GIVEAWAY
Banning books never works. It ignites interest in the forbidden
—Art Spiegelman, El País article, February 15, 2022
Comic book lovers,
I’ll start with Alfred E. Neuman,
we have that in common. I reveled
in the pages of Mad Magazine in my
growing up years, its irreverence, its
nose-thumbing at society’s norms, thank
goodness for Mad it led us in other
directions. We’re also human beings,
for some that’s not a given. In fact
his birthday just came and went,
Itzhak Avraham ben Zev, a few years
younger than me, better known
as Art Spiegelman creator of Maus,
the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer.
He took his lessons from Mad and
went into bubblegum, trading cards
that is. Another connection between us,
before he drew them, as a kid I bought
them, had quite a collection. He went
on to the big time of course, did covers and
strips for The New Yorker, including the black
on black for 9/11, he made sure French
satire magazine Charlie Hebdo
got their "freedom of expression
courage award" from PEN America.
He’s Jewish, me too, something else
we share, but his parents were in Auschwitz,
not mine, who made it to their 90’s, died of
natural causes. During the Holocaust
Spiegelman’s aunt poisoned herself and
his older brother he never knew so the Nazis
could not take them to the camps. Seventy-two
Spiegelman family members died in those camps,
thirteen survived. You know a county board of education
in Tennessee removed Maus from its eighth-grade
language arts curriculum, one member saying,
“...we don’t need all the nakedness and all the
other stuff,” think of Mel Brooks’ Spanish Inquisition
complete with dancing nuns and synchronized water
torture. Just the other day a California comics store
tweeted out an offer to donate 100 copies of
The Complete Maus. 400 orders poured in;
curiosity kills the cat.
In Maus, first published in 1986, the Nazis are cats, the Jews, mice; one of the objections raised in the Tennessee case was that Maus depicts characters without clothes, that is, cartoon drawings of naked mice! In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel spoke these words: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Spiegelman’s Maus epigraph: The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.—Adolph Hitler
Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His photography is featured in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words (Scarlet Leaf Publishing), is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His latest work Political (Cyberwit Press) is the 2021 American Writing Awards winner in poetry. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, forthcoming from Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary. He is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory.