Some readers may have been surprised to find a three-page comic in our February 27 issue: a collaboration by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco titled “Never Again and Again.” It’s a “graphic conversation” between the cartoonists about Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and—as Sacco puts it on the comic’s first page—“obliteration” in Gaza.
Spiegelman is best known for Maus, a comic about the young artist coaxing out his father’s recollections of surviving Auschwitz. It was serialized in Raw, a magazine of avant garde comics published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, in the 1980s, finished in 1991, and then published as a graphic novel. Sacco’s comics also rely on firsthand stories of war and occupation, including three books on Palestine (Palestine, 1993; Footnotes in Gaza, 2010; and War on Gaza, 2024).
I spoke to Art by phone in mid-February about the new strip, the failures of Zionism, and what it means to him to once again don his “mouse mask,” the cartoon avatar that he created for Maus. Joe Sacco followed up via e-mail to offer his account of their collaboration and his thoughts on Israel and Palestine.
Will Simpson: How did this project come about? When did you and Joe first start discussing the idea?
Joe Sacco: I was visiting New York, and Art and I were sitting in his place sharing a bottle of wine. This was in early 2024. We were talking about what was going on in Gaza. One of the things I appreciate about Art is that he believes that the lessons derived from the genocide of the Jews in World War II are universal—that, as we expressed in the comic strip, “never again” means never again for everyone. He was horrified by Israel’s actions in Gaza. A short time later I sent him an e-mail saying that if he wanted to express what he thought about the situation, perhaps we could work on a short piece together. I didn’t think he’d take me up on it, but he did. I never thought of this as an unstructured jam, as I think Art might have. I thought from the beginning that we were working toward a purpose.
So Art, you felt like the project was a little looser going into it? What is your recollection?
Art Spiegelman: My memory, not an especially reliable beast, is a bit different. We were talking on the phone, and I was whining, which is one of my modes, about how I had really stopped doing comics for quite a while. Maus got banned from a Tennessee school district in early 2022, and then suddenly I was in permanent interview mode. Everything else stopped. I felt more like a politician than a cartoonist. It was important to do that, but it left me almost incapable of drawing. It’s not like falling off a bicycle. Getting back on after a long time off is like, I don’t know, physical therapy after some dire event in your body. You have to build it up all over again.
So I was whining about that to Joe, and he generously offered, “You know, I come east pretty often to see my mother, why don’t we just get together and jam, it’ll loosen you up.” Joe had spent the last few years working on a graphic novel about India, and so his hand and brain and eye coordination were completely in sync. Mine were the opposite, but when he said Let’s jam, it sounded like fun. Jamming is just having the same sheet of paper between you, and you each add to it until a picture or an improvised comic happens.
We were talking on the phone before he came out, but at a certain point, Françoise heard our conversation drift toward Gaza, and she insisted that we switch to Zoom so that we could record ourselves. So essentially, this strip grew out of a couple of long Zoom conversations, which we condensed, improved, and turned into our “script.” But at that point, it was no longer a jam, it was a project. And although I was grateful, I gulped because I really was out of shape, let’s say.
But it was important to me because I’ve been trying to find some way to engage and comment on what’s been going on in Israel and Palestine, feeling that I couldn’t really sit back as a noncombatant, ducking and covering while this was happening. It would make me feel like a coward. And Joe, who knows a lot about Gaza, has many friends in Palestine and has been there several times to research at least two books. Everything I know is what I read in the newspapers, which all have recently become The Onion.
In one panel I explain that I don’t want Maus to ever be mistaken as a recruiting tool for the Israeli Defense Forces. That seemed urgent, almost like a dare to myself. I felt like to say nothing was to be a complete coward, and to say something meant probably just grief at the other end.
So it was a battle between my superego and my id, like the superego saying, You got to do this! And the id saying, Who needs the grief? What kind of difference can you make? If you look back at the McCarthy era, I’d rather be Dashiell Hammett and ashamed to be Elia Kazan. So I was being forced to do the right thing, but I think the strip took this long, starting from April and ending nine months or so after, because of that wrestling match in my brain forcing me forward. “I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on” kind of stuff.
How do you collaborate on an individual page or sequence when you’re used to total control over your work? A “jam” sounds like an underground comix strategy.
Art Spiegelman: I think that’s where the term got invented, as a kind of collaboration where you find out what you’re collaborating on as you’re moving forward. And in a sense that’s true, but this was much more intensive. I think the first time Joe and I were in my studio, we were basically trying to break down exactly what the comic would be, how long, what’s happening on each page and in each panel, and then we began divvying up the labor.
The biggest negotiation was: I can’t draw horses, Joe. I’ve seen you draw horses many times. You’re doing the horses in the apocalypse, but I’ll tell you what, your caricature of Netanyahu isn’t that terrific. I’ll learn how to do it because everything is now relearning, and I’ll take that panel on and that’ll be the splash panel. And then it became a back and forth, like, I’ll do the rubble, and you do another aspect of it, and sometimes the style shift is more or less clear in the final comic, I would think, to anybody looking closely. And some of it is relatively seamless, but it all fit together well.
My next question was going to be whether it was difficult or liberating, but it sounds like you were playing to each other’s strengths and that it was more liberating.
Art Spiegelman: Oh, it was liberating, and I needed to do it, which is why Françoise came to my rescue and said, Okay, I’m turning on the tape recorder. Because Joe and I weren’t thinking of our conversation as essentially the subject of what we were going to make, just as a way to hash out, say, we’ll be able to work X number of hours each day, and we’ll go out to dinner and have drinks there and whatever. But I wasn’t aware of it as a wrestling match when I started. I’m sure that that’s part of what made it take such an ungodly long time, nine months. It was like gestating a baby, a deformed baby. But it’s what I really needed to do to get back into cartooning.
When we started, we decided that we’d each have a 51 percent veto, so that we would each be comfortable with everything we put down, including the need to have some areas—political, artistic—where there’s space between us.
One difference I’ve noticed between your styles is that in your drawings, especially of the mouse-people, often you’ll depict them without a mouth or many facial features. The emotions are usually from mark-making and body language and the writing. Whereas Joe seems to draw attention to facial expressions in a much more focused way.
Joe, do you find yourself agonizing over faces or ever redrawing them? The treatment of your subjects’ faces, and what they tell the reader, is crucial to your comics, and I wonder if you have any thoughts how you draw people, how you get the right likeness or expression.
Joe Sacco: I’ve always been impressed at the amount of expression Art can squeeze out of a relatively nondescript mouse face, but he understands the language of comics incredibly well and can pull off quite a range of emotions within those self-imposed limitations. Drawing faces representationally, as I tend to do in most of my work, is difficult, but I’m trying for something journalistic, so I want to be as accurate as I can in depicting an actual person. I want that person to be individually recognizable. I want the reader to be able to stare into that person’s eyes, which is why I often draw faces looking straight on at you. The facial expressions I draw tend to reflect the emotion in what the person is saying. Sometimes someone tells you a horrifying story, but they’re numb enough to it themselves that they tell you in a deadpan manner. Sometimes the story brings back such awful memories so vividly that they look aghast as they relay it.
Art, do you either avoid or pull back from drawing exaggerated faces?
Art Spiegelman: No, it just became clear that for this to function as a snapshot of what I really think about all this stuff, it was better for me to do it with my mouse mask on. Obviously, over the decades, I’ve done many things that feature scruffy caricatures of myself. But here, that persona was what I had to put forward to make sure that people understood that the mouse was not to be used as a way to ratify what’s been happening in Gaza over the last year and a half. And I do find that over the years, the mouse mask has become very expressive. I found a way to use these masks and still make the expressions and the body language do the job. And the expressions are subtle, but they’re there.
Midway through the comic, you write that “Israel may be a failed experiment.” What would it mean for a country to recognize that about itself? Do you think it’s possible?
Art Spiegelman: Well, it has gotten harder and harder every day since 1948! In the hangover after the Shoah there was a lot of international support for a Jewish homeland; but the notion that Palestine was a “land without people,” where Jews had a long-expired lease that they could simply renew, was the original sin. I’m not a student of Middle Eastern history—in fact, I spent a lot of energy trying not to think about Israel—but there must have been a moment when it would have been possible to find a way for Jews and Palestinians to coexist with a one-state or two-state solution, rather than a bloody process that reminds me of how the Europeans settlers dealt with indigenous peoples in America from the seventeenth century onward.
My reductio ad absurdum wisecrack about “an apartment without people” was a way for me to scale down the problem to try to get a handle on it. When I tried to visualize that in the comic I had to show dehumanized little creatures that “invisibly” teemed through the apartment. It was such a challenge I got stuck for almost a month trying to draw it. It was actually the first part of the strip I tackled, and it set the pace for how difficult it was going to be for me to make this comic happen.
With these ambitious visual metaphors.
Art Spiegelman: Yeah. And I think it’s there. It does its job. But it was a hard one. And part of the issue is that I don’t know if there was ever a land without people, except maybe in the Jurassic era. At one point during World War II, the Nazis were thinking about shipping all the Jews off to Madagascar—an idea as absurd as my apartment metaphor. But the Zionist movement chose a spot where the three major Mosaic religions are all in some kind of deeply uncomfortable apartment-sharing arrangement. What could go wrong?
I was only in Israel once. My parents took me there as a kind of Bar Mitzvah gift; I was the same age as Israel. It was my first trip abroad, and it was exotic, but I wasn’t comfortable there. Every young man carried a rifle. I am very grateful that my parents ended up in America after the war. I’ve always been more comfortable taking my chances in the diaspora.
Joe, in response, your comic avatar asks Art, “Can you imagine Israel not existing?” And I can’t help but wonder what your answer to that would be. Can you?
Joe Sacco: Frankly, I think all bets are off at this point. The status quo—and I mean quite explicitly the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, between the oppressor and the oppressed—was untenable, but, leaving historical injustices aside, one could still articulate what a political solution might look like: either two separate states or one state including both peoples. Neither seems viable at this moment, and we might be reaching the dangerous territory of a zero-sum game. Israel’s continuing conquest and settlement of the West Bank, its genocide in Gaza, and its embrace of Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan have definitively answered the question of whether Israel is a colonial enterprise.
So, yes, I can imagine an Israel existing as it does now, by force of arms, beating, corralling, or cowing its neighbors into submission, creating more and more facts on the ground. If the ultimate aim of Israel was to create a space where Jews could feel safe, I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. How long can Israel hold the sword? How reliable is US and Western patronage, and how long will it last? What are the alliances with regional strongmen worth? If we still want to hang on to our humanity, then neither Jews nor Palestinians should be removed or driven out. If they could somehow coexist, as Jews and Arabs once did before the Zionist era, then the name of the state or the number of states or their configuration would be of secondary importance. The question is: Have events left these fine notions behind?
Art Spiegelman: I agree with Joe’s analysis. I don’t have the imagination to envision a peaceful solution after so much carnage. It horrifies me, but as I put it in the strip “You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube.”
One advantage of it having taken so long to make this comic is that the zeitgeist has shifted a bit. If I’d been able to work more efficiently, I think this strip would have seemed even more incendiary. Right after October 7, it felt like if you said anything about this, duck and cover! I was expecting trouble, and I can’t say I’m disappointed. I’m somewhat relieved. But since my best-known work is about the genocide in Europe, I felt it was necessary to clarify issues that are easy to blur. Like this notion that if you’re a Jew you’re a Zionist, and if you’re not a Zionist you’re not a good Jew. As far as I’m concerned Netanyahu has two enemies: everybody in the surrounding nations and every diaspora Jew.
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