‘When parents give Maus…to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse. I wanna protect my kids!’ Who do you imagine this quote is from? Some plaid-clad member of the moral majority at a town hall meeting in Tennessee – where the local board of education in McMinn County recently caused an outcry by removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust from the eighth-grade curriculum? Nope. It’s a quote from, well, Art Spiegelman – in a 1997 comic he drew depicting a conversation he had with Maurice Sendak.
This week he took a rather different view. Interviewed by CNN, he said that in contemplating the school board ruling he had ‘moved past total bafflement to trying to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis… maybe?’
I quote that line from his earlier comic not as a gotcha, or to try to paint Spiegelman as a hypocrite. I think he’s a stone-cold genius and interviewing him has been one of the privileges of my career.
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