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Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus is a landmark
in reckoning with the Holocaust and breakthrough in serious comic art
-- but his full achievements are more remarkable and eclectic. ART
SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE tracks his beginnings in the 1960s as
co-creator of the Wacky Packages trading cards; his co-founding of the
underground comics magazines Arcade (with Bill Griffith) and Raw (with
wife Françoise Mouly); In the Shadow of No Towers, his reaction to 9/11,
inspired by witnessing the attacks from his home in lower Manhattan;
his controversial covers for The New Yorker (1993-2003) that prompted
the NYPD to picket the magazine's office; and his public response to
Maus's recent ban by a Tennessee school board. Spiegelman proves an
eloquent guide through his provocative work, along with contemporaries
(Robert Crumb, Gary Panter) and younger cartoonists (Joe Sacco, Jerry
Craft, Molly Crabapple) inspired by Spiegelman's unflinching
confrontation of personally traumatic themes.
A captivating and well-edited documentary biopic. - Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru