There’s Nothing Like Banning a Book!
by Josephine Riesman
In January of 2022, the Tennessee Holler reported that the McMinn County School board had voted unanimously to ban Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel about his Jewish father’s experiences during the Holocaust and his own Jewish struggle to uncover and understand his father’s life. Spiegelman agreed to talk with me about the ban, Maus, and the collapse of Western civilization, and our encounter at his high-ceilinged studio in downtown Manhattan formed the basis of an article I wrote for New York magazine. However, the article was brief and the conversation meaty, so I’ve long wanted to publish more of the transcript.
With Spiegelman now finally dipping his toe into explicit commentary on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing massacre of Palestinians—via a triptych of provocative strips about Gaza made with comics journalist Joe Sacco—I thought now was the time to look back on my long, engaging, and sometimes contentious conversation with one of the great creators of—and ponderers of—comic books.
The following conversation took place on February 4, 2022; it has been edited for clarity and length.
Josephine Riesman: So, what has the past week and a half—God, it’s not even like two weeks yet—been like?
Art Spiegelman: It’s never quite stopped, so it’s an almost daily round of interviews… it’s been like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I started out with about 50 emails unanswered in my inbox before it started, and then I must have answered at least 50 in the last week, it’s been very hard to catch up. My life went into a kind of stasis with things I was working on. I’ll have to figure that out later, and the offers I’ve been given to op-ed or draw op-ed pieces for various important journals are there. I’ve just become cannon fodder in a culture war.
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