At many points in his life Art Spiegelman has tried to escape his family’s past—and who can blame him? His parents were survivors of Auschwitz, and vast swaths of his extended family had been murdered in the Shoah. The ghosts of this horror have always hovered nearby. Spiegelman, born in Sweden in 1948, was an only child since his older brother perished in 1943. Spiegelman grew up in Rego Park, in Queens, New York, but the genocide was never far away. He could see it on the numbers tattooed on his parent’s arms, as well as the arms of their friends. He could hear it in the stories his parents and their circle of intimates told and the offhand allusions they made. The burden of pain proved too much for his mother, Anja Spiegelman, who committed suicide in 1968. After Anja’s suicide, Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, Vladek, always fraught, became even more tense.

Spiegelman’s childhood embrace of comic books and cartooning was surely motivated in part by the fact that this popular art form offered a bright four-color alternative to the European gloom of his home (only later did he learn that some of his favorite American cartoonists shared his Yiddishkeit roots). Part of the magic of comic books was that they were an art form kids could purchase and enjoy separate from the adult world. Comics were Spiegelman’s path to Americanization. He claims that he learned to read from Batman, politics from Pogo, economics from Uncle Scrooge, sexual dynamics from Archie comics, skepticism toward authority from Mad, feminism from Little Lulu, and philosophy from Peanuts.

The drama of Spiegelman’s life, of course, was his discovery that the two radically separate parts of his childhood (the Holocaust memories of his parents, his own love of comic books) could be fused together. Spiegelman would eventually tell his parents’ story (translated into the anthropomorphic visual language of cats and mice) in his graphic memoir Maus (released in two volumes in 1986 and 1991), a groundbreaking work that was crucial to the evolution of comics into a mature art form. The story of the cartoonist and his masterpiece is the subject of a thoughtful and sensitive new documentary, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin. The film is currently playing at Film Forum in New York.

For those who have followed Spiegelman’s work for years, the documentary is particularly gratifying because it accurately traces the milieu and influences that shaped the artist. Spiegelman has always been a collaborative and communal artist, and the film deftly tells his story through interviews with the many artists who have influenced him or been shaped by his work.

Men who have a hard time talking to their fathers are often quick to find older male mentors. Spiegelman’s first important father figure was Woody Gelman, a former cartoonist who was art director at Topps Chewing Gum Company. Gelman was steeped in the comics past and introduced the young Spiegelman to the wonders of early-20th-century cartooning, the vertiginous dreamscapes of Winsor McCay (creator of Little Nemo) and George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat). Gelman would also be a source for the freelance work designing satirical bubble-gum cards (most notoriously the Garbage Pail Kids) that would be Spiegelman’s main source of income until he achieved fame in the 1980s.

As an undergraduate at Harpur College (a part of SUNY Binghamton), Spiegelman met his other substitute dad, the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who introduced the aspiring cartoonist to the world of experimental movies. One early insight that Jacobs inspired was that the same techniques used by experimental filmmakers and painters—radical juxtaposition, visual layering, formalist play, estrangement of expectations—could be applied to comics.

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At the same time, Spiegelman was investigating the burgeoning scene of underground comics, created by cartoonists his age who used the freedom of the counterculture press to do work that was politically and visually radical. This was most notable in the work of Robert Crumb, who perfectly distilled the bouncy urban jauntiness of early-20th-century cartoonists such as Rube Goldberg (famous for his impossible contraptions) and Bill Holman (Smokey Stover) but deployed that style to satirize the sex-and-drugs world of the hippies.

Radicalized and psychedelicized by the late 1960s, Spiegelman abandoned his studies to join Crumb and other underground cartoonists who formed a small community in San Francisco. Transgression was the stock in trade of underground comics, but Spiegelman had little taste or talent for the scatological and sexual excess that suffused the work of cartoonists such as Crumb and S. Clay Wilson.

Spiegelman didn’t need the overt shock imagery of the other underground cartoonists, since he had high-voltage material closer to home: his family’s history and the unprocessed trauma that continued to ripple through their lives. Spiegelman’s forays into personal history were sparked by the example of another underground cartoonist, Justin Green, who showed the rich potential of autobiographical comics in his agitated masterpiece Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), a fidgety and candid confession about the dangers of mixing religious indoctrination with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Made bold by the example of Green’s courage, Spiegelman told the story of his parents in two early works, “Maus” (1972, a three-page story about his father) and “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” (1973, a four page story, done in woodcut style, about his mother’s suicide).

It’s unlikely that Spiegelman would ever have expanded these brief early works into the two full-length volumes of Maus if he had never met his most important collaborator, Françoise Mouly, an architecture student from France who was visiting the United States in 1974. In New York, Mouly saw “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and fell in love with Spiegelman as an artist. After calling him up, they met and became first friends and then lovers. They married in 1977.

Mouly had instinctive gifts as a book designer and editor, as well as grounding in the sophistication of European print culture. She pushed Spiegelman’s formalist tendencies in a more ambitious direction, with greater attention to how comics could be presented in innovative formats that made a fuller use of print technology. Together, they started the important magazine RAW (which ran from 1980 to 1991), a lavish, exquisitely curated haven for cerebral, go-for-broke comics. A host of pioneering artists—ranging from Lynda Barry to Charles Burns to Chris Ware—found a nurturing home. RAW was also where the early chapters of Maus were serialized.

One of the most heartrending scenes in Maus shows Spiegelman talking to Vladek about diaries that Anja had kept. She had intended for her son to read them some day. But after her suicide, Vladek in his grief destroyed the diaries. Enraged by learning about this destruction, Spiegelman lashes out at his father as a “murderer.”

If you hold a volume of Maus in your hands, it has the shape and feel of a diary filled with private doodlings and homey lettering. The materials Spiegelman used for the book are everyday stationery: a fountain pen, legal paper, and whiteout. Mouly praises Spiegelman’s art for being “so intimate on paper.” Spiegelman talks about “the intimacy comics are capable of.”

That quality of “intimacy” is inextricable from the book’s crafty simulation of the diary form. The paradox of Maus is that it is built on Vladek’s memories and Spiegelman’s research to create a substitute for the diaries Anja created and Vladek destroyed.

Maus opens with a two-page childhood vignette of Rego Park from 1958. The 10-year-old Spiegelman injures himself roller-skating and complains to his father that his friends left him behind. Vladek, with his characteristic gruffness, responded, “Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends!” Here is the book in miniature: the American childhood, the abrupt and unassimilable horror stories from the past, and the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between father and son. But the book itself becomes the bridge between these divides.

The first volume of Maus, subtitled My Father Bleeds History, was a much-acclaimed bestseller when it was published in 1986. But this was a mixed blessing. In the documentary, Mouly reflects, “Some things were happy accidents, like the publication of the first book as a book. And then the extraordinary feedback that it got early on, which was the right thing at the right time, and the despair that threw him in.”

Spiegelman adds, “The success of Maus was a setback. Literally I was set back into a couch staring into a stain for months on end.” Mouly helped Spiegelman find a psychotherapist, Paul Pavel, himself a survivor of Auschwitz.

In the documentary, there is remarkable footage of Spiegelman researching Maus by going to Auschwitz and then talking to Pavel about the experience. Spiegelman told the psychologist, “We went to the ruins of the barracks my mother had been in and also to the site of the crematorium gas chambers. It’s an incredible dark thing to have to delve into day in, day out. There seems to be something insane about achieving some kind of celebrity for working in that area.”

All of us have to grapple with our failures; Spiegelman has had the strange and bittersweet experience of grappling with his success. To create a work as monumental and influential as Maus is itself a burden. Aside from the discomfort at winning fame from his parents’ suffering, Spiegelman has had to deal with the expectations that come from being a famous artist. In Spiegelman’s case, he’s tried to resist the unwelcome role of becoming “the Elie Wiesel of comics.”

But the heaviest burden is that of memory. At one point, Spiegelman enthuses that comics “were time turned into space, a perfect container for memory.” The comics scholar Hillary Chute, who teaches at Northeastern University and provides consistently intelligent commentary in the documentary, picks up on that idea. Chute says, “I think he had a sense when he was doing Maus that he was going to do it and he was going to bury these memories in panels.” But our memories always live on in us, especially if they are given such memorable shape as they are in Maus.

What finally brought Spiegelman some peace as the creator of Maus and the container of his parent’s memory was, strangely enough, Donald Trump. With the rise of what Spiegelman sees as a new fascist threat, Maus clearly holds lessons not just about the past but also our present. Like many of us, Spiegelman has learned Faulkner’s great lesson: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” One could add that fascism is never dead, nor even past, and continues to be an enemy to fight.

In 2022, Maus was banned by a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee. This threw Spiegelman into the thick of battles against the new wave of censorship aimed not just against his work but also other works, particularly graphic novels, that challenge racism and gender conservatism. With the resurgence of the authoritarian right, the meaning of Maus has changed: It’s not just an account of history but now also a warning about a possible future.

The title of the documentary gets to the heart of the matter. Disaster has always been Spiegelman’s best muse. Post-Maus, his most important work was In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a memoir of his family’s experiences during and after the 9/11 terrorist attack as well as America’s subsequent descent into militaristic madness. Another world event, the Hamas attack of October 7 and the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, is the source of Spiegelman’s latest project, a series of reflections on the conflict done in collaboration with Joe Sacco (known for his graphic reportage in works such as Palestine and Footnotes to Gaza).

What makes Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse such an effective and exceptionally intelligent documentary is that it deftly links together all the strands of Spiegelman’s life. Through the documentary, the shape of his life shines bright: Spiegelman’s attempt to escape his past and bury his memories leading him to build works that prove that it is only by grappling with the traumas of history that we can open up a path to the future.