Art Spiegelman #3: A Controversial New Yorker Cover and Holocaust Denying Cartoons

February 24th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

In case you missed them, here are posts #1 and #2. This time, Spiegelman talks about a provocative New Yorker cover and about cartoons that deny the Holocaust. (The picture is courtesy of Bruce Guthrie. See his site.)

Spiegelman’s Valentine’s Day, 1993, particularly provocative New Yorker cover showed a Hassidic Jew (”who looks like he got lost from a Chagall painting”) kissing an African-American woman in the wake of the “blows and bloodshed” of the Crown Heights Riot. Spiegelman received a lot of criticism for the cover, from critics referring to the Hassid’s “lascisious lips” (”I realized the problem was the Jew had lips at all!”) to others calling him a racist for showing a white man kissing a black woman rather than the alternative. “What exploiting?” he asked. “They’re kissing each other.” To the critic who demanded on the radio that Spiegelman show a black man kissing a Jewish woman, he replied, “You might be a good reverend, but you are not a good art director. No one would know what I was saying with a woman with a kerchief on her head.”

Spiegelman than addressed propaganda in the media, comparing the “demonization” used by the Nazis, at least aesthetically with that used by the Americans in Hiroshima. Of documentation the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Spiegelman said, “It is not easy to find unless you had internet skills.”

He then showed his drawings of the prophet Muhammad (a blank sheet of paper), and expressed his disappointment that the notorious Danish Muhammad cartoons only appeared on the internet, not in the “genteel press.” Spiegelman showed a piece for Harper’s where he rated the cartoons not on a scale of one to five stars, but fatwa bombs. He also drew some entries for the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest, which he submitted to the New Yorker. One showed a man in a restaurant (pressumably a Jew) declining the waiter’s offer of Palestinian blood. “Bad for cholesterol,” he says. The second plays off large Jewish noses, and not depicting the profit. The third showed the final solution to Iran’s anti-Semitic cartoon contest: a Jew standing in line in a concentration camp laughing. A bubble indicates that he does not believe the Holocaust is occuring.

“It’s just lines on paper,” says Spiegelman. But coming from the cartoonist who has been championed as The Holocaust historian-artist, one wonders whether the MAUS cartoons should be taken seriously if the same artist could draw cartoons that deny the Holocaust and shrug it all off saying it’s just lines on a paper.

Spiegelman then moved back to comic book history, to Goethe — “Goethe was the Oprah Winfrey of his day. If he knew about it, everyone else had to also” — and the split image cartoon. He addressed Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz (”it’s German humor,” he said of a cartoon that showed the children fed to the geese), and the Yellow Kid and the birth of Sunday funnies, when color printing presses were too expensive for printing anything but cartoons. He moved on to Little Nemo in slumberland (where other characters lived in the slums, Nemo resided in the suburbs). And then Krazy Kat, which “even intellectuals agreed was great.” Dick Tracy boasted “magic blacks” (like the Sopranos, Spiegelman said), while “Peanuts always ended with a sigh.” In fact, Spiegelman called Peanuts the “last great one,” which “I felt was profound and important” until he got older. “I began to associate it with Republican girls, and I lost interest,” he said. [Lights cigarette #4]

But try as he might, Spiegelman was often misunderstood. One girl wrote to him of his Crown Heights riot cover commending him for drawing Lincoln kissing an African American girl on Lincoln’s birthday.

Spiegelman then moved to comic books, which replaced strips and often reprinted strips, until most had been reprinted and publishers had to find a way to generate original content while still paying the same minimal fee that a reprint would command. This gave birth to new superheroes, including Superman, “the circumcised ubermensch from outer space,” created by two Jewish boys.

In the next installation, Spiegelman lights his fifth cigarette and talks of the Captain America cover where the captain battles Nazis and so-called graphic novels, “a genre which has been mistaken for a medium.”

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