BEFORE: Well, I hit another century mark so I rewarded myself today, I went out to the real movie theater - a chain of theaters, yes, the chain I used to work for. If you're in their rewards program tickets are 50% off on Tuesdays, so I got to see "Fantastic Four: First Steps" for just over $10 - non-IMAX, non-3-D, non recliner, but you can't beat that price for a new release at a Manhattan theater. I also cashed in my rewards points to get $5 off my popcorn - so next week there will probably be a new rule that you can't cash in your points on Tuesdays, because I kind of gamed the system a bit. Anyway, I'll have to sit on the reviews for Fantastic Four and Superman for a bit, "Superman" I can link to a few days after the Doc Block ends, I think I can't run Fantastic Four until October. This year's theme will be horror films and a couple superhero films, I've fallen back on that before. But that's two months down the road, assuming I can link there.
Dan Rather carries over from "Martha". He's only in the film for a couple of seconds in a news report, but that counts - I'm just glad that he's there at all, because there was almost no other way to link here - which seems a bit odd because I watched another documentary about comic artists, but those were comic STRIP artists, not comic BOOK artists. I guess maybe those two camps don't talk to each other?
But wait, you say, Gary Panter is interviewed here, and he was seen in the Pee-Wee Herman doc - so yes, I could have come here from there, but then I wasn't sure I had somewhere to go after that, something with Dan Rather, obviously. But once I started moving things around, the chain started to fall apart, and I'd only JUST gotten these 47 films in the order I wanted them in, something that seemed to almost neatly divide them by category. Moving things around meant that even if I could build the wall back up again with the same bricks, then I'd be jumping from an actor to a musician to a cartoonist, and then to an athlete - that would be chaos. Which isn't to say that I managed to avoid chaos, but it's been chaos in an order that I designed and felt comfortable with, so that won out. The only changes I made along the way were dropping one doc and adding the Barbara Walters doc and the Ms. magazine one, other than that, this has all worked out like I planned it.
THE PLOT: The life and work of the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, Art Spiegelman.
AFTER: Well, we're back on a topic I know pretty well, underground comics. I'm mostly a mainstream Marvel Comics guy ("Fantastic Four" was probably my entry point in 1981) and a bit of DC, just Batman and Superman books, but I used to read the underground stuff in college. I had a roommate who had some of the Freak Brothers comics and also Neat Stuff, so when I met Peter Bagge at S.D. Comic-Con, that was a big deal for me. From there I became aware of R. Crumb and other unsavory types, and tonight I learned that Crumb hung out with both Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman, who's most famous for the graphic novel Maus, also countless illustrated covers for the New Yorker. Yeah, he worked on RAW, too, but I wasn't really a big fan, the book was oversized and I think most of it was over my head.
Spiegelman also worked for Topps trading cards, and co-created both Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, two things that had gross appeal for kids, and probably if he didn't do anything else noteworthy, that might have been enough, it would have paid the bills anyway. But then that same guy wins a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, how is THAT possible? There's just something inherently genius about a serialized comic (later graphic novel collection) about the Holocaust where the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews as mice. (He tried using this as a metaphor for the KKK and Black Americans, then realized he didn't know much about all that, plus a white man writing about racism, not a good look.). He kind of describes the process here that led him to interview his father about surviving the concentration camps, I also think it kind of riffed off of Hitler calling the races he didn't like "vermin". Mice are vermin, so I see what he did there.
Plus, you can draw mice getting exterminated, and it doesn't break the Comics Code, but then you remember what the mice are standing in for, and the point is made in a way that is both elegant and extremely blunt at the same time. Genius. Prize-worthy genius. When we were upstate a few years ago and we developed an affinity for shopping at antique stores (well, we are the right age for it now) in one shop I found a two-volume set of Maus, unopened, still in the shrink-wrap, and I didn't hesitate to buy it. It's somewhere in my basement library, I don't intend to ever open it and read it, but I'm glad it's in the collection, which I really should get around to re-organizing while I'm on summer break. I also should throw out all those old almanacs, they're pretty worthless now that there's no more Yugoslavia or Soviet Union.
I know a couple people interviewed in this film, because I've spent the last ten years working in Artists Alley at the NY Comic-Con, and my ex-boss is friends with Peter Kuper, so I met him a few times and I remember seeing Molly Crabapple rising up through the ranks at indie comic events. My boss was also friends with Jules Feiffer, but I never got to meet him, and he passed away in January of this year. Anyway, it's a who's who of NYC illustrators here, I also remember that every few years there's been a scandal over controversial drawings that Spiegelman has made for the New Yorker covers, and yeah, we all know his wife works for the magazine and that was his "in", but he is also a great graphic artist.
"Maus", of course, is part comic book, part memoir, part history, part autobiography, and tells two intertwined stories, one of the writer/artist interviewing his father about the Holocaust to make a comic book about it, and the other is the artist depicting the Holocaust events in that anthropomorphic animals-as-metaphor fashion. Spiegelman, the writer/artist, depicts himself in the book and details the process of researching the SAME BOOK that you're holding in your hands, so it's very meta, which is all the rage these days, maybe a little less so in the 1980's, but how the hell else could he tell this story without explaining why he's telling the story, and in such a way? Sometimes comic books or cartoons are like dreams, in that the writer plays all the characters, or each character represents a part of his own psyche.
After the release of the first collected edition of Maus (the first six chapters), Spiegelman found himself creatively blocked, so he seeks helps from his psychiatrist, who was also a Holocaust survivor - and the main character of the comic does the same thing in Vol. 2. Spiegelman went to visit Auschwitz to gain some perspective, and so yeah, his character in the book did the same. In all instances, the process of making the thing was reflected in the thing itself, like that's something you're not supposed to do in documentaries, you don't show the casting director calling the famous people to set up interviews, you don't show the research you're doing, you don't show the editor going to the archive footage companies to license the footage of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or John F. Kennedy riding in a car through Dallas. But here it was important for Art to re-connect with his father in order to get the very personal information that he needed, as for years the family wouldn't talk about the details of their ordeal, or how Art's older brother died, stuff like that.
Really, the only other comic that even comes close to this in style was Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" comic, because he wrote about his own life as a comic-book writer and artist, so everything of interest that happened to him ended up in the comic book, like what else was he going to write about, fiction is WAY too hard, but writing about everything you do is a great way to try and make some sense out of your own life, then putting it all in your comic is I guess what people did before there were blogs. Like Art Spiegelman moved from San Francisco back to NYC in 1975, but he didn't tell his father he was back in town until 1977, and we know this because he wrote about that in a comic book.
There's no question about how influential this comic was, the doc depicts a number of illustrators like Chris Ware and Mariane Satrapi, who might never have made the comics they made if Art hadn't shown that not all comic books have to be silly ones made for kids. And yet there was some backlash over Maus, some Holocaust survivors objected to someone making a comic book about their tragedies - they really should read the book, though. And then some school boards in the U.S. started to ban the book because of it's profanity and violence, which, umm, is overlooking the whole point. I suspect that they really just wanted to ban the book because it's a Jewish book, or they're Holocaust deniers - but, you know, you can't just ban books because you don't like them, yet that's where we find ourselves in America sometimes. Books like this are necessary to ensure that nothing like that ever, ever happens again, only it probably did and it probably will again.
The title of this documentary refers to key moments in Spiegelman's life - in addition to being raised by Holocaust survivors, his mother committed suicide when he was 20, and then later in life he was in NYC during 9/11, and then there were those New Yorker covers that reflected other tragedies like the Crown Heights riots, the pandemic (I'm sure) and various racially-charged police shootings. You know, basic NYC stuff, this city is a gold-mine if you're looking for material. I really should check out his book "In the Shadow of No Towers", which is all about 9/11. It mentions how the smoke that was coming from Manhattan smelled just like what might have come from the concentration camps in WWII - at the time I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was right in the path of that ominous cloud. But I have to wonder about Spiegelman's depiction of the Twin Towers collapse, in this doc he relates how he was taking his kids out of their school in lower Manhattan, and they were all walking to safety, away from the WTC, and he said that when he looked back he could see the glowing red girders of the building after the "gray parts" had fallen off. Umm, that's not how I remember seeing it that way, but I watched it collapse very quickly on TV, so I'm not really sure what to make of his eyewitness account.
On the other hand, Spiegelman was one of the first cartoonists to print publicly that starting a war after 9/11 would be a bad idea - I agreed with that at the time but it seemed to be a minority opinion, but I knew deep down that was probably going to happen, no matter what. So maybe I'll try to get a copy of his 9/11 book before the event anniversary this year. Oh, yeah, forgot to mention that his played at DOC NYC festival, which made me add it to my list of must-sees, and I was happy to see it appear as part of PBS's "American Masters" series.
Directed by Molly Bernstein & Philip Dolin
Also starring Art Spiegelman, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Hillary Chute, Molly Crababble, Jerry Craft, Robert Crumb (last seen in "Crumb"), Aline Kominsky-Crumb (ditto), Bill Griffith (ditto), Emil Ferris, Jules Feiffer, Jonathan Freedland, J. Hoberman, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kuper, Francoise Mouly, Gary Panter (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Trina Robbins, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, R. Sikoryak,Dash Spiegelman, Nadja Spiegelman, Chris Ware,
with archive footage of Stanley Crouch, Adolf Eichmann, David Gregory, Harvey Kurtzman, Joan Lunden (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Josef Mengele, Howard Safir, Ali Velshi,
RATING: 6 out of 10 national book awards
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