Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winner behind ‘Maus,’ plans graphic novel about Gaza
‘I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head,’ the author said of the project
Art Spiegelman, author of “Maus,” poses in Paris, March 20, 2012. (Bertrand Langlois/AFP via Getty Images)
By Benyamin Cohen December 30, 2024
Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel about the Holocaust won the Pulitzer Prize, now plans to write one about the war in Gaza — though he knows it will inevitably be controversial.
“I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head,” Spiegelman, who is 76, said at a documentary film festival last month, according to Hyperallergic, a news site focussed on the art world. “My superego says, ‘You must do this if you’re going to live with yourself,’ and my id says, ‘Who wants the grief [of] being canceled by everyone on the planet?’”
Spiegelman made the remarks after the premiere of Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, a film about his career. He offered scant details about the Gaza book, beyond that he plans to collaborate on with Joe Sacco, a fellow graphic novelist who has previously written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I’ll finish this thing or die trying,” he said at the film festival, DOC NYC.
Spiegelman is no stranger to controversial subjects. His work — in books and in the pages of The New Yorker — has tackled 9/11 and police brutality as well as the Holocaust.
His most famous work is Maus, which depicts Jews as mice and Germans as cats as Spiegelman recounts the experience of his father, a Polish Jew, in a concentration camp. It is the only graphic novel ever to be awarded a Pulitzer — a special citation, in 1992. The book has been translated into dozens of languages and is the way millions of young people first encounter the horrors of the Holocaust.
In recent years, some conservative groups have worked to ban Maus from public schools, citing the book’s inclusion of eight “swear words” and a drawing of a naked mouse. Spiegelman called the efforts “a real warning sign of a country that’s yearning for a return of authoritarianism” in a 2023 article in The Washington Post.
Spiegelman’s work on Gaza — if and when it is published — would join a string of books about the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the ensuing war. They include two books by Haaretz journalists: Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza, a first-person account of the massacre and, more broadly, the failings of the Netanyahu government; and Lee Yaron’s 10/7: 100 Human Stories, a collection of intimate profiles of hostages and some who died that day.
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