Geopolitical. Superman had very strong subtext. One that Dealt in one sense of with trauma with the world trauma those growing up around them and their own personal fantasies and needs so. I'd say they're always serious. So one could come directly about the holocaust. And when could we deal with slavery and people's of terminal illnesses. that's a more recent development mouses and early entry into that world. It was in part made possible by one of the underground comics friends. I had back in the san francisco early moments of that Vining justin green. Who did a comic called. Dinky brown meets the holy mary with pinky brown being a an avatar for himself. Justin green's work. Pinky brown meets the holy virgin mary which came out in nineteen seventy two and is conventionally understood is the very first auto-biographical comics work in the united states. So justin green's comic book. Pinky brown inspired a lot of other kinds of stories. to take shape i'm specifically stories by women about embodiment and sexuality in art. Spiegelman has said that he could not have done house without the inspiration provided to him by justin green and big brown. You know the content of those stories are very different but what is similar in. Both of those stories is that kind of unflinching. Look at the self and thinking about the self not as a but as justin green puts it as kind of specimen book deal with his own obsessive compulsive disorders. He put it and very overtly with the trauma of growing up catholic and feeling guilty and not feeling absolution from the church definitely deserving of its x rating as he would walk past churches and see the steeples as phallic symbols that he had to not look at directly and so on. I mean i often say this to my students. I teach maki brown. What could be more private than masturbation and religious visions. I can't think of anything so this was suddenly content that could be made public because there was no editor who was going to edit that out there was a completely different cultural field for comics. Once the underground started started picking up out to see my father in rego park. I hadn't seen him in a long time. We weren't that close. He'd aged a lot since i saw last my mother suicide in his two heart attacks had taken. Their toll was remarried. Mullen new my parents in poland. Before the war she was a survivor to like most of my parents friends. They didn't get along art. Spiegelman the complete mouse the impact of a mouse on comics gruff novacopy underestimated. But what i would say is that the impacts have mouse on trauma. Studies company underestimated the budget rumors. To these i mean the field of psychologists of experts historians of the holocaust experts in in the cult representation of trauma all these kinds of different ways of in which traumas constructed is something that we understand and can and can talk about spiegelman's really been. His mouth is at the center of all of that. From a coach was days perspective. Trauma is their word we can use. I think to describe text are dealing with the legacy of particular events and so trump is kind of. It's a very intangible thing. It's impacted impacts upon forms An an interesting ways and and the comic has you know. The form of the comic has has been particularly good at sat kind of capturing that impacts hoping artists office tend to navigate impacts died of congestive heart failure on august eight can't nineteen eighty two francois's and i stayed with him in the catskills back in august. Nineteen seventy nine. Lenox started working tinman in australia. In the spring of nineteen forty four. I started working on this page at the very end of february. Nineteen eighty two in may nineteen eighty-seven class wasn't expecting a baby. Between may sixteenth nineteen forty four and may twenty four th nineteen forty four over one hundred thousand. Hungarian jews were gassed in. It's in september nineteen eighty six eight years of work. The first part of mouse was published. It was a critical and commercial success. At least fifteen foreign editions are coming out of gotten four serious offers to turn my book into a tv special or movie idol walker in may nineteen sixty eight. My mother killed herself. She left out lately. I've been feeling depressed. Art spiegelman the complete mouse. Is it fair to call mouse. Memoir is that is that a correct characterization. Yeah i suppose it's correct to call it a memoir in that deals with memory. But i never thought about it that way because It's not my memories of the death camps and the plight of jews in world war two. It's my memories of my father and what he's able to tell me what i was able to understand what he's holding me and what i can put down on paper of what i understood for me. What always fascinated me so much about the form of comex in contradistinction to photograph for example is the way it could put different time frames or temporarily to think of it together in one space and so in mouse this this happens In a page for example in which art spiegelman was a character in the book and his father vladic spiegelman who is a survivor of the actuates. Death camp in poland. They're walking in new york in the late. Nineteen seventies or early nineteen eighty s. And they're talking about the holocaust. And then on the same page you actually see latic in auschwitz being paraded in front of dr mangla. Almost by definition comics are a welding together of past present and future. As soon as you've got three boxes you've got the bucks reading then couple boxes ahead of it that represent the future and then as you look back to your left in american comics. You've got a past president future visual lies spatially as well as something you're reading about and i think it's important aspect of what comics do by their nature and as i formulated years ago comics time turned into space with via a strategic form which is difficult with other forms is that you can transcend time and space and emotion so you can actually go inside. Eight someone's hate. Ooh that trauma can draw Kind of looming in a cloud above their heads which is really interesting. When you're dealing with such topics conflict to migration that's benjamin war coup decks. He worked as a un communications and liaison manager in sri lanka during the civil war. How did you come to comics. Are you there. The six months before we evacuated from the vanni. That was a huge amount of time spent sitting in the bunker and so we would get radio. We'll talk. He's birds in the sky. Birds in the sky aside Vice this north of sri lanka than there would be u n in the middle sri lanka and the cafe jets would usually take off from columbus in the south so we ended up spending many hours sitting in the bunka and one of my colleagues had two graphic novels one was palestine. joe sacco's palestine and one was mouse. So i read them back to back and was just fascinated by how you could tell such complex political difficult.