‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: Doc About ‘Maus’ Creator

In Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s new documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, Robert Crumb is the man who came to dinner. 

In one of the film’s central scenes, Crumb and his late wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb join longtime friends Art Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly to break bread and discuss their respective connections as titans of the ’70s and ’80s underground comic movement. For purposes of this scene, Crumb is just a friendly and reflective old guy, a normal person having a normal dinner with his normal, if culturally significant, pals.

Crumb’s ease in this scene is disarming because while here he’s simply a peer and a colleague, he’s something much more significant in a broader cinematic context. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb casts an impossibly long shadow over any nonfiction film about artists, comic or otherwise, but really over any biographical documentary of any kind. But while that movie was a delightfully weird synergy of filmmaker and subject, in Disaster Is My Muse, Robert Crumb is just amiably dull — which turns out to be appropriate.

Premiering at DOC NYC ahead of an eventual PBS launch under the American Masters banner, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse is too often an amiably dull, or at least dry, documentary. It’s portrait of a man whose greatest artistic achievement (Maus) was an autobiographical graphic novel, who spent decades immersed in producing that achievement and then discussing it in the media, who followed up the achievement up with another book explaining it (MetaMaus) and who has, owing to unfortunate real-world circumstances, had to keep discussing the achievement, because it keeps becoming more and more relevant. 

Put a different way, Art Spiegelman is a remarkable artistic figure, for things associated with Maus and much more. But he’s also a figure who has spent decades talking about himself and about Maus and conveys that impression on-camera here. He’s never hostile — it’s a documentary celebrating his life, after all, nobody’s forcing him to do it — and if you don’t know anything about Art Spiegelman, he’s well-worth learning about. Still, this is a man who has been talking about why he chose to depict Jews as mice in an comic about the Holocaust since the late ’70s, and he doesn’t have the type of personality that allows him to pretend that he hasn’t. 

The focus of Disaster Is My Muse is, appropriately, the role that tragedy has played in fueling Spiegelman’s creative process. His parents were Holocaust survivors, and his younger brother died in Europe before he was born. His mother died by suicide when he was in college. In addition to two volumes and the companion book on Maus, he wrote In the Shadow of No Towers, about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He’s not a morose man, which should already be clear to anybody who knows that he was inspired by Mad magazine and that another of his key co-creations was, of all things, Garbage Pail Kids.

The creation of the latter is not featured extensively in Disaster Is My Muse, though it is acknowledged in passing, and it’s not like it needs to be. But as important as it is for Spiegelman to talk about his relationship with his parents and his process on Maus, the documentary is better when he gives the impression of addressing topics that are either less rote or less emotionally taxing in their repetition.

He and Mouly are great discussing their relationship and the different publishing endeavors they’ve collaborated on, from independent comics to their work through The New Yorker. The introduction of daughter Nadja, who helped inspire his 9/11 book, helps push Spiegelman’s stories into a fresher context. 

It’s just hard for anything said about Maus to sound new. Literary scholar Hillary Chute gives great panel-by-panel breakdowns of several key moments from the work, but when she says that her contributions to MetaMaus came as part of two years of interviews with Spiegelman, it’s another way of saying, “You’re not getting anything previously unrevealed out of me.” It’s all interesting and all just a bit calcified. 

Even when the conversation is brought to the “current” moment, Disaster Is My Muse feels just a little out of step. Donald Trump’s election and first presidential administration forced Spiegelman to resume talking about Maus in the context of anti-fascism, and right wing pushes to ban a number of books in the early ’20s pushed him back into the spotlight as an anti-censorship crusader. So theoretically, Spiegelman and Maus and these topics are even more relevant today, but the interviews all seem to have been conducted a year or two ago. I get that filmmakers can’t hold their project until the subject stops being relevant for new reasons, but there’s a news cycle and this film lags behind it.

You can spot the virtual timestamp on the documentary from the presence Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who passed away in 2022. More than that, you can glean it from the presence of Neil Gaiman as one of its featured talking heads. Having Gaiman to examine panels from the original incarnation of Maus as a three-page strip in a magazine called Funny Aminals [sic] must have seemed like a big “get” at the time, but with the author currently out of the spotlight after accusations of sexual assault, it’s a needless distraction.

With peers like Crumb, Bill Griffith, the film critic J. Hoberman and more, Disaster Is My Muse doesn’t lack for less distracting people capable of breaking down Spiegelman’s importance and his influence in the legitimizing of his chosen medium. A closing montage of current comic/graphic novelists signing books for Spiegelman feels like it could have been something more significant and more immediate.

The documentary is generally engaging, and putting Spiegelman in a spotlight will always be worthwhile. But Disaster Is My Muse is in the shadow of Crumb, in the shadow of Maus and just a little bit behind the times, in various disappointing ways.