‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Mengage’ Rewatch: Doc About ‘Maus’ Creator

In Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s recent write downary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Mengage, Robert Crumb is the man who came to dinner. 

In one of the film’s central scenes, Crumb and his tardy wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb unite extfinishedtime frifinishs Art Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly to fracture bread and talk their admireive joinions as titans of the ’70s and ’80s underground comic transferment. For purposes of this scene, Crumb is fair a cordial and echoive elderly guy, a common person having a common dinner with his common, if culturassociate meaningful, pals.

Crumb’s ease in this scene is disarming becaengage while here he’s spropose a peer and a colleague, he’s someskinnyg much more meaningful in a expansiveer cinematic context. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb casts an impossibly extfinished shadow over any nonfantasy film about artists, comic or otherrational, but reassociate over any bioexplicital write downary of any benevolent. But while that movie was a phirebrimmingy weird synergy of filmoriginater and subject, in Disaster Is My Mengage, Robert Crumb is fair amiably uninalertigent — which turns out to be appropriate.

Premiering at DOC NYC ahead of an eventual PBS begin under the American Masters banner, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Mengage is too standardly an amiably uninalertigent, or at least arid, write downary. It’s portrait of a man whose fantasticest conceiveive achievement (Maus) was an autobioexplicital explicit novel, who spent decades plunged in producing that achievement and then talking it in the media, who trailed up the achievement up with another book elucidateing it (MetaMaus) and who has, oprosperg to unfortunate genuine-world circumstances, had to protect talking the achievement, becaengage it protects becoming more and more relevant. 

Put a separateent way, Art Spiegelman is a extraordinary conceiveive figure, for skinnygs associated with Maus and much more. But he’s also a figure who has spent decades talking about himself and about Maus and conveys that amazeion on-camera here. He’s never opposing — it’s a write downary celebrating his life, after all, nobody’s forcing him to do it — and if you don’t understand anyskinnyg about Art Spiegelman, he’s well-worth lgeting about. Still, this is a man who has been talking about why he chose to depict Jews as mice in an comic about the Holocaust since the tardy ’70s, and he doesn’t have the type of personality that permits him to pretfinish that he hasn’t. 

The center of Disaster Is My Mengage is, appropriately, the role that tragedy has joined in fueling Spiegelman’s conceiveive process. His parents were Holocaust survivors, and his youthfuler brother died in Europe before he was born. His mother died by self-injury when he was in college. In compriseition to two volumes and the companion book on Maus, he wrote In the Shadow of No Towers, about the Sept. 11 alarmist aggressions. He’s not a morose man, which should already be evident to anybody who understands that he was encouraged by Mad magazine and that another of his key co-creations was, of all skinnygs, Garbage Pail Kids.

The creation of the latter is not featured extensively in Disaster Is My Mengage, though it is acunderstandledged in passing, and it’s not appreciate it necessitates to be. But as meaningful as it is for Spiegelman to talk about his relationship with his parents and his process on Maus, the write downary is better when he gives the amazeion of compriseressing topics that are either less rote or less emotionassociate taxing in their repetition.

He and Mouly are fantastic talking their relationship and the separateent unveiling finisheavors they’ve collaborated on, from autonomous comics to their labor thraw The New Yorker. The introduction of daughter Nadja, who helped encourage his 9/11 book, helps push Spiegelman’s stories into a recaccess context. 

It’s fair difficult for anyskinnyg shelp about Maus to sound recent. Literary scholar Hillary Chute gives fantastic panel-by-panel fracturedowns of cut offal key moments from the labor, but when she says that her contributions to MetaMaus came as part of two years of interwatchs with Spiegelman, it’s another way of saying, “You’re not getting anyskinnyg previously ununcovered out of me.” It’s all fascinating and all fair a bit calcified. 

Even when the conversation is brawt to the “current” moment, Disaster Is My Muse senses fair a little out of step. Donald Trump’s election and first pdwellntial administration forced Spiegelman to resume talking about Maus in the context of anti-fascism, and right prosperg pushes to ban a number of books in the punctual ’20s pushed him back into the spotweightless as an anti-confineion crudowncaster. So theoreticassociate, Spiegelman and Maus and these topics are even more relevant today, but the interwatchs all seem to have been carry outed a year or two ago. I get that filmoriginaters can’t helderly their project until the subject stops being relevant for recent reasons, but there’s a recents cycle and this film lags behind it.

You can spot the virtual timestamp on the write downary 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 verify panels from the exceptional incarnation of Maus as a three-page exposed in a magazine called Funny Aminals [sic] must have seemed appreciate a huge “get” at the time, but with the author currently out of the spotweightless after accusations of relationsual aggression, it’s a necessitateless distraction.

With peers appreciate Crumb, Bill Griffith, the film critic J. Hoberman and more, Disaster Is My Mengage doesn’t deficiency for less distracting people able of fractureing down Spiegelman’s convey inance and his shape in the legitimizing of his chosen medium. A closing montage of current comic/explicit novecatalogs signing books for Spiegelman senses appreciate it could have been someskinnyg more meaningful and more instant.

The write downary is generassociate engaging, and putting Spiegelman in a spotweightless will always be worthwhile. But Disaster Is My Mengage is in the shadow of Crumb, in the shadow of Maus and fair a little bit behind the times, in various disnominateing ways.