Art Spiegelman says the US needs a ‘counter-revolution’ as he reflects on Trump, 9/11 and fascism

Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist whose Holocaust memoir Maus became a landmark in the graphic novel, is once again framing American life through crisis. More than four decades after that book changed what comics could do, Spiegelman is speaking about Donald Trump, the legacy of 9/11 and what he sees as the rise of fascism in the United States, arguing bluntly that “The US needs a counter-revolution.”

The comments matter because Spiegelman has long occupied a rare place in American letters and visual culture: his work is not only canonical in comics, but also central to how the form entered wider literary and cultural debate. Maus did not simply win acclaim; it helped prove that graphic narrative could carry historical trauma, moral seriousness and political urgency at the highest level. Spiegelman’s latest remarks suggest that, for him, the same medium still remains a tool for warning, resistance and memory.

The conversation also casts light on how Spiegelman’s own life remains tied to New York’s changing social landscape. When he began dating Françoise Mouly in the mid-1970s, she told him not to worry about escorting her home because even New York muggers did not bother going to Soho, where she lived. He soon moved in after his apartment in Greenwich Village burned down, a sudden turn that followed a grimly comic episode involving a landlord who lived downstairs, hoarded clutter and once had a cockroach crawl up from under his shirt collar while collecting rent. Eventually that accumulation of junk caught fire.