While censorship of books, comics, graphic novels and films has been with us since the advent of books, comics, graphic novels and films, over the past several years, book banning, and book burning, has become a driving force in the right wing’s culture wars. Books that tell LGBTQ+ stories are under attack. Librarians are under attack. Libraries are under attack. And in some states, the American Library Association has come under attack. One of the earliest modern-day censorship efforts revolved around Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a Holocaust story that the good folks in Tennessee thought was too racy for its schools.
Several years ago, while in Paris, Gale and I had the opportunity to visit the Art Spiegelman retrospective at the Pompidou Centre library. Little did we suspect -- or imagine -- that Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivors Tale -- the Pulitzer Prize–winning genre-defining comic memoir -- would be the subject of headlines regarding the censoring of his work.
In 2022, the McMinn County, Tennessee school board banned Spiegelman’s book, a hybrid of memoir and oral history, over a few curse words and a nude image of Spiegleman’s mother in the bathtub after having committed suicide.
MSNBC noted that Maus. “[t]he first ever graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, …. is a frank and visceral look at the Holocaust through his father’s eyes. … Spiegelman famously depicts his characters in Maus as animals – Jewish mice, Nazi cats, Polish pigs, French frogs, and American dogs -- subverting common Nazi propaganda portraying Jewish people as ‘rats’, ‘vermin’, and ‘sub-human’. The black-and-white drawings masterfully illustrate anguish, love, fear, and brutality. The reader is not just hearing about the depravity of the Holocaust – they’re seeing it. At its core Maus is a memoir –a story about the Holocaust–but it also explores intergenerational trauma, the complexities of family, mental health, and enduring love.
In an interview with PEN America’s Lisa Tolin, Spiegelman joked that the school board apparently wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach the children. Spiegelman added, “We haven’t learned much from the past, but there’s some things you should be able to figure out. Book burning leads to people burning. So it’s something that needs to be fought against” (https://pen.org/art-spiegelman-on-banning-mau/#:text=Art%20Spiegelman%20was%20shocked.a%20district%20in%20Tennessee).
"Maus Now: Selected Writing" (Pantheon), edited by Hillary Chute, distinguished professor of art and design at Northwestern University, "bolsters Spiegelman’s rightful place in history through various cultural, scholarly and philosophical texts that dissect and analyze facets of Maus’ form, format and what makes it such a seminal opus in a unprecedented discipline that has spawned and influenced hundreds of subsequent graphic novels," Steven Heller pointed out in an essay on The Daily Heller (https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-maus-that-roars/).
Margaret Atwood had her graphic novel version of her critically acclaimed book "The Handmaid's Tale" removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district. Speaking out on book bans across the country, Atwood called it a "a culture war that’s totally out of control," and "woke snowflakery," while Spiegelman has branded it "Orwellian.”
PEN America’s Tolin asked Spiegelman: “The Nazis obviously banned books. What does it say to you that book banning is now happening here?”
Spiegelman: I think that book banning is not the only threat. I mean, there are many threats right now, where it seems to be, memory is short, fascism is a while back, the don’t know much about it. And, you know, it’s maybe attractive. It’s so complicated to lie in a plurality, a democracy of some kind, even is it’s a flawed one, an I try to balance out all those needs, and make decisions for yourself. So there’s a desire to keep it simple. And maybe fascism looks simple to them. And it seems to be the direction we’re moving in, more and more in various ways. And not just in America. It’s a worldwide phenomenon.”
In addition to Maus, Spiegelman is the author of Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, and Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. He has been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 1992 and has drawn dozens of covers for the magazine.
Last year, in an interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnOaE2ExG4A) with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on the VelshiBannedBookClub, Spiegelman said that he never expected to be in the position of talking about book banning in the country. And while Maus has thus far survived with “flying colors,” he is concerned about the censoring of books about race and gender.