Tennessee Waltz: Conversations with Art Spiegelman
“Tennessee Waltz,” a pareidolia created in late 2022 and first published on the cover of this issue.
Interview by Ted Genoways
Illustrations courtesy of Art Spiegelman
The summer before I started high school, a shop called Cosmic Comics opened in a strip mall within short walking distance of my house. It was June 1986. I started hanging out there and eventually was given a “job”—which was really getting store credit in return for racking new arrivals, bagging and tagging back issues, and listening to the college kids talk about comics that I’d never heard of. That was the summer of The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller’s gritty reimagining of the Batman story, and Watchmen, Alan Moore’s dark vision of a universe of superheroes on the brink of World War III. Both series drew from and reshaped a long history of comic book tropes, and they became two of the earliest examples of what we now call “the graphic novel.” Later that summer, as I hungrily searched for graphic novel forerunners, wandering aimlessly through back issues of Cerebus the Aardvark and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one thoughtful college student with long hair and John Lennon granny glasses handed me a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. For people in the know, the story had been appearing for nearly six years in the pages of RAW, a “graphix magazine” edited by Spiegelman and his wife and collaborator Françoise Mouly. But this collected version was released that August—and was brand-new to me.
I was a freshman-to-be, an almost-ninth grader, what the upper-classmen in my high school referred to as “an ankle-biter.” Maus found me at precisely the right time. As the school year began, I was reading William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in the classroom, at the same time that I was seeing a sophisticated mode of storytelling emerge in the frame tale of Maus. On the surface, Spiegelman’s story looked like something aimed at children. It was a narrative of the Holocaust, yes, but also a father telling stories to his son, depicted in the most reduced visual terms. The Jews were mice. The Nazis were cats. Other ethnicities and nationalities were likewise represented: Poles were pigs, the French were frogs, Americans were dogs. Thankfully, my freshman English class was also assigned to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, so I knew better than to dismiss Maus as kid stuff. In his story, Spiegelman tells of his childhood in Rego Park in Queens, interwoven with his father’s narrative of Auschwitz, so the tale of determined survival is complicated by a vision of the long shadow of that trauma—ending in his mother’s suicide and his eventual estrangement and tenuous reconciliation with his father. Despite the fable-like form, the book doesn’t pull punches. The drawings are simple, black and white, but we see scenes of horror in the camps, and we see Spiegelman’s mother dead in the bathtub, her wrists slashed.
In January 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee decided that what I had seen over the summer between my eighth- and ninth-grade years was something that no eighth grader should see. The minutes of their meeting are often mystifying. One board member seemed disturbed that scenes from Auschwitz are often violent. “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids,” he said. But the main focus of the conversation is on two perceived deal-breakers: nudity and profanity. Another board member, while discussing the scene where Spiegelman’s mother is depicted dead and naked in a bathtub, got stuck on a minor detail of Spiegelman’s career. “This guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy,” the board member said, “and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening.” Still another member was upset about Spiegelman’s use of profanity (including “bitch” and “God damn you”), often while remembering his mother or arguing with his father. “A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father,” the board member said. At the end of the meeting, the full board voted unanimously—10-0—to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum of the McMinn County schools.
Months earlier in May 2021, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt had signed HB 1775 into law. The language of that bill forbade public schools and universities in the state from teaching books that might suggest that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” Critics had already objected that the law, written in response to national movements such as the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter, would prevent instruction that addressed the inequality and racism woven into the fabric of American history from the founding documents through Jim Crow through the present. There was particular concern that Oklahoma teachers wouldn’t be permitted to teach about how the state’s very first law enshrined segregation, how the backlash to rising Black wealth led to the Tulsa Race Massacre, and how this increased the number of the state’s all-Black towns. It would also curtail teaching of the Trail of Tears, the Osage murders, or the complexities of the McGirt Supreme Court ruling, and it would ban mandatory gender and sexual diversity training and counseling or even the teaching of books addressing gay and transgender rights.
After seeing what happened in Tennessee, some leaders in the Jewish community in Oklahoma worried that the new law would also exclude the teaching of the Holocaust, because it might cause discomfort and anguish among students. State Representative John Waldron worked together with the Jewish Federation of Tulsa to write HB 3720 to ensure that the Holocaust is taught in Oklahoma schools and a second bill, HB 3721, which would have created a select commission to advise schools on Holocaust education. The first bill passed—but some free speech advocates, including Spiegelman himself, expressed concern that carve-out legislation for Maus might have the unintended effect of factionalizing objections to HB 1775.
In a series of conversations conducted in early 2023, Spiegelman and I spoke about the case in Tennessee that touched off the defensive bill in Oklahoma, as well as the history of Maus, why he has become a free speech absolutist, and how he found his way back to the drawing table after a year consumed by controversy and outrage. —Ted Genoways
Ted Genoways: So 2022 was an incredibly difficult year for you. Can you talk a little bit about how it all began?
Art Spiegelman: It started in late January, when I got a call really late at night from Jake Tapper, saying, “What’s your opinion of what’s going on in Tennessee?” I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. So he sent me a link. I started looking at the school board meeting notes, and I really wanted to read and find out more in depth what was happening. But by that time, my inbox was flooded. Calls were coming in. It started then. And it went on for months.
One panel from “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” first published in Short Order Comix #1a (1973) and collected in Maus I (1986).
TG: The McMinn County School Board in Tennessee had voted to remove Maus from its curriculum. After the meeting, members issued a statement claiming that they were opposed to the book’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” What did you make of their objections?
AS: It seemed baffling to me because there’s one nude—sorry, I can’t use their language—one naked woman in the book, and she’s my mother. She’s dead in a bathtub. It’s a tiny image. And it’s hardly graphic. She’s immersed in a bathtub, but you can see a nipple. It’s a little dot of ink in the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” section of the book that was done about 1973, when I fully remembered what had happened in the days surrounding my mother’s suicide when I was 20. To find anything prurient in that? It’s just not that kind of a picture.
And the curse words: there were a few, but they were there for a reason. One of them was the word “bitch,” which appears when I’m thinking back to those days when my mother killed herself. There’s a razor blade going over a hand that had a number on it. And the word underneath it is “bitch.” She had left me and I was angry. Another one was when my father reveals to me that he had destroyed my mother’s diaries, which had been shown to me as a kid—they were in Polish, so I wasn’t that interested when I was a kid—but it was written, in a sense, for me. And she basically died twice. Her memory, as she put it down was also destroyed, as well as all the people who otherwise would have made up my family tree. So I said, “God damn you.” And then I call him a murderer.
Although I’m sure they hadn’t read the book, they found those words. I think they said eight times there was some curse word in a 300-page book. And I know that can’t have been the real reason because in the course of the minutes, one person on the board starts saying, oh, gee, there were these horrible things like kids being killed and people being hanged. He’s probably looking through the book for the first time and seeing these things and jolting. And my response was that, obviously, what they were looking for was a kinder, gentler Holocaust to teach.
TG: So do you buy the school board’s explanation, or do you think this was thinly veiled anti-Semitism?
AS: There might be an ambient anti-Semitism in the school board, but I don’t think that was the main motive based on what they kept trying to put forward. I think the real reason the book was banned is several fold. One of them has to do with the fact that they want to defund public schools. Their goal was to get people out of public schools, use public funds to thereby fund religious schools and charter schools, and thereby have more control over their children. And control is what authoritarians like to have. So that was one part of this. The part that I had to chew on a little longer was: so why Maus? Why was this book on the list?—because, basically, the culture war has to do more with things that have to do with gender, sexuality, and race.
Panels from Maus I (1986).
I think Maus seems like it’s part of the conversation about race, although at some point Whoopi Goldberg was on The View and explained that Jews aren’t a race and she got scolded for it. But certainly for the Germans, the Jews were a race and that led to the central metaphor in the book. But the other aspect of this that was interesting to me is Maus naturally got built around this metaphor of using cat heads, mouse heads, pig heads, dog heads on characters, and trying to make it clear that this was a metaphor that would self-destruct in the course of the book. They take off their masks. They put other masks on, trying to disguise themselves as another group. There’s a number of ways in which the metaphor is used but then undone.
TG: So you think the resistance to your deconstruction of propagandistic stereotypes in Maus—portraying Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs—is really, in some way, a fear of unearthing the suppressed history of racial caste in America?
AS: I’ll say this... I first came up with the idea for Maus after I’d been invited to contribute to an underground comic called Funny Aminals that was supposed to deal with animal rights and vegetarianism. But every one of the cartoonists took it as a mandate to enter this anthology with talking animals like the funny animals like Donald Duck that we’d read as kids. And so I tried to do the same and couldn’t find something worthy of the occasion. I was a little stuck. I went to sit in on a film class that Ken Jacobs, the person I’d befriended at my university after I’d been kicked out, was holding and they were fascinating. He showed a lot of Hollywood films and then put them through an analytic projector to see what was going on under the hood.
He’s showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And then he points out a certain moment like, “Okay, here’s some racist cartoons where it’s just the minstrel-lipped Blacks. Here’s this Mickey Mouse cartoon. So my question is, ‘What’s the difference between Mickey Mouse and Al Jolson, the singer with blackface on?’” And it’s just that he has these round ears on top. The young Mickey was a Jazz Age singer. That was pretty much the first audio cartoon was his version of a jazzy, wise-guy mouse. I jumped up going, “That’s it. I’ve got it now. I’ll do something about the history of Black people in America. I’ll use a Mickey Mouse-like jazz singer—and I can have Ku Klux cats in it!” And that was what kept me going for a day or two before I dropped that.
But fortunately for me, the three-page strip became catalyzed by remembering a short story I’d read called, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” It’s a Kafka story that can most easily be read as a mouse, entertaining her fellow workers in the field by singing plaintive songs. So it was clearly a metaphor for the Jewish people in the way that I—and I think many other people—read that story. So there was that as a fulcrum to work from and then immediately looking through my parents hidden bookshelves in the back of our house, I found this book called The Black Book, and it was about the history of the Nazi genocide, with a lot of photographs that I saw for the first time at maybe 10 or 11. It also had posters from before the war showing the Jews as rats. And so it felt like, “Okay, now I’m home free. I want to know more about this stuff.” And that’s what led to a very long process of making two Maus books that are that story.
TG: And you think the people who want to ban Maus are somehow sensing that racial aspect of its origin?
AS: I’m just saying that the book, in its DNA, was about othering. It was about what happens when you take a large group of people and demote them into being less than human. So it’s there from before I decided to do it about my own personal history with my parents. And it remains, I think. It vibrates and reverberates inside the spokes so that somebody who feels othered can relate to the story without having to think of themselves as somebody who gets up and goes to shul every day. But what happened as a result of me using these animal heads in the book is it feels very much like a fable. Cats and mice, it goes back to the animated cartoon part of this, and it goes back to Aesop and beyond.
So, as a result, there was kind of a contradiction built in—that on the one hand, this is for kids because it’s like animated cartoons and fables, but it was about something more than what it seems to be on the surface because it was dealing with a very specific thing: genocide. I did Maus to understand how I could get born, long after my parents were supposed to have been murdered and could have had a chance to conceive me. And to do that, I had to live through it in a granular way, understanding it and putting it down coherently. I never did this to teach anybody, except me, anything. I spent thirteen years working on a comic for grownups. I didn’t make it for kids. I wasn’t even sure kids should read it.
Panels from “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2006).
TG: Still, to a surprising degree, you were not only giving interviews to the media last year, defending Maus, but also engaging directly with the McMinn County School Board. Were those conversations productive?
AS: Yes, definitely. The main thing I did was I asked for some kind of webinar or Zoom, so that the people of McMinn could all be part of it and ask questions. I asked through my lecture agent to set something up where I could just be in conversation directly. That worked. And so I spent a terrible day before this event, reading too much about Tennessee and the South and ultimately finding out the Klan started in Tennessee, and there’s still a chapter right outside this small county. It would have been easy to enter this as a wise guy—more difficult to do what was the beginning of a long process of having to speak publicly to people who didn’t agree with me. Ultimately, by the end of the few hours that we were on this webinar together, there was 17,000 people who tuned into it around the world.
So Maus became kind of the poster boy for all book-banning. By the end of the year, I just felt like I was some kind of crazy politician running for office. And I never even knew if I was winning or losing the race. I just didn’t know what the goal was. But at this point, I felt I could no longer just keep shrugging people off by saying I never wanted to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books, that that wasn’t what I was making. I realized I had some responsibilities to the book and its afterlife. I had to rise to the occasion, even if it’s an afterlife beyond my intentions. And that had to do with the fact that, by God, yes, we are in trouble. I never thought we’d be in as much trouble. I never thought that authoritarianism would be as popular as the hula hoop was when I was a baby.
TG: I can understand that weariness, but it raises a question for me. Your origins are so much in the counterculture magazines and underground comics of the Sixties and Seventies, a scene that was really looking to critique and talk back to the dominant culture of the time, I have to wonder if this pushback over the years doesn’t feel like an affirmation of what you’re trying to do?
AS: I think, somehow, that war got won, and I’m glad to have been instrumental in it. At this point, graphic novels of one kind and another, many kinds, including the spectrum that would have been at one time called alternative or underground comics, are mainstream to the point that they’re in every library. They’re part of the bookstore culture. They’re being used in schools. Not just Maus. And they’re being read. So at a time where literacy and bookstore experiences are caught in the whirlpool of cultural change, books have been under threat. On the other hand, just one of the other “traumas” that I had last year was I got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation. When I first was working on Maus, cartoonists were lower on the totem pole than any other possible form of art, except maybe, at that time, tattoo artists. And Maus really was an attempt to demonstrate, like I said, what a comic for adults might look like when “adult” didn’t just mean X-rated but meant for people who could analyze, think through, sift through what they were reading, rather than just being given another fantasy adventure story or a gag. And yeah, I mean, I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, so much so that I’ve been drawing pictures of myself being chased by a 500-pound mouse for decades since the books got finished.
TG: For what it’s worth, I consider it a psychological improvement that when you when you first started talking about this, you used to say that it was a 5,000-pound mouse.
Original paste-up artwork for the three-page version of “Maus,” first published in Funny Aminals #1 (1972).
AS: We were on a diet for those most of those decades, trying to starve the beast and find other things to feed the world. But I had to acknowledge as of now—my 75th birthday, another trauma of this period—that even though it’s hard to talk about a book that you finished that long ago as if you finished it yesterday, that’s what I had to do. I feel like Maus was a drive-by shooting, because it was an easy one to get off the curriculum in the sense that nobody was there who had skin in the game. I don’t think there were any Jews on the panel, for instance. But beyond that, I am grateful to my marketers in McMinn County. I didn’t need the help. The book didn’t need the help. It stayed healthy and alive—lo, these decades and decades later—but ultimately, the book became a worldwide bestseller of a certain kind.
I even got a call from Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, who was preparing to have hearings about book-bannings and invited me down. But I pointed out that I would just be the catastrophe that deep sixed the hearing. Even in the school board minutes, one of them said, “What do we want him in our schools for? He’s done cartoons for Playboy.” And, man, that’s the tip of the iceberg. The underground comics were far more hardcore, sexually, than anything I ever did in Playboy. The main character I did in Playboy was a head without a body, which I thought was a funny main character for a comic in Playboy. But then, I did Garbage Pail Kids, these little parodies of Cabbage Patch Kids, which were actually censored in schools, and things like Wacky Packages, which were censored as well. So from my work for children to the work I did for myself to the work for adults, I was going to be a discredited witness.
TG: So, here in Oklahoma, there was an immediate response to what happened in McMinn County, concern that there might be a similar movement here in Oklahoma. And so the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, working together with State Representative John Waldron, crafted a couple of bills that would make sure that there was Holocaust education in schools. What was very clear was that this came directly out of this concern about Maus. In fact, Magic City Books, the great independent bookstore here in Tulsa, made the book available to any student who came in wanting one.
AS: It happened in McMinn County, too. Ron Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, or his brother shipped truckloads of Maus into the county. So I wince when you tell me about a Jewish organization that’s concerned only, it seems, about the Holocaust, because it remains the central unifying factor for most American Jews. It seems to me that the advantage of using those animal-headed characters is it’s an easy leap to what happened to Blacks in America, what happened in the genocide of Native Americans, and so on. We can’t afford to be provincial at this point. It can’t be just about grinding an axe for your own group. It ends up alienating every other group. These things try to squelch thought.
Look, ultimately, curricula are a good thing. And education is a good thing. And in a way, I would rather that the young tyke in junior high school in Tennessee can study anything they want in the curriculum. If they want to use Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries, that’s great—but do it in a curriculum, where you’re actually trying to dissect it. It’s way better than just spotting The Turner Diaries on Dad’s shelf and taking it out and reading it for yourself. For most kids, it’s useful to have somebody shepherding you through something that complicated—in its roots, if not in its grammar. So that’s my response to hearing about McMinn’s Jewish community’s responses not being broad enough.
“Ed Head,” first published in Playboy (March 1979).
TG: To some, it’s a surprising response, I think. All of these people were rallying behind you—the poster boy, as you said, for book-banning—but you seemed to bridle against that support.
AS: I was trying to live up to the responsibility of it—but by the time it was all over, I read on LitHub that I was now the coolest man in America because I was eating my breakfast while talking on CNN. I just felt full-blown impostor syndrome. And all of the petting left me feeling like a cat who has been pet until every single hair has been brushed off its back and only the raw, red bleeding skin was left. By the end of last year, I was totally exhausted and had stopped drawing and writing almost completely
TG: Which was precisely at the point that I was asking you for a cover.
AS: And at first I thought, yes, doing something about book-banning is an interesting subject. I’ll find my way around, but I really have not been able to do finished “artwork” anymore. And it led me to a specific practice, which was brought to mind by the first times I ever held a pencil and made representational marks. It was a game I played with my mother when I was five years old. She would take a pencil and scribble on a sheet of paper and say, “Okay, turn that into a picture.” And I’d go, “It looks like a duck.” And then I would draw—and this was my way into making drawings, because I was getting a positive reinforcement for my mother for doing it. And it was sort of fun and easy. Now, when that memory was turned into a piece, called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young blankety-blank,” that starts with that image, I began to use the spiraling squiggle as the symbol for being a cartoonist, as well as for being dazed—because in most comics, when you have that squiggle, it means you’re drunk or confused. And that was true for me as well, this past year especially.
All of which is to say, I wanted to go back to that, because I just had to feel comfortable holding a pencil. I felt genuinely inhibited and more incapable than usual. And I just would run away from it as often as I could. I no longer had my mother to make scribbles for me. But while I was playing around, I began trying to make a watercolor—I don’t remember why. And when you’re doing watercolor, you have to like, move the brush on a sheet of paper to mix the water and the pigment and see how thick you want it to be. And I began to turn them into whatever creatures without paying much attention because doodling was always easy. So I just began making blots without knowing what they were and then turning the paper around until I could find an image.
TG: So basically, you’re starting to see… a composition?
AS: I’m seeing figures. I’m seeing monsters. I’m seeing sexual images. Whatever. And I’m trying to find the ones that would be the most interesting to draw from that. So it’s a kind of personalized Rorschach test—what I called “pareidolias,” because I, at some point, looked up the word for when you’re looking at clouds and hallucinating on them. I realized these pareidolias are closer to stories and fiction than my comics usually get, but there’s no punch line. There’s no even political agenda necessarily. This is all the preamble to the question. Like, how did I make this cover, I suppose, right?
TG: Right.
Panels from “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2005).
AS: Well, I knew I had to do something, and you’re trying to get me off the hook by telling me what to do, which I’m very resistant to.
TG: I’ve noticed.
AS: I had to come up with something. I’m doing these weird drawings. And I figured, okay, I’ll just make a bunch of shapes. But afterwards, I’m going to look for a mouse head. There might be one somewhere even if it’s not the standard shape that I draw, something that could turn into that. I figured nobody gives a shit about what I do most of the time. Maus has gotten to be a skyscraper in my small landscape of one and two story buildings. So I looked for a mouse and I began to just draw around it, and it grew into a picture. And it’s a mouse suspiciously looking like the one that represents me in the book with a vest. And it’s a Ku Klux Klansmen on fire with Uncle Sam striped pants below, holding a very large wild cat in his arms, and the cat—which is, of course, a symbol for fascism in Maus—is scratching my face and creating a multi-pronged rip across my face and head. Now, it was an image of book-burning and burning with a pig breathing flames, small cat in the background with a Hitler mustache somewhere. And it’s just seeing what came of it, finding what could happen around this image of the cat scratching. And—voila!—there we have the bonfire of the 21st century.
TG: Exactly. And I love the way it nods to the themes and symbols of Maus, but it is also an image that speaks very directly to your last year. It’s personal.
AS: This image was not meant as a visual summation of the experience of book-banning. It’s my visceral, childish response to book-banning, the one I had to transcend in order to be what I tried to be, which was a spokesperson for the larger issue, rather than just for my own expression of discomfort.
TG: You’ve titled it “Tennessee Waltz,” which obviously refers back to the banning in Tennessee. But there’s the added resonance, as you mentioned, of Tennessee as the birthplace of the Klan and the Klansman at the foreground revealing that he is wearing Uncle Sam trousers underneath. So tell me the process. How do the clouds that you’re looking at in the Rorschach self-test, how do they start to organize themselves and become things that that are so tightly thematic?
AS: It comes from the blot and also from drawing completely straight in ink, because that was part of bringing it back to my practice of doodling. I think the first thing was putting in the mouse ears because that gave me a sense of where we’re going, but I’m hypothesizing. I can’t remember. It’s a trance of a certain kind. And I saw a Klan mask on fire, just from the shape that that blot was giving me and then the picture just started growing. The composing it is impromptu, but it is trying to find a composition. So that was—without too much bidding—what came forth.
TG: I have a couple of questions about the other things that came out. You mentioned the pig in the background has fire spewing out of its mouth. In Maus, the Poles were the pigs. Is that still what we’re supposed to read?
AS: Well, it’s everything from barbecued pork to Poles. In this particular instance, I’d have Google News giving me every morning, “So what did Maus and Art Spiegelman do in the news today?” And I’d be reading these things for months. I started discovering they have news on Twitter that usually becomes the next day’s news in the newspapers. So I would go there as well. And every once in a while there’d be this irate Pole or group of Poles, very upset about the animal avatar that was used to represent Poles in the book. And for years, I tried to placate them saying, “Yeah, you know, it’s a complex symbol, because it’s not necessarily pejorative,” and they would say, even in some of the tweets that were coming up, “But the Germans called us swine.” And I said, “Yeah, and they called us rats and vermin. It’s not my metaphors. It’s Hitler’s metaphors. And all of these are masks that are meant to be removed.”
I just settled on this because it has an ambivalent aspect to it. And on the other hand, it’s also part of my heritage, the peaceable kingdom of animals and funny animal comics do include the cat and mouse chase, but it also includes Bugs Bunny, Pepé Le Pew, and Porky Pig. Porky Pig is hardly a swine. He’s a sweet, stuttering friend of the other animals, and they’re all co-equal in this Edenic world of animals. So I didn’t feel it was only pejorative, and I would explain this over and over again, but they remained very, very angry at me, some at least. And so, I was reading that at the same time I was reading the Twitter feed about how book-banning has been spreading like wildfire, so I knew that wildfire had to be part of the image. But as a result, it was enough in my brain pan of what was going on that there became what looks like a pig snout.
TG: Everything, as you say, doubles back and repeats and revises itself. The mouse with the vest that is very often you at the drawing table, pen in hand, in this case shows your hand in that same pose but there’s another mouse in your grip.
AS: Being squeezed to death or something.
TS: I mean, is this you commenting on your plight that you’re trying to draw something new and instead you just find another mouse there?
“Self-Portrait with Maus Mask,” first published on the cover of the Village Voice (June 1989).
