TORONTO – Art Spiegelman has always been a target.

First, when he published his Pulitzer-prize winning opus Maus – a book that legitimized the literary power of comics while helping him cope with the trauma of his parent’s survival at Birkenau and Auschwitz – he took heat from the Polish when he represented them as pigs, even though he was only satirizing Hitler’s own dehumanizing propaganda.

Then, his very first cover image for the New Yorker, on Valentine’s Day, 1993, brought in angry letters from Chasidim when he depicted what appeared to be a Chasidic Jew kissing and embracing a black woman, even though she looked just as complicit. Finally in 2006, the issue of Harper’s containing Drawing Blood, his article discussing the validity of the Danish Mohammed cartoons and telling stories of other artists persecuted for their work throughout history, was banned at all Indigo locations. Ironically, he points out, putting him on the same list as Hitler’s Mien Kampf.

So it’s no wonder he was invited by Hillel Toronto to give his lecture on censorship and free speech at the University of Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre last Thursday, when he practically wrote the book.

 Titled Comix 101: Forbidden Images and the Art of Outrage, Spiegelman’s lecture explored the mixed messages of censorship and the power an image carries; a power that is no more evident than in Spiegelman’s own medium. Comics were dangerous influences in the 1950s and to concerned mothers everywhere; still are for one reason.

“Comics pierce into your brain deeper than what language can do, past all of your critical thought centres into a visceral blur,” he said. “A baby can recognize a happy face before its mother’s smile, so we’re wired to respond to these high-definition cartoon images.”

In some ways this is good, we recognize the punch line of a comic strip almost immediately without words, but these images can also be used to dehumanize.

Spiegelman’s unofficial collaborator on Maus, Hitler knew this well. He turned Jews into vermin, Spiegelman later throwing it back as satire in Maus. Still, Hitler’s tactic wasn’t limited to the Nazis. The US forces turned the Japanese into mice in a trap for their own propaganda campaign. Comics are so steeped in stereotype, Spiegleman revealed, that in a ‘Learn to Draw’ book of the 1930s, you could practice your pencil work by drawing ‘kikes,’ ‘niggers’ and ‘injuns’

Speigelman added that it isn’t just an image’s power to distill human beings down ethnic lines that’s concerning, it’s also how it is repressed from public view. He showed a photo of a naked, bruised and beaten Abu Ghraib prisoner with his genitalia blocked out to illustrate this point.

“We don’t know how to process these images and as a result, what makes this image more obscene to me is the black box that indicates there is something sexual and that’s seen as the invasion of this man, rather than the dehumanizing abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib.”

It’s an image’s power to confuse and distort like this that really gets to the heart of why censorship is detrimental to humanity for Spiegelman. “Images have the power to confuse; they don’t always unpack the way you think they should that’s why discussion and not repression is crucial.”