Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Art Spiegelman, joe sacco

Art Spiegelman Writes To Us About His Comic With Joe Sacco On Gaza

Art Spiegelman writes to Bleeding Cool to clarify a very important detail about his upcoming comic with Joe Sacco on Gaza

A few days ago, Bleeding Cool reported that after the premiere of the documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, the author of Maus, Art Spiegelman announced that his next project would be a collaboration with Joe Sacco and focused on Gaza. That it will be hard to find a publisher in the USA but, "I'll finish this thing or die trying. I've never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head. My superego says, 'You must do this if you're going to live with yourself'," and my id says, 'Who wants the grief being cancelled by everyone on the planet?'"

We're not the only ones who ran this story. The Middle East Eye followed up on our report, and it also appeared on Forward, Hyperallergic, Daily Cartoonist, ScreenRant, and more. But it was Bleeding Cool who Art Spiegelman got in touch with to add a little nuance to what was reported. He told me, "Yeesh! That rumor is based on my response to an audience member at a Q&A after the first screening of the Disaster is My Muse doc in November. When asked about what I was working on now, I explained that I was, at that moment, in the middle of a 3-page comix collaboration with Joe Sacco distilled from a few long phone conversations we had about Gaza. I dunno the exact definition of a graphic novel, but I think they're usually way longer than three pages. I naively didn't realize my comments would be reported on or inflated into describing an epic-length work that I wouldn't be able to finish before the Messiah comes. As it is, those three pages we made took months and will now be submitted by our agents looking for a suitable venue. All the best, a.s."

Thanks Art! Maybe we should call it a graphic pamphlet? All though I do recall something you were quoted on in the New Yorker…

"About seven years ago, I was invited to do a comics page for the op-ed section of the Washington Post. The editor was very excited and told me, 'Great—we've never had a graphic novel before!' I pointed out that it was only a one-page comic, but the editor repeated, 'Right, and we never had a graphic novel before!'" As a result, Spiegelman decided it was time to embrace the term that has come to characterize "an ambitious comic book," whether the narrative is drawn on one page or three hundred. "Since comics is the art of compression, I started looking back on the one-pagers which either in terms of their subject matter or in terms of their resonance had stayed in my brain,"

And for those who asked about Art Spiegelman's attitude to the subject in question, especially working with Joe Sacco, author of Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde, he has certainly spoken out about the Israel/Palestine issue over the years. In 2022, he told The Telegraph, "my feeling is that America shouldn't be subsidising this terrible thing. My sympathy and my charitable giving often goes to Palestinian causes, not because I think the Palestinians are pure but because somehow the text of Maus leads me into having to support them." He also wrote on social media, for a now-deleted cartoon in 2014, "I've spent a lifetime trying to NOT think about Israel—deciding it has nothing more to do with me, a diasporist, than the rest of the World's Bad News on Parade. Israel is like some badly battered child with PTSD who has grown up to batter others." And he told the Tablet in 2013 about a planned cover to a Tony Kushner book, "It was a close-up based on the same famous Life magazine photo that was at the start of the 3-page Maus: Palestinians behind barbed wire wearing Jewish stars. In front of the barbed wire was an Israeli soldier with his gun and also with a Jewish star, and he's also behind the barbed wire and looking mournful as well. And the implications of it are unbearable for a lot of people, it makes their heads explode. Still."

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