Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse
Preview: 4/15/2025 | 2mVideo has Closed Captions
Explore the career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and his award-winning graphic novel Maus.
Explore the work of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, about his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. A defender of free speech, Spiegelman has spoken out as book bans spread across the country.
Support for American Masters is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, AARP, Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Blanche and Hayward Cirker Charitable Lead Annuity Trust, Koo...
Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse
Preview: 4/15/2025 | 2mVideo has Closed Captions
Explore the work of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, about his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. A defender of free speech, Spiegelman has spoken out as book bans spread across the country.
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How do today’s masters create their art? Each episode an artist reveals how they brought their creative work to life. Hear from artists across disciplines, like actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, singer-songwriter Jewel, author Min Jin Lee, and more on our podcast "American Masters: Creative Spark."Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [Speaker] Art Spiegelman is the guy that reinvented comics as a medium that people took seriously.
- The thing that amazed me about Mouse was the audacity.
- Thank you so much, it's something I've read so many times over the years, I can't thank you enough.
- [Speaker] It is drawn as if you took a pen and put it in the heart, and the heart drew this.
- [Speaker] I was absolutely floored at what you could do with a comic.
- Everything I know, I learned from comic books.
I learned how to read from looking at Batman and trying to figure out whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and ethics, aesthetics, and everything else from Mad Magazine.
- The thread that ties most underground comics together is transgression.
By showing stuff you're not supposed to show, you're robbing it of its power.
- I didn't understand how someone could be so intimate on paper.
And that blew my mind.
- I did take comics very, very seriously, and I thought they were an incredibly maligned art form, and this was as valid as anything that happened in literature or in painting or in cinema.
- [Speaker] He opened up the door that a lot of us went through.
- [Speaker] Art always seems to be standing at this point in these histories.
- [Art] Man, did that get people upset, that was the one that really did it.
- [Newscaster] Growing backlash over a Tennessee school board's decision to ban a Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Holocaust.
- Oi.
- It is a work that has not lost any relevance in the nearly 40 years since it was first read.
- Thank you all and see you in the funny papers.
Support for American Masters is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, AARP, Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Blanche and Hayward Cirker Charitable Lead Annuity Trust, Koo...