foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you I'm not here as Arts colleague today I am here as art spiegelman's friend art art makes art he makes pictures he makes words he combines the visual art with the literary art and he makes Magic art studied cartooning at the High School of Art and Design in New York City he became an underground cartoonist joining the underground Comics movement inspired by and descended from the creators of Mad Magazine the first thing of Arts I ever read I would have been about 14 Maybe 15. and it was a reprint of
a three-page autobiographical comic about a Jewish Mouse who was a holocaust Survivor telling his son a bedtime story about Jewish mice and Nazi cats that was the first time I read anything by art and the first time I noticed that I was a genius art is a genius it is important for you to remember this he is a mensch but he's a genius uh taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1979 to 1986 where my school friend Jeff knockkin had the life that I was convinced I should be having because Jeff had somehow gotten
out of England made it all the way to New York and was being taught by art spiegelman um Jeff eventually wound up an assistant editor on Raw the amazing Comics art magazine periodical that art and his wife The Fabulous Francoise mooli were creating um and I back in England would read raw which was this enormous magazine and inside raw each issue of raw there would be a tiny little comic where it felt tiny by comparison and it was called Mouse and it took that initial conceit of Jewish mice and Nazi cats and it expanded it
and it expanded it into the story of Art and of Art's father and of the Holocaust I knew it was a work of genius and because I was friends with Jeff I got to meet art and Francois and baby Naja in the ICA The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 86 and I met art as my friend Jeff's friend but over the next 10 15 years I became Art's friend and Francis friend and I watched as art made garbage pale kids and was attacked in the Press I watched as art became a staff Artist
At The New Yorker creating iconic covers that were each of them in themselves a story the Hasidic kiss crucified tax return Easter Bunny the black missing Towers of the 9 11. issue Unforgettable issue images all of which stories and I was there and watched art get a Pulitzer Prize for mouse a special Pulitzer because at that point nobody had ever given any big Awards to Comics before nobody quite knew how so they had to make a whole new special Pulitzer category and I was in it all on his own I'd known art now well I
think for well over two decades he's one of the kindest people I know he's one of the wisest people I know he is in every way a mensch he is a New Yorker who is a citizen of the world he's a maker of comics who redefined what Comics were capable of and how they were perceived he changed the level of respect Comics got and he's a troublemaker and today he is still out there making trouble today Penn America sent a letter out protesting the latest round of book Bannings I was proud to be on it
American Gods has been banned [Applause] but up there first and foremost making trouble art spiegelman's signature because Mouse is banned a game and a game and again and if you ask me there's only one kind of people who really want Mouse band and they're the same kind of people who didn't want things like Mouse to exist back in 1942 either it's with Incredible pleasure that I get to give the medal to art spiegelman [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thanks Neil for Lending yourself to this occasion
and for so consistently being a good friend as well as a world-class black belt Storyteller black because he looks good in Black so thanks to the National book Foundation that has done so much to Champion literature but now welcomes me and Comics into that category with this medal uh milestone in my life I'm also thankful that I didn't mispronounce Milestone as Millstone since I was so terrified about putting together an acceptance speech for this event and for this August crowd I even contemplated sending a suicide note instead but hey I had writer's block nothing like
a Lifetime Achievement Award to make me feel like my lifetime might be over so this award is for my distinguished contribution to American letters and I really do feel honored but like what about the pictures I now know that everyone you've mystically calls them graphic novels I've even been called a father of the graphic novel but I'm still demanding a blood test for me comics with an X as into Comics words and pictures is a more accurate description of the form I love in the future if we have one could we say this is an
award for American letters plus pictorial signs co-mixed with an X together or at least let's call it an award for American letters and emojis Against All Odds Mao's became a Blockbuster it was kind of sweet generous and had therefore been rejected by every publisher in town today this award makes my book a blockbuster yet again as in what they're letting cartoonists into the Great Hall of literature well there goes the neighborhood mouse was never made to teach anybody but me anything I was just trying to understand how I got onto this planet with two parents
who were supposed to be dead long before I got here I was not trying to write out Auschwitz for beginners and I confessed I was annoyed at first when I got a young adult Library award after 13 years of working on a book for adults in their Heyday Comics were read by millions of adults as well as kids it's just that most adults were embarrassed to be seen by well reading them you know that's why they changed it to graphic novels um a moral panic in the 1950s but more than half of all Comics Publishers
out of business for uh causing juvenile delinquency politicians the clergy teachers and parents collected them not because they would someday become as valuable as nfts but to protect our children and they literally threw the books into public bonfires the more things change when mouse was pulled from a middle school curriculum in McMinn County Tennessee this year my book became a cause for Libra in today's brilliant virulent book Banning culture War and my shrewd marketers on that local school board made Mouse shoot up to the top of every bestseller list thanks to alarmed readers around the
world there may have been some good old vestigial anti-Semitism involved but I don't think it was exactly Holocaust denial as one school teacher was at the board meeting even said I love the Holocaust I love the Holocaust but this is not a book I would teach students everyone just wanted a Kinder gentler Holocaust to teach as well as wanting to control thought and maybe eviscerate trust in public education so that tax money can be diverted toward private and religious schools there's still a general if shrinking consensus that the Holocaust was a bad thing most of
today's attack books many of them graphic novels deal with queer identities in America's race issues Mal's deals and granulars that tell with my parents experience as Jews in Nazi Europe but I think it became a universal symbol for all murderous othering because of its fable-like animal metaphors so this medal is for a distinguished contribution it's not an adjective I associate with cartoonists in fact I'm proud of my mediums vulgar Roots its ability to to stir controversy to provoke and sometimes even make people laugh Harvey kurtzman who kneel just evoked he's the genius who created Mad
comics as well as sober anti-war war war comics during the McCarthy era and the Korean War he surely deserved a Lifetime Achievement Award for rewiring the way several Generations learned to think and question authority and if this is a Lifetime Achievement Award it's got to include my decades working for Tops bubblegum on Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids thank you as as well as my New Yorker covers starting in the 90s they got a generation of readers in their 90s to cancel their subscriptions [Applause] my year culminating in this award has been really sobering I'd
always vowed to not become the Elie Wiesel of comic books in fact in the years after Mouse I would draw myself trying to outrun a 500 pound Mouse trying to either evade or supersede that work but now I've had to try to become a mensch it's been a long march to turn around and embrace the 500 pound Mouse while fascist storm clouds gather together to gather yet again all over our frying planet so I'm even grateful that Mal's may now have an afterlife as a cautionary tale that it might make readers insist never again in
the future even if the past for other other minorities has often been a matter of never again and again and again thank you all and see you in the funny papers wait wait I want to thank my friends and enablers at Pantheon and at the Wiley agency who've always had my back and and most most especially Francoise my better half for over 40 years my love my tech support and my most astute editor merci beaucoup for putting up with me when I find my pizza cutter with a diamond blade Francoise you get half the medal
thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
