from Art Spiegelman himself, really showing us who he is as a person as well as a creative force.

4 stars