Maus author Art Spiegelman to collaborate with Palestine writer Joe Sacco on new comic about Gaza
Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, has announced that he will be collaborating with Joe Sacco, creator of the documentary-comic Palestine, in a new project about Gaza.
Spiegelman made the remarks during the premiere of a documentary about his life, Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, in New York.
He said that the new graphic novel will likely be difficult to find a publisher for in the US, given the ongoing wave of censorship on Palestine in western art, but added: “I'll finish this thing or die trying”.
Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, co-editor of the comic magazines Arcade and Raw, and contributing artist for the New Yorker.
He was born to Polish Jews who lived through the German occupation of Poland and were sent to Auschwitz.
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Of 85 of his relatives alive at the beginning of the Second World War, only 13 survived the Holocaust, including his parents.
Spiegelman’s Maus was serialised from 1980-1991, illustrating his interviews with his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
Commonality of human beings
In the comic, he depicts Jewish people as mice and the Germans as cats. He explained that the decision was informed by the way Nazi propaganda propagated an image of Jews as the “vermin of mankind”.
“In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin,” he said in a 2011 interview for The New York Review.
For Spiegelman, these symbols served to ironise such distinctions between Jews and Germans.
He argued in an article for The Comics Journal that the book is about “the commonality of human beings” despite efforts to dehumanise certain groups.
“These metaphors, which are meant to self-destruct in my book - and I think they do self-destruct - still have a residual force that allows them to work as metaphors,” he explained.
Spiegelman is often credited with popularising the use of comic form as a more serious medium, subverting the over-simplification of the image to draw attention to the ways in which people are treated as subhuman on religious, racial or ethnic lines.
Sacco, who Spiegelman will be collaborating with, is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist.
He wrote his seminal graphic novel Palestine after visiting Israel and the occupied territories during the First Intifada in the late 1980s.
Although it was released over 30 years ago, according to Gary Groth, the co-founder of the book’s American publisher, Fantagraphics, demand for the book has soared since the escalation of Israel’s bombardment on the Palestinian enclave after 7 October.
Sacco’s fusion of journalism and the graphic novel form has “become recognised as a great empathetic work of art,” Groth said.
'Turned into hell'
A journalist by training, Sacco began interviewing Palestinians to understand the “structure of occupation and its effect”, compiling the testimony into a work of “graphic journalism.”
In an interview with Haaretz on his new graphic novel, War on Gaza, published in December, Sacco explained that, since he was not able to conduct the same on-the-ground research for this project, he had to “reach back to my satirical roots”.
“Gaza has been turned into a hell, yes, so if my comics reflect that in some small, abstract way - good,” he added.
Referring to the “traditional superhero aesthetic” of villains and heroes, Sacco said: “I seldom think of superheroes or supervillains. I just see sociopaths with a hell of a lot of power at their disposal.”
“America had just invented a Kinder, Gentler Genocide,” one frame from his comic strip read, “The patent is pending.”
The new collaboration between Sacco and Spiegelman will again focus on Gaza, exploring resistance and nationalism.
Sacco is featured in Spiegelman’s biographical documentary, where he praises the veteran comic.
“He’s very good at comics, which are sequential images, but he’s also very good at the one image - it’s like poetry,” he said.
“The single image can be used to elicit emotion or a thought, and it can also be used to really upset people, and sometimes those are the same things.”
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