Art Spiegelman talks to Tablet Magazine’s literary editor David Samuels about the retrospective currently at the Jewish Museum in New York, Mad magazine, and, inevitably, Maus.
While not exactly critical of Spiegelman, it’s one of the feistier interviews I’ve read with him recently:
Now, if you’re talking about nationalism, then you have to get to Duck Soup within a couple of seconds. And that impulse predates WWII, and it’s an outsider’s perspective on a culture, and there are still plenty of outsiders to this culture, and things will come from that still, I believe. That’s one point.
The other point, which is more to the point perhaps, is the impulse—I see it through Mad, because it’s the one that’s imprinted on me. Mad made the resistance to the Vietnam War even possible. And that seems really, deeply true, not just some kind of wise-crack true. Because the ’50s felt incredibly monolithic. The early ’50s was an incredibly oppressive place in America, very iconically represented by a decent-enough liberal chap named Norman Rockwell. It’s when we got this ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, it’s when we had our crazy McCarthy moments, we had all of these things happening, and yet there was room for a very effective antibody, which was this kind of self-reflexive, self-deprecating, angry response to the homogeneity from people who weren’t thoroughly homogenized in our culture, i.e., Jews. It led to something very fruitful, and we still have the aftermath of it, both positively and negatively.