A school board in Tennessee recently voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s Maus from an eighth-grade language-arts curriculum, due to worries about “unnecessary” profanity and a single image of a nude female. The Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. The above portrait depicts Art in the mid-70s, around the time I had him as an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, in New York. Art was, and continues to be, passionate about the potential of comics.
