It’s been almost a month since Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco published their collaborative comic about the genocide in Gaza and I have finally made peace with the fact that it sucks. I knew it was bad when I first read it; I told people it was bad; but I also wanted to be wrong so I kept rereading it, hoping it would divulge some previously hidden depth.
Reader, it has not.
For a comic made by giants in the field and published by established outlets with enormous reach (i.e., The Guardian and The New York Review of Books), it has made very little noise. I didn’t even see it until days after it dropped, though perhaps that’s a product of how fractured the internet is right now. A few people praised it on social media and quite a few more said it was garbage. But there’s been little in the way of substantive discourse. Sadly, that’s probably because there’s nothing of substance to really talk about. So here’s a thousand word blog post about it.
Despite the fact that “Never Again and Again,” as the collaboration is titled, is explicitly about the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s oddly tepid. It feels weird to say this about a comic that includes a panel of Benjamin Netanyahu wallowing in the blood of innocents, but Sacco and Spiegelman’s work has no bite. Its central preoccupation is their sense of despair, their lack of solutions, their inability to picture how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict might end or even change.
At one point, the comic makes this sense of hopelessness quite explicit. Sacco asks Spiegelman directly: “Can you imagine Israel not existing??” In response, all Spiegelman has to offer is a baffling image of Israel and Palestine as toothpaste that can’t be put back into the tube — a drawing so stupid and unhelpful that the only charitable reading is that Spiegelman is making fun of his own failure of imagination. At least, that’s the only charitable reading I could come up with and it still sounds foolish to me as I write this.
When it comes to Sacco in particular, I actually do understand his feeling of paralysis. The man has already documented, in extensive and mind-numbing detail, how much the Palestinian people have suffered. As he observes in the foreward to Footnotes in Gaza, his book about a decades-old massacre of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military:
Palestinians never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them. When I was in Gaza, younger people often viewed my research into the events of 1956 with bemusement. What good would tending to history do them when they were under attack and their homes were being demolished now?
In this context, Sacco’s resigned self-deprecation, his comment in the final panel that it will take bigger brains than his and Spiegelman’s to resolve the violence, certainly makes sense. After all, Sacco has spent decades of his life crafting books that compel Western audiences to see Palestinians as human beings and things only seem to be getting worse for them. He is certainly allowed to feel a little despair!
To be clear, I don’t object to art that explores things like war and genocide through a personal lens. Maus itself is an incredible example of how powerful that approach can be. It is pointedly not a history lesson about the Holocaust and is as much about Spiegelman’s combative relationship with his father as anything else. One of the book’s most fascinating moments is when Spiegelman expresses his meta-textual discomfort at the way the comic — which was originally serialized and garnered acclaim before it was even complete — has transformed him into a public figure who is treated as an authority on Jewish suffering and Nazi atrocities.
This feeling of being trapped by the book’s success has clearly haunted Spiegelman for his entire life. In public appearances and interviews, he talks a lot about the feeling that the book is the one thing he’ll always be known for — something he visualizes as an enormous mouse hovering behind him, forever breathing down his neck.
What bothers me about his collaboration with Sacco is that Spiegelman uses the ongoing genocide as a canvas to continue wrestling with his conflicted relationship to Maus. There’s a place for this kind of self-conscious artistic conflict, and that place is definitely not the ruins of Gaza. If I wanted to hear about Spiegelman’s complicated thoughts on his magnum opus, I’d go reread MetaMaus. It’s great that he doesn’t want Maus to be used as a recruiting tool for the IDF, as he tells us in this new comic, but did we really need that clarification? Is that truly the issue at hand here?
Ultimately, “Never Again” is a comic, not about the atrocities committed against Palestinians, but about two American cartoonists (or Maltese-American in Sacco’s case) feeling trapped by their own inadequacy in the face of what feels to them like an intractable conflict. They have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. Hell, Sacco already drew a whole series of short comics about the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide, and they are drastically better than “Never Again.”
But for Spiegelman, at least, it seems like this comic was something he felt he desperately needed to create, regardless of whether anyone else found it valuable. According to Hyperallergic, he told an audience back in December that:
“I’ll finish this thing or die trying. I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head . . . My superego says, ‘You must do this if you’re going to live with yourself’,” and my id says, ‘Who wants the grief [of] being canceled by everyone on the planet?’”
It’s a little sad to see Spiegelman tormented by an idea for a comic that is ultimately so forgettable. No one is canceling him because “Never Again” has no opinions worth getting angry about. It is an exercise in self-expression that borders on self-absorption, a comic he and Sacco created because Spiegelman couldn’t live with himself otherwise.
But did anyone besides Spiegelman really need to see the creator of Maus call what’s happening in Gaza “kinda ‘genocidish?’”