loser. i'm going to show you that i'm the winner. >> to some, the red carpet comes calling, for many mary mains a dream and is likely to stay that way at least in the short term. al jazeera, los angeles. >> you can find more about the oscars and rest of the day's news on the website. piegelman. >> i was trying to figure out as an incredibly self centered human, how did i get on this man it when my bairnts supposed to be dead. >> art spiegelman, had a brother he hadn't met. he had a brother that had been

poisoned to not be found by the nazis. >> a pristine and perfect rival i wouldn't be able to live up to. >> controversial covers for the new yorker magazine. >> you know, they should just. >> and some that captured a nation's mood. >> you could see the phantom limb. the ghost of the towers. that had just fallen. >> i spoke to art spiegelman where couldmix. >> art spiegelman, welcome. glad to have you here. >> thanks for having me. >> you talk about your work. >> fine art. i don't even mo what that means -- know what that means anymore. i think it's a hustle. >> what do you mean? >> what passes for old world art is kind of strange extension of junk bonds and fashion.

>> is there a difference between what appears on the cover of a magazine or a book than what goes up on a wall? >> well, i mean, i would say 95% of the work that's here was meant for publication. which means certain things are forgiven. those thought drawings are often more attractive to me than the final drawing that's meant to be printed. because their occasional ineptitude, their ways of thinking are more manifest. as important as the result. >> in some ways the center piece of this program is "maus." what led you to "maus"? >> i have this cross-over hit which is "maus." but in order to understand "maus," some of the comments or, in

quotes, experiments that came before. in my underground comics in san francisco and new york. figure out what's under the hood that makes a comics understandable or ill lus illus more directly or, find a gallery to represent me and i didn't want that. so the answer to that question you asked about ten minutes back, is just what led me to make "maus" was seeing how difficult it was for people to understand what i was up to in a nonnarrative work. and if i would consider an narrative, how difficult it was for me to draw and make the things i wanted to make and have a narrative worth making, and in 1978, "maus" was it. >> was it the stories your

parents would tell? >> my bad passive polish when they were talking about themselves. >> their parents were holocaust survivors. >> from poled. i would hear some stories that would have no context. these horrifying intense fight mayor images but without anyplace to put them. >> you were listening to conversations that your parents were having. >> yeah or with their friends. they hung out with other survivors, as people who would know what -- you know they would have a common core of experiences to talk from. i would hear bits and snippets but i have never been able to frame a meaningful narrative out of it. my mother spoke of it again in snippets to me again but without me understanding and my father just didn't want to talk about it. it was just like oh, people don't want to hear such stories. not now. when i was an adult and went back

to him after a long estrangement, it was okay, he just didn't want to tell me about it as a kid. after a three page underground story of "maus," before it became the book. i showed him what i was working on and that started a conversation. >> what was important about the narrative, what was important about the message from "maus"? >> it's not about a message. sorry i don't -- messages are efficient, you can put them in an e-mail. what i was trying to think about as an incredibly self centered human is how did i get on this earth when both my parents were supposed to be dead? plunge back into the miss mists of time. not as ubiquity as

-- ubiquitous as it was sense. in the genera of the '70s '72, '70, the word that had been used was genocide, it was invented for that purpose after the war. so there just wasn't a context to work from. and that's what got me interested, there was no context yet it was the central fact in my family home. >> so as a child you're hearing these stories and you're beginning to get -- you're putting away some things that you grow into being an adult and learning about the holocaust but wanting to know more? good people want to know more. i'm working on these other aspects about what comics can be. it's so much work to do a comic right, even though it's something people think you do on the pack of math tests. that's a toir a story that is worth telling and in some of

these rooms is a drawing i did in the new yorker after "life is beautiful" came out as a movie men in striped uniform sitting under bashed barbed wire, thanks to all the little people who made this possible, the subtext, now there's an oscar award for best holocaust movie, as if it was a genre. >> you say your father didn't want to tell you these stories until you were an adult, when you finally did sit down and talk to him about it, it must have been incredibly hard to hear. >> it was. but in other ways something really strange, which is why i undertook "maus" as a book later. the conversations were in '72. i moved away from new york, came back in '75, talking talking to him

through a towel i put on the phone, i just talked to him, i finally cop seeded i was in new york, we have to do something together, we found a place where i would be quiet and listen and a place where he had his son attentive, when we were talking about the death camps and what he lived through there. the eery profound way that is not lost on me we found a common ground and quiet way to be together, because around the death camps. >> a comic about the holocaust? >> it sound like an ox 80 more oxymoron to me. it denied -- an oxymoron to me. , it sounded stupid but so is much paint. >> it took you a decade to do

this. why? >> short attention span.it was complicated to do this. i neated a comic that didn't ask to be reread. i nt have the -- i didn't have the graphic novel in my head. it didn't exist. >> you completed it, it won a pulitzer prize. what does a pulitzer prize mean to someone like you? >> i don't worry about you let's have lunch. you have to understand, this is either a death sentence or a license to kill. and it's been both at various times i must say. but what it actually meant was people wouldn't give me the time of day or take me seriously enough to keep me working. it is a responsibility and i don't -- i've never learned how to bear the responsibility responsibly. parents.

what was their life like? >> i don't know how to answer that. in a way that's the story certified those 300 pages. they weren't well assimilated in america. they had made too many moves prior to that. they didn't understand quite the culture they were in. and when the kinds of displacement that involved losing a son, they lost what would have been my older brother in the war and losing most of their relatives, parents brothers, sisters, both from large families, doesn't leave you comfortably rooted in the world. both of them were wrecks of a certain kind. both wrecks. >> when did you learn the story of your brother? >> some ways, kids know everything before they know anything you know, there was a photograph of this whatever, three-year-old boy blown up from a small photograph in their

bedroom hike a kind of out of -- like kind of an out of focus shrine. that was always present. i got some sense, they had a sense that didn't 75 into the present o-- survive into the present. my phantom brother. i knew there was this kind of boy who on the one hand was my sibling and on the other hand, some pristine and perfect arrival who wouldn't mouth off and i was, constantly. >> you have been asked what lesson the holocaust teaches us and you said -- >> i don't know -- >> that it's kind of a cheap shot, to answer the question like that diminishes the holocaust. >> isn't anything as sanctimonious as that. innobles. that's not the take away. and it's certainly not the idea that never again, because we've been doing it ever since. these

genocidal reductions of the other into the non-human and thereby, worthy of extermination, is just an ongoing process in many wars that have happened since an are still potentially present. so i don't think there's any use value to the holocaust except things. >> when you were mentioning the diary that your mother gave you i've read that you also have pictures or drawings that were done by survivors. how did that help you in your research for "maus"? >> very important, that was really important. because one thing they didn't have much in auschwitz among everything else was cameras. so there was no way to visually witness what was happening. in fact by the end of the war a lot of it was being destroyed as evidence by the retreating germans. the only visual witness tended

to be people drawing usually at great personal risk where sometimes the drawings would survive and they wouldn't or they would be buried and found later. and those provided a way to visualize the oxymoron of life inside a death camp. >> coming up. i'll talk to art spiegelman in >> monday. >> this is the place where 43 students were handed over to criminal organizations. >> a crime that shocked the world. >> the military is about a mile away. they say that they didn't hear anything. >> where are mexico's missing students? >> kidnappings keep going up human security is collapsing. >> "faultlines". al jazeera america's hard-hitting... >> today they will be arrested. >> ground-breaking... >> they're firing canisters of gas at us. >> award-winning investigative documentary series. "mexico's disappeared". monday, 10:00 eastern. only on al jazeera america.

>> welcome back to "talk to al jazeera." i'm john siegenthaler and my guest today is art spiegelman the author of "maus." you have had an incredible career but part of that career is work being for the new yorker. had you ever done a magazine cover before? >> i think i did. new yorker covers are not usually connected to stories statements. in the heyday of the new yorker in the postwar new yorker especially, the idea was to give respite, a moment of calm on the honking blaring tawdry passing parade. so they would be images of cebt scenes or of the city -- connecticut scenes or the city drawing. that was the-cartoon drawing. i seemed to her like a likely terrorist so -- but you know, it

was -- i was a likely person to bring into that mix. i didn't know what it meant but she had no special i thought reverenrce. i was more likely to read underground newspapers or comic books or other things than the basis. i was enlisted at the end of '92 and my wife francois was brought in later. when francois and i got back from ground zero -- >> you lived near ground zero? >> about ten blocks from ground zero. we saw the plane going into the building. went running downtown, managed to extricate our daughter and started walking up the west

sidessidehe esplanade as the other tower fell. as soon as we were back in any kind of phone contact there is a message for francois saying, get up here we're putting out a special issue. i didn't know what to do but figured out what a cover might be and between francois and me covered that black on back cover. that cover looked black on black, but you could see the phantom limb, the ghost of the towers that had just fallen. the only clue was a pierced cover. >> what were you trying to say on that? was there something you were trying to say? >> in a moment where most any imagery would be too much, it seemed pulling back towards

minimalism was a good idea. my house to my studio which was two blocks further north, i had to keep turning around to make sure the towers were not still there. i don't especially loving my nose but i don't want anybody poking their fist into it, you know, there was that. the only thing that could be said was that feeling of loss, mourning and eerie twilight, not understanding what reality was reconfigured. the thing that would flash only in certain light of being manifest. otherwise, it was a total blackness. that seemed appropriate to the spirit and mood of what was happening in new york in the week following september 11th. >> one of the other memorable covers for the new yorker was the kiss. >> that was the first one.

>> the picture of a black west indian woman with a hasidic man. what that? >> i was looking at eustace tilly. doodling hinge. i wondered what he would look like if he was -- for months and months before, the violence that erupted in crown heights between the hasidic community and the black exunt, kind of a -- munt community, kind of a race riot had he should just kiss and make up. how can i express that thought it was like finding a thought poking around, like a scientists in the lab, this rather

rather attractively faux naive picture, a possible valentine's picture dealt with something charge was explosive at that moment, so different than what had come before the magazine's history. >> the female construction worker nursing her child? where did that come from? >> before i met francois. >> your wife. >> doing electrical sheetrocking, plumbing, acting as a play working as an architectural model-builder, cobbling and a salesperson of candy at a counter, this was her -- anything i can do could compete with that, i can put words together and pictures together a little bit. but maybe it came from that on some primitive level. it just seeing this woman, i

don't know what was in the news at that moment but probably something about women wanting to be accepted as firefighters, policemen, part of the zeitgeist, breast feeding seemed like a beautiful image of another kind. >> children and guns -- >> that is my favorite cufer. >> why is cover? good because i thought it caught well that weird balancing act, looks so benign and innocent, charge. >> this was 1993. >> yeah, it was way before columbine and the rest. >> yeah. but there's already some conversations about guns in schools and just guns in general being so pervasive in the culture and that just seemed like the perfect back-to-school image, people carrying their

uzis and automatic weapons. the new yorker has a very good fact checking department they're very diligent. the question of should we or shouldn't we, i figured some two triggers on the background guns, that was useful. we noticed there was a girl in the back ground, a world war i gatling, what's up with that? she a scholarship kid, she couldn't afford it, it's a private school, her great grandfather's gun was in the attic, that was the best she could do at the time. it was the time they invented the unauthor. >> you are a political commentator. you like that. >> i can leave it for a month and get obsessively engaged again.

>> you left the new yorker, why? >> i needed to go to the building out of the shadow of the towers. >> you say -- is that fair? >> it's not fair. it came from one italian journalist who i've tried to avoid from there. it would be such a dopey protest in the sense that the new yorker was more open than most. politically. so it didn't seem like this would be the most effective place to protest. >> did you get tired, let's just put it this way: did you get tired of doing covers? you had success at it, you wanted to move on? >> maybe. you know but i wish i hadn't left in protest in quotes so i could leave in protest when there was an editorial endorsing the notion that we should have a war in iraq, in a magazine that doesn't usually

have op-ed type pieces in which a reluctant talk was made by a man i respect, david remn inkck i didn't want to become the new yorker's art spiegelman which made me restless to a degree. maybe there was something of i've done this i don't want to keep doing it. part of it was at that moment i really needed to make pages about being stuck in september 11th, 2001. >> i want to talk a little bit more about process when we come back. >> okay.

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>> welcome back i'm john siegenthaler. my guest today is comic artist art spiegelman. let me ask you about the process. how do you start creating let's say a cover, or some sort of work that you know, do you start with a drawing? >> well, often it's from a concept rather than a drawing. but what i mean by that is, it related to something i said earlier about how comics seem to me the most serious endeavor that one could be involved in rather than something trivial, comics are a deal with images. that means, they deal with images we have inside our world, in order to explain the world. the baby have a simple smiley

face, and rather than a mother's smile. nailing these images are the process of making a comic. the iconic images and usually there's something exists between word and picture, usually something that's bugging me. when i feel good i tend not to make pictures. i don't have that kind of joie de vivre let me paint the sunset, it's usually an irritant that i have to work through that leads to my better pieces. >> again, when i look on the wall and i see some of this work, it, comic doesn't seem to me to give it as much respect and tribute as it deserves. >> that's why i started misspelling it to, comic had to be light and funny. the only thing i wanted to do is comics and i'm still not well equipped to do it. >> i would disagree.

>> i know what i can do. >> i look forward to seeing more of your work. thank >> announcer: this is al jazeera. ♪ hello from doha everyone. this is the news hour on al jazeera. government troops are forced out of a town in eastern ukraine after an assault by pro-russian rebels. also a state of emergency in myanmar, after an attack on a red cross convoy. egypt wants more support from the united states after striking isil-linked