The Four Color Media Monitor

A new documentary about cartoonist Art Spiegelman's debuted, titled "Disaster is my Muse", and hints at what a leftist propaganda machine it could be turn up in some politicized reviews. For example, here's Variety's review:

Late in the doc, the artist embraces how timely that work remains as an anti-fascist monument to historical memory in the face of the book-banning Trump administration, whose policies — including the mass deportation of those deemed undesirable — chillingly mimic those in Nazi Germany during World War II. Furthermore, as a Jewish man with a direct connection to the horrors that the Nazi regime inflicted on millions of people, Spiegelman recently collaborated with author Joe Sacco on a three-page comic about the alarming situation in Gaza. Through it all, Spiegelman remains motivated by the realization that there’s no end in sight for the kind of personal and collective trauma that has fueled his work thus far.

So this "documentary" contains hints of a screed against right-wingers and Israelis, and the trade magazine's giving it their full backing? Well, I guess that figures. The part about book banning is peculiar, because during the Biden administration, they stopped celebrating the day dedicated to Dr. Seuss and his classic rhyme-emphasizing children's books, and the Seuss estate ceased reprints of 4-5 books of Theodore Geisel's, all because they allegedly contain racially insulting artwork. Why, Spiegelman was once interviewed by the BBC 2 years before the woke embarrassment took place, and chances are he knew what happened, but apparently, he has nothing to say about childhood favorite books falling victim to cancel culture. If Spiegelman's never said anything about that, it proves his complaints about banning books are not genuine or altruistic, and suggests he's little more than a selfish man with no clear motivation. So what do they mean by trauma anyway? He's obscured the victims of October 7, 2023, and even the victims of September 11, 2001 with the way he's going about things.

Then, in a review at the site dedicated to the late Roger Ebert, they say:

As he presents himself publicly, Spiegelman, who is now 76 years old, the artist is voluble if not quite avuncular. His life work (for better or worse as far as he’s concerned, as we learn) was the incredible graphic novel—although calling it a “novel” is inaccurate, and when these books hit The New York Times Best Seller Lists, Spiegelman insisted on their being categorized, accurately, as non-fiction, and the Times complied—Maus, an autobiographical two-part work about Spiegelman coming to grips with not just his own past but that of his father, a Holocaust survivor. The Shoah, of course, is also central to the story of Spiegelman’s mother. Maus pulls these threads together with unstinting frankness, remarkable craft and artfulness, and, occasionally, very mordant humor. The work gained huge popularity, and earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and then dogged him; he couldn’t get out from under it. In an apt demonstration of the subtitle of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse,” it was 9/11—an event he and his daughter were such close eyewitnesses to that they were nearly wiped out by it—that gave him a new subject and yielded In The Shadow Of No Towers.

[...] The movie ends on a bleak note, with Spiegelman observing the first Trump administration and bemoaning a new wave of fascism. “We’ve gone from ‘never again’ to ‘never again and again and again,’” he says. One can’t imagine that he’s too thrilled by current events. But one is confident that he’ll produce some work that’s appropriate to the present moment.

So here, it's indicated there's allusions to the very same screed he and Sacco drew for the UK Guardian, and his ignorance on the issue of Islam is chilling. Does Spiegelman know many Gazans celebrated September 11, 2001, and does it occur to him how bad it is to exonerate a community that upholds one of the worst acts of violence against the USA as much as against Israel? And on the subject of his GN, "In the Shadow of No Towers", this would-be review says:

The book is not only a personal memoir of his experience of being in New York City during the attack, but it is also a strong social criticism on the US government’s actions following the attacks. He accuses the Bush administration as using the tragedy as a way to justify their agenda.

Now Bush did some bad things during his administration. He practically led to Israel under Ariel Sharon withdrawing from Gaza, and enabling October 7, 2023 years later, and even excused Islam's role in 911 by claiming it was "hijacked". Yet that doesn't constitute the beef men like Spiegelman have against Bush in any way, so what's Spiegelman's point here? Does that mean he thinks Islamofascism is worthy of exceptions, and that it's okay for the Taliban to run a totalitarian regime that subjugates women? What's offensive about Spiegelman's reaction to the USA government at the time is that he's upholding a position that implies they shouldn't avenge the murder of nearly 3000 people by bringing down the caliphates that backed the terrorists who committed the heinous crimes in 2001, even though in the end, the justice mission was selective, and let Iran off the hook at the time, while not taking any proper steps to punish Saudi Arabia for any role they had in the tragedy. And I guess Spiegelman never met with, befriended or interviewed any 911 survivor organizations like 911 Families for a Safe and Strong America. That too is telling of what's wrong with ideologues like Spiegelman.

The Daily Cartoonist provides further clues where this "documentary" is going:

The titular phrase, disaster is my muse, reflects a recurring theme in Art’s work. His mother’s suicide led to Prisoner on the Hell Planet, a four-page comic that introduced Maus several years before he began the longer-form work. His strained relationship with his father shaped the two volumes of Maus. The overwhelming attention from Maus’s success, which made him want to fade into the background, came the opportunity to create New Yorker covers – some of which became controversial. The US media’s tilt to the right after 9/11 led to him creating In the Shadow of No Towers that ran in Germany because no major US publisher wanted to touch it. The election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of illiberalism renewed interest in Maus once again and Art becoming an alarming voice against a nascent fascism in the US.

Well I will say that, if right-wingers really did lead to Maus getting banned in Tennessee classrooms, of course that was wrong - and provided leftists lacking in altruism with ammunition to exploit - but to completely absolve left-wingers of any wrongdoing on their part is reprehensible, and that Spiegelman clearly is letting Islamofascism off the hook is chilling. And that goes without saying. Some "auteur" he really is, and I can't buy Maus if that's how he's going to behave.

Here's also the Forward's review:

That Maus was a game changer, the first ever comic to win a Pulitzer and a foundational work in graphic memoir, is something that Spiegelman has spent decades grappling with. Even today, when he draws himself, as he did recently for a piece about Gaza in The New York Review of Books, it is in his vested, mousy persona, a cigarette still dangling from his mouth, though in real life he appears to have switched to a vape pen.

Spiegelman’s 9/11 cartoons, which the Forward serialized, captured a premature-for-many skepticism of the U.S. response. [...]

Would any skepticism be voiced if a left-wing government were in charge at the time? Again, nothing's clear in all this embarrassment.

Receiving a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards, Spiegelman stated that he promised himself to never become a Holocaust memoirist first and foremost — “the Elie Wiesel of comics” — but as comics scholar Hillary Chute notes, in the age of Trump he realized Maus was “a text for people explicitly reacting to and fighting fascism,” both in content and aesthetics. (In 2019, Spiegelman withdrew his introduction to a Marvel comics compendium after editors insisted he delete a comparison between Trump and the supervillain Red Skull.)

Ahem. Considering how bad some of the left's attacks on Trump at the time were, it was miraculous that Marvel editorial didn't want political screeds injected at the time, though if Axel Alonso were still EIC back then, they probably would've gone ahead full force. That said, Marvel unfortunately still enables bad left-wing politics into their comics in some way or other even now, and it's a very bad influence that does a terrible disfavor to Stan Lee's legacy, along with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's. Furthermore, if right-wingers are what Spiegelman cares about, then it's all he's going to care about. His attempt to attack Trump in the Marvel compendium was cheap and uncalled for, and he trashed a big chance to show he could take on more challenging issues. Regrettably, that's not what leftists like Spiegelman are in the business for.

When a Tennessee school district banned Maus in 2022, the urgency of the work became even clearer.

“I never thought I would live to see something where America, which saved my parents after the war, and gave them a new start in life, could be tilted toward a new kind of fascism,” Spiegelman said in a Zoom talk shown late in the film. In the banning — which extended beyond Maus to graphic novels about LGBTQ issues, racism and an illustrated diary of Anne Frank — Spiegelman recognized a new form of Nazi book burning.

“It’s like destroying memory yet again,” Spiegelman argued.

Depending how one sees this, it's weird he literally considers conservatives to blame during a time when a liberal government was in charge, and has no complaints about Joe Biden's management, if at all. And does he believe it's okay to teach children about homosexuality and imply it's an inherently positive example? Sigh. What's more, if he's really worried about book burnings, then was he outraged at what a school in Canada did a few years ago? If he had nothing to say about that, then again, his sincerity is in doubt.

Another problem with the documentary that's disturbing is a certain interviewee/contributor who wasn't clearly mentioned in most other reviews to date, but whose presence is noted by the Hollywood Reporter:

You can spot the virtual timestamp on the documentary from the presence Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who passed away in 2022. More than that, you can glean it from the presence of Neil Gaiman as one of its featured talking heads. Having Gaiman to examine panels from the original incarnation of Maus as a three-page strip in a magazine called Funny Aminals [sic] must have seemed like a big “get” at the time, but with the author currently out of the spotlight after accusations of sexual assault, it’s a needless distraction.

Well, this is certainly telling of what irresponsibility additionally dogs this documentary. Considering the news about Gaiman's scandal originally came out last July, the producers of Disaster is My Muse would've had some time to edit Gaiman out of the interviews if they wanted to, yet even though several companies cut ties with Gaiman afterwards, his moments in Spiegelman's documentary still remain? This also reminds me that Gaiman was a contributor to Frank Miller's recent documentary, "American Genius", and one can only wonder what even Miller thinks now. Because Gaiman can be just as much a distraction there too after what was discovered.

Man, Spiegelman sure knows how to prove himself somebody who's obsessed for all the wrong reasons, not to mention a defeatist. As a result, he's rendering whatever vital messages Maus had almost meaningless. I do like to watch documentaries, but this is one that's certainly not worth the price of admission, and does no favors for the comics world.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, golden calf of LGBT, history, indie publishers, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, terrorism, violence