American Masters

- [Speaker] Art Spiegelman is the guy that reinvented comics as a medium that people took seriously.

- The thing that amazed me about Mouse was the audacity.

- Thank you so much, it's something I've read so many times over the years, I can't thank you enough.

- [Speaker] It is drawn as if you took a pen and put it in the heart, and the heart drew this.

- [Speaker] I was absolutely floored at what you could do with a comic.

- Everything I know, I learned from comic books.

I learned how to read from looking at Batman and trying to figure out whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and ethics, aesthetics, and everything else from Mad Magazine.

- The thread that ties most underground comics together is transgression.

By showing stuff you're not supposed to show, you're robbing it of its power.

- I didn't understand how someone could be so intimate on paper.

And that blew my mind.

- I did take comics very, very seriously, and I thought they were an incredibly maligned art form, and this was as valid as anything that happened in literature or in painting or in cinema.

- [Speaker] He opened up the door that a lot of us went through.

- [Speaker] Art always seems to be standing at this point in these histories.

- [Art] Man, did that get people upset, that was the one that really did it.

- [Newscaster] Growing backlash over a Tennessee school board's decision to ban a Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Holocaust.

- Oi.

- It is a work that has not lost any relevance in the nearly 40 years since it was first read.

- Thank you all and see you in the funny papers.