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‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: ‘Maus’ Cartoonist Grapples with the Weight of His Most Seminal Work
Through interviews with the artist and those closest to him, Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin chronicle Spiegelman’s career in standard doc portrait.
Constructed from talking-head conversations with Spiegelman and his friends and family, the standard biographical piece doubles as a history of how the medium transitioned from being perceived largely as a vehicle for humor into one suitable for stories of all tones and magnitudes — a shift in which “Maus” played an important role. As he narrates each cumulative step that led him to a successful professional life, pivotal players are brought into the fold, including underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and Spiegelman’s talented wife Françoise Mouly, an editor at the New Yorker. 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.
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