Eye Magazine

Art Spiegelman is the comic book artist who drew Maus, the acclaimed graphic novel famous for its fascist cats and persecuted mice. No stranger to inherited grief, personal trauma, historic tragedy and looming tyranny, he has spent his life playing his own tense game of cat-and-mouse.

Disaster courts, taunts and threatens to undo him. Yet his creative practice dodges and outwits disaster to pull him – and perhaps the rest of us – back from the brink. In this biographical documentary, artist / writer, Molly Crabapple (Brothers of the Gun), is one of the many artists who pay tribute to Spiegelman. She describes him as the ‘guy who … showed that comics could express the darkest, most tragic, most complicated, most true things about history, about our relationships and about our family.’

Maus appeared in the mid-1980s, depicting events of 40-plus years earlier; Maus II followed in 1991. In the Shadow of No Towers, about the local, personal aftermath of 9/11, was published in 2004, the interactive MetaMaus in 2011. All his stories recall a past imperfect, represent a past continuous, and warn of a future conditional. We need Spiegelman’s take these days. If the good guys don’t prevail, how do we de-claw the cats?

Disaster Is My Muse sets out what it means to show complex truths with wit and compassion, while others, with neither, tell lies. While we doomscroll, Spiegelman is still the poster boy for consequential drawing, and he reminds us that enduring printed matter still matters …

Rachel Abrams, strategic designer, artist, writer, London and New York

Read the full version in Eye no. 108 vol. 27, 2025