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The title of this chapter feels like an interesting play on words because he is talking about the changes in time, like when he compares his father in May of 1944 verses May of 1987. He is also drawn with flies around him. This represents Artie feeling stuck and gross within himself. He feels depressed and these flies support that as they move throughout all the panels.
Julia Gunsiorowski

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The chapter opens up with Artie sitting at his drawing desk. He is shown wearing a mouse mask. This was a huge change from how Vol I was set up. Art uses past and present within one speech bubble. This stood out to me because he was using the time to show the changes that have occurred within his father's lifetime and his own. This also showed that Vol II was taking him a while because of all the recent events in his life. He is drawn with stubble under his mask and he looks tired and depressed. Even though he talks about Vol I being a success he doesn't seem happy about it.
Julia Gunsiorowski

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Art doesn’t really understand why everyone loves Maus.
Why is it a critical and commercial success?
He doesn’t want to be interviewed about his work which you can see as he slowly shrinks to kid form, showing the innocence he has for the story.  He doesn’t want to exploit his father’s life like his publicist wants to do.  He never tended for a specific message in his book, so he doesn’t know how to ask the questions like, “Why should they feel guilty?” He doesn’t feel like an adult because of all the pressure and persistent questions that everyone gives.
Brianna Schroeder

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Art makes the characters humans with an animal mask. He uses animals that he doesn’t really use before like rabbits, dogs, and a bear.  He used a cat mask when one interviewer was speaking about the German people and how they should feel.  The bear is the publicist, it gives the essence of a bear hug, that he can’t really escape what the publicist is going to make him do.
He probably uses the mask to show the readers the impact everything had on him, take the reader out of the father’s narrative and into his own.
Brianna Schroeder

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Why ‘Maus’ remains ‘the greatest graphic novel ever written,’ 30 years later

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Why ‘Maus’ remains ‘the greatest graphic novel ever written,’ 30 years later

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"Yet Spiegelman only gradually realized what a long and arduous endeavor it would be — just as publishers didn’t initially realize what a literary accomplishment he was gradually carving out."

"'In the beginning, I thought: This will be about a two-year project,' says the cartoonist, who, between each of the book’s chapters, would take on a less creatively taxing assignment. It took him 13 years from conceiving of it as a book to its completion."
Spiegelman didn't expect this to be such a huge project nor did he expect to carve out a huge literary accomplishment. He was simply writing this book to share his father's story and his story as a survivor's son. He chose to do it in a unique way that opened doors for many more graphic novels in the future. It was a long process not only because of how important it was that he do it right due to the sensitivity of the topic but also because pf how hard it was for him to process and write the story. It caused him a lot of depression, especially when working on Vol II after his dad had died.
Julia Gunsiorowski

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A panel from Art Spiegelman's "MetaMaus" - a 25th-anniversary "Maus" compendium. (courtesy of Art Spiegelman and Pantheon Books)

ART SPIEGELMAN didn't set out to reinvent a swath of his chosen field. He was only trying to tap his family history, even as he sat clear across the country estranged from his New York father, several years after his mother committed suicide.

Spiegelman, having survived a nervous breakdown while living in New York, had set out for San Francisco, where by 1972 he was thriving in the underground comix scene. An assignment came for a three-page comic, and so he decided to emotionally unpack his parents' Holocaust. His father had survived Auschwitz; could he tap Dad's harrowing experiences, despite their differences?

"All I knew was: This is unfinished business," Spiegelman tells The Post's Comic Riffs by phone from France, while traveling to a festival.

He drew the comic, but the depth of this powerful personal wellspring did not ebb. Several years later, Spiegelman moved back East. "I went to visit him with a tape recorder," the cartoonist says of his father, Vladek, who lived in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens, "and figured this would be the start of something."

"Something" turned out to be "Maus," the Pulitzer-winning graphic memoir, a landmark project that led the American public, including many literary critics, toward seeing comics as a serious art form. Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary since the first collected volume, "Maus, a Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History" (Pantheon Books), was published.

Today, amid the massive boom in graphic novels, it can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer "Maus" was.

The comic installments ran in serial form in RAW, the indie "graphix" magazine launched in 1980 by Spiegelman and his editor-wife, Francoise Mouly, now art editor at the New Yorker. That's where rock-star cartoonist Chris Ware ("Building Stories") first read it. "Probably more than any other single comic, it made me see not only the potential for complex, moving and intelligent storytelling in comics, but also galvanized my own resolve to become a graphic novelist," he says.

Has Chris Ware just influenced the future of the magazine cover?

The series inspired another budding young cartoonist in the '80s, acclaimed "Bone" creator Jeff Smith. "It was a big deal. My comics pals and I were blown away," says Smith, who first met Spiegelman while a student in an Ohio State University class, in 1986. "Nobody had ever seen anything like it."

"The most brilliant thing was, this same person who came up with Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids [cards] now decided to depict the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. Wow. This was in equal parts outrageous, disturbing, subversive, witty - and yet somehow comforting," says Smith, who is director of the forthcoming Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival in Ohio. "By using talking animals, Spiegelman allows his readers just enough emotional-safety distance to be able to follow a story that takes place during the Holocaust. Before you know it, you are with Vladek, unmoored and slipping into the cruelest pits of hell."

Yet Spiegelman only gradually realized what a long and arduous endeavor it would be - just as publishers didn't initially realize what a literary accomplishment he was gradually carving out.

"In the beginning, I thought: This will be about a two-year project," says the cartoonist, who, between each of the book's chapters, would take on a less creatively taxing assignment. It took him 13 years from conceiving of it as a book to its completion.

After "Maus" comics had appeared in the biannual RAW for about five years, Spiegelman pitched the work to publishers - meeting little enthusiasm. Then, in 1985, Ken Tucker's essay for the New York Times hailed the work-in-progress as "a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness," and it quoted a Library of Congress graphic-art curator who said that the cutting-edge "Maus" returned "an excitement that has been lost in comic art."

"The result," Spiegelman says, "was all of a sudden, Pantheon was interested in putting out the first volume."

It landed in August 1986, inspiring a generation of up-and-comers who held no prejudices about the comics form.

"I first read 'Maus' in my late teens," says Gene Luen Yang, a literary ambassador for the Library of Congress whose 2006 "American Born Chinese" would become the first graphic novel to be named a National Book Award finalist. "Art Spiegelman set the standard for the rest of us . . . He gave us something to chase after."

Spiegelman created "Maus" as a "frame tale," depicting his '70s conversations with his father as a contextual window into the World War II experiences of Vladek and his wife, Anja - both Polish Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. Anja's mental-health issues are foreshadowed in "Maus"; she committed suicide several months after son Art left a state mental hospital, after a brief stay, in 1968.

Spiegelman drew "Maus" in black-and-white hatched panels, intentionally using a simple style that heightens the blunt impact of the content. And the cartoonist deftly employs many subtle tricks and literary devices - from visual foreshadowing to well-timed flashbacks - that gather cumulative force. "Maus" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, after the publication of its second volume.

"I had no idea the book would have the impact and resonance that it's had since," says Spiegelman, whose shorter works include "In the Shadow of No Towers" and "Breakdowns." "My mission wasn't to make a long comic book that needs a book mark."

(And it's worth noting: The legendary Will Eisner, author of "A Contract With God," had popularized the term "graphic novel" some years earlier, and Spiegelman now champions such early "wordless novelists" as Flemish wood-cut artist Frans Masereel and American Lynd Ward.)

Some, like Smith, wish that Spiegelman would do more long-form comics. Spiegelman says "Maus" was the one time he felt compelled to write one. "Some people want a 'Maus' 3, 4 or 5," says Spiegelman, laughing. "But that's it."

And really, what more needs to be said?

"It continues," Ware says, "to be the greatest graphic novel ever written."

With 'Metamaus,' Art Spiegelman reveals the details of an emotional journey

Read this: Yang's rousing diversity speech at the National Book Festival gala

Why teachers shouldn't ban the graphic novel from their classrooms

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why 'Maus' remains 'the greatest graphic novel ever written,' 30 years later

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ART SPIEGELMAN didn't set out to reinvent a swath of his chosen field. He was only trying to tap his family history, even as he sat clear across the country estranged from his New York father, several years after his mother committed suicide.

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Complexities of publishing a "bestseller" about the Holocaust

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Complexities of publishing a "bestseller" about the Holocaust

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You can see how working on this book has been very hard for him. Even after publishing Vol I and the success it receives, he feels lost. People want to interview him, they want to figure out his "message" for writing this book but Artie doesn't have a specific message. He just wanted to share his father's story in a medium that can be easier understood. The interviewers want to ask him a bunch of deep questions but Artie doesn't have the answers because all he wanted to do was get his father's story out to the world. All of this made writing Vol II harder for him. He was depressed and lost in all of the media. He wasn't feeling like a functioning adult.
Julia Gunsiorowski

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Maus' author Art Spiegelman shares the story behind his Pulitzer-winning work

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Maus' author Art Spiegelman shares the story behind his Pulitzer-winning work

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"People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust...But it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. They come across very viscerally. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book."
Art Spiegelman knows that using a comic strip format for a topic as dark and important as the Holocaust may be strange but he does it this way because he knows that the readers have to do a lot more to decode a comic and really get to the raw understanding which is what he wanted the readers to experience. He published it this way so readers could get a more in-depth understanding of the story he was telling.
Brianna Schroeder

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book.

In "Maus," Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape. He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. The book has moving flashback sequences as his father describes passing as a Gentile, hiding out in bunkers, and facing death in a concentration camp. Here's Art Spiegelman talking to Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ART SPIEGELMAN: People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust. Like, just too - it's an oxymoron somewhere in there, and people just don't want to hear any more after that.

But it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. They come across very viscerally. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: When did you first become aware that your parents were survivors?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I can't remember not knowing it, but on the other hand, I can't remember it ever being a significant fact. It was just one more thing that I knew about my parents. So that when I was a little kid, my mother had a tattooed number, and every once in a while, friends of mine would ask, Mrs. Spiegelman, why do you have a number tattooed on your - well, not tattooed. Why do you have a number on your arm? And she would say it was a phone number she didn't want to forget or something like that. So it was built into the fabric of our life without it being a specifically pointed one. And on the other hand, a lot of their friends and therefore their friends' children were also involved in the same background. So it wasn't that anomalous.

GROSS: But before you sat down and actually said to your father, tell me the story of how you survived, had he actually told you anecdotes about his survival during the war?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, yeah, but the same way that some other person my age's parents might have told them about life in the Depression, you know? Oh, it was really hard back then. And the anecdote would just glimmer in and out between talking about taking out the garbage or doing homework.

GROSS: I got the impression that you were frequently taught grim lessons about life based on your parents' experiences during the Holocaust.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, that was something I didn't know until I left home. It's true. What would happen is these stories, which really haunted me, I didn't know were haunting me because they were what I was breathing. And it was only when I got some other perspective when I went away to college and was surrounded by people who didn't have those ghosts hovering over them that I realized there was something unusual about growing up with parents who survived a form of hell.

GROSS: Did you have Nazi dreams when you were growing up?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I - see, one thing - I guess one thing that haunted me when I was growing up was this one blown-up photograph. It was a photograph that was originally just maybe two inches by two inches, but it was a large portrait photograph of what would have been my brother if he had survived the war. So I remember having dreams about him, although I never met him or knew much about him beyond a couple of anecdotes and that photograph. And although I don't remember all of them, I remember one fantasy that was recurrent was being in school and then the principal, instead of just telling everybody good morning on the PA system, would tell all the Jewish students to go out to the school yard, you know, that kind of thing.

GROSS: You didn't have dreams where you were chased by Nazis.

SPIEGELMAN: I think I've probably had many, you know. Any older kid that I was having trouble with would immediately have a swastika on his arm, you know.

GROSS: When you approached your father and sat him down and said, you know, tell me chronologically all the details you can remember from the war and from surviving the Nazis, was it hard for him to talk about it?

SPIEGELMAN: Not especially, although when I was growing up, my mother was more voluble than my father on the subject. And yet when I came back as an adult, he was rather giving of it. It wasn't a problem. And in fact, he didn't even seem to be aware of the fact that I was taping or anything till the very end. Getting it chronologically was impossible. Getting the conversation from him came in tidbits that were mosaic that had to be reassembled and worked out later. And sometimes, I felt like I was playing a pinball machine and trying to avoid those penalty holes because I'd ask a question and it would fall right back into an anecdote I had before. And there's no way to get out of the anecdote till I went through the entire 20-minute sequence, you know?

But the way I got it from him was after I did that comic strip in '71, I went back - and so I'm - actually even before I'd finished the comic strip, while I was two-thirds through. And I showed it to him, and I told him I wanted to tape him then. For the entire three- or four-hour session, which was when I got the bold outlines of what's now the book, he seemed totally oblivious to the tape recorder. We were just sitting on the terrace and talking. And then at the very end, he grabbed the microphone from me and says, and so, ladies and gentlemen, this is how it was and I want - you should know so nothing, God forbid, like this - so many millions were killed and that should never happen again - it was a statement for posterity, but I wasn't - he took me by surprise.

GROSS: One of the things that really struck me in "Maus" was that every time he'd finish telling you this story about narrowly surviving some horrible thing, whether it's at a prisoner of war camp or being hidden away in a bunker in somebody's cellar who was protecting him or, you know, trying to pass for gentile, he'd come out of the story and he'd say something really petty, you know, like, criticize you for smoking or what you were wearing or something. Can you tell the coat story?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, the coat story. After my father finished telling me the story one day, I just went to get my coat to leave, and I couldn't find it. So I was kind of walking around asking my stepmother if she had seen it, and she hadn't. And my father said, yeah, he knew exactly where it was. He had thrown it out. And at first, I don't believe him, and I asked him to give it back, and he says it's too late. He said, when you were sitting first down to dinner, I threw it outside. By now, the garbage men took it away. Such an old, shabby coat, it's a shame my son should wear such a coat. But I like it. I have for you a warmer one. I got myself at Alexander's a new jacket, and I can give to you my old one. It's still like new. Here, just try on it. Try it on a minute. Oh, great, a Naugahyde windbreaker, and it's too big. It looks on you like a million dollars. Look, Dad, you can't do this to me. I'm over 30 years old. I choose my own clothes. After you wear it a little, you'll see how good it looks. Come. I'll walk you downstairs. And then I went downstairs and kind of looked in the garbage can, and it was just buried under muck and I couldn't believe it. But I walked home in a Naugahyde oversized jacket that I didn't like. But it was typical of what my father would do to try to arrange my life to his liking.

GROSS: I kept thinking that just at the moment when you would be feeling tenderness towards your father and realizing the hell that he had survived, that he'd do something really manipulative like that, like throwing out the coat that you really love so he could give you his Naugahyde parka or something. And, I mean, how would you reconcile that? I mean, what you're supposed to do - like, the way it's supposed to be is that you find out your father's life story, all the hostilities of the past are erased, tenderness takes over, you embrace each other, you understand each other, and you reconcile.

SPIEGELMAN: It actually leads to a larger issue for me, which has to do with sentiment in literature and especially in this kind of literature. It's actually one of the banes of so-called Holocaust literature that when you're reading it, you hear violins in the background, you know, and, like soft, mournful chorus sobbing. And, well, I've met some survivors who work toward that, and I've met other survivors who just are much spunkier than that in a way. And what it is is, I guess, this - the subject matter makes such a large claim on your sympathies to begin with that I don't think it's necessary to, like, underline it and push it any further than that. In fact, it kind of seems trivializing and cheap to do it that way. And my life with my father wasn't tender. My life with my father was, well, probably as ambivalent as everybody's life is with their parents, ultimately, if they dig deep and look at what it is that was going on between them. And I just wanted to make an accurate portrait of that relationship.

GROSS: Your father also always complains about money, that his second wife just wants his money, she wants to rewrite his will, everybody's out to get him. And you write in "Maus" at one point - you write, it's something that worries me about the book I'm doing. In some ways, he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly Jew. Did you ever think, oh, well, maybe I should try to present him in a more positive light.

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, of course. I just would never do it. But of course, I'd think it - not even just portray him but in general, try to tailor the story to my own ideological bent or interests. And I just - it's just too dishonest. I mean, one of the things that was important to me in "Maus" was to make it all true. And that truth wouldn't be served by retouching the portraits. And on the other hand, I found that by working with the things that are actual, the book becomes far more potent so that my father isn't a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He's a miserly, old Jew. But he's not a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He happens to be Jewish. There are avaricious people of many different ethnic persuasions that I've met.

And I find that working with everything that seems a problem to me when I'm first approaching it, once it's been kind of looked at from the 15 different angles necessary and assimilated into the story, it becomes a strength of what I'm working on rather than a liability. I find this a lot richer than if I had a far more exemplary father because if I did, then I'd have a book, maybe, whose ultimate moral would be - and if you lead a virtuous, exemplary life, then you, too, can survive the Holocaust. And that's not the point. The point is that everyone should have survived the Holocaust. There should never have been a Holocaust. And that kind of assumption of some kind of supernatural picking of who would survive and who wouldn't wasn't based on ethics. And it wasn't based on goodness, nor was it based on being especially evil, which is, I guess, the flip side of the way one might try to perceive somebody who comes through a situation of extremis.

GROSS: You almost describe yourself as a prisoner in your home in some of your work. Did you ever feel like, oh, it's trivial to feel that you are living as a prisoner or that life is hell when you're not living through the war? This isn't really the Holocaust, you know?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah.

GROSS: You're living a middle-class life, you know? Is it - (laughter) are you, you know, overexaggerating or, you know, indulging yourself to feel that way?

SPIEGELMAN: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

SPIEGELMAN: But actually, more than that, I've gotten interested in psychological literature about children of survivors. And one common denominator that cropped up a number of times was children who ended up in mental hospitals or in jails. And I was in the former. And what it is is referred to in the psychological literature as an anniversary reaction. It tends to happen not always, but very often - it didn't for me. According to the literature, at approximately the same age the parents were when they got caught up in the concentration camps, the children would end up in the mental hospitals or jails. And I think that I've found a safer way of dealing with all this stuff by drawing a book. And that - you know, one of the things is you can't live through what your parents lived through. And yet, you've been given this mandate to be happy because you didn't have to. And yet, you're not all that happy. And then there's all kinds of ambivalences that come up from that, including a certain kind of very perverse envy of your parents having lived through something that proved that they could - were strong enough to live.

So it's - I don't think it's a total accident that I ended up really starting work on this very long project at the age of 30, which is about the age my father was when he went into the camps, because in order to draw "Maus," it's necessary for me to reenact every single gesture, as well as every single location, present in these flashbacks. The "Maus" cartoonist has to do that with his "Maus" parents. And the result is the parts of my story - of my father's story that are just on tape or on transcripts, I have a very kind of - I have an overall idea. And eventually, I can fish it out of my head. But the parts that are in the book are now in neat, little boxes, you know? I know what happened by having assimilated it that fully. And that's part of my reason for this project, in fact. And in order to do it, like I said, it's necessary for me to do a certain amount of research - photographic research, looking up drawings of survivors, a lot of readings - in order to get a sense of what it was, in order to put it in some kind of visual order for others to look at. I went back to Poland. I went to Auschwitz to look around, tried to find my parents' hometown - all part of the same kind of trying to understand and understand from the bones out what happened. And I'll say, it's still - not totally understandable. But it's my attempt.

BIANCULLI: Art Spiegelman speaking to Terry Gross in 1987. His graphic novel, "Maus," was published the year before, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now more than 35 years old. Yet very recently, it was banned by a school district in Tennessee. After a break, film critic Justin Chang reviews "Kimi," the new movie by Steven Soderbergh. It begins streaming today on HBO Max. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RARE EARTH SONG, "HEY BIG BROTHER")

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'Maus' author Art Spiegelman shares the story behind his Pulitzer-winning work

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book.

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Graphic artist Art Spiegelman on Maus, politics and 'drawing badly' 

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Graphic artist Art Spiegelman on Maus, politics and 'drawing badly' 

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“I didn’t mean comics,” he says now. “I meant art or literature. I didn’t feel it was possible to give structure to this that would be meaningful. I didn’t know how to proceed in making it in comics form, because there wasn’t much of a model for making something like it."
This quote shows that he didn't want to convey a certain message he just wanted to write something meaningful and share his father's story. He didn't know how to structure such a story but he knew that art combined with literature was going to be a super important part of his story. He wasn't envisioning a "comic" he wanted art.
Julia Gunsiorowski

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arly in the second volume of - the graphic novel about the Holocaust that made Art Spiegelman's reputation - he includes a passage showing the reaction to the publication of volume one. The artist is sitting at his drawing board, perched atop a mountain of dead bodies, as a succession of importunate reporters crowd in bombarding him with questions: "Okay... let's talk about Israel..." "Could you tell your audience if drawing Maus was cathartic? Do you feel better now?"

As the questions come in, he struggles to answer - "A message? I dunno..." "Who am I to say?" - and over the course of the following panels shrinks to the size of a toddler, marooned in his writing chair. "I want... ABSOLUTION. No... No... I want... I want... my MOMMY! WAH!" The reporters vanish, and mini-Spiegelman confesses: "Sometimes I just don't feel like a functioning adult."

Yet being adult is, in a way, what Spiegelman is famous for. In the age-old discussion about when comics finally "grew up" Maus is often exhibit A. The New Yorkercalled it "the first masterpiece in comic-book history". It's the comic that people who don't read comics have read, and the only graphic novel ever to have won a Pulitzer prize. Forty years on - the first chapter appeared in serial form in Spiegelman's underground zine Raw in December 1980 - it remains a monument in the genre.

I talk to Spiegelman over Zoom from his New York apartment. Wearing a pale fedora and tinted glasses indoors and choffing on a vape, he's fidgety and garrulous and emphatic. But when I mention the anniversary he's vague. "There seems to be another anniversary available from anything to anything if one just finds the right two events."

Its creator may be vague, but Maus is precise. It's a complex and subtle piece of work: partly a family memoir, partly an act of historical documentation and (as the passage I describe above makes clear), partly a self-reflective account of its own creation. The frame story, set in late 1970s New York, shows the grown-up Spiegelman's relationship with his grouchy and eccentric elderly father Vladek, and his attempts to interview him about his early life. Threaded through this is the account that emerges of Vladek's relationship with Spiegelman's mother (who took her own life in 1968, when Art was just emerging from his teens), the Nazis' rise to power, and the road to Auschwitz.

It's a paradoxical mixture of apparent caricature and extreme fidelity to the truth. In the historical sections Germans are drawn as human-bodied cats, and Jews as mice, and in some of the present-day story the protagonists wear mouse masks. Yet their diction - the cadences of his Polish-born father's English, his kvetching and kibitzing - is impeccably rendered, and Spiegelman worked like crazy to verify the historical detail, down to the look of the machinery in the tin-shop in which his father worked.

At one point in the book, Spiegelman is in despair: "I feel so inadequate," he tells his wife, "trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams. And trying to do it as a comic strip! I guess I bit off more than I can chew." He didn't, obviously: but it's surprising that a lifelong champion of the comic strip as an expressive medium seemed to be saying there that some subjects might be out of its reach.

"I didn't mean comics," he says now. "I meant art or literature. I didn't feel it was possible to give structure to this that would be meaningful. I didn't know how to proceed in making it in comics form, because there wasn't much of a model for making something like it. But I think if I had somehow gone down one of those string theory universes next door where I became a writer, I would have the same misgivings."

Spiegelman's success had the disconcerting effect of placing an artist who had been happy in the comix-with-an-x underground - a lysergic disciple of R Crumb - very firmly in the literary establishment. He became a staple of Tina Brown's New Yorker, a darling of academics, and came to be regarded by many, not without resentment, as a sort of capo of the US comics scene.

"I remember when I first got this Pulitzer prize I thought it was a prank call," he says, "But immediately after I got back to New York, I got an urgent call from a wonderful cartoonist and friend, Jules Feiffer: 'We have to meet immediately. Can you come out and have a coffee?' And we met. He said: 'You have to understand what you've just got. It's either a licence to kill, or something that will kill you.'"

That comics are now considered "respectable" - thanks in part to Maus - is something Spiegelman never quite looked for. But he acknowledges it has its advantages. "I'm astounded by how things have changed. And I would say I might have been dishonest or disingenuous when I said I wasn't interested in it being respectable. I love the medium. And I love what was done in it from the 19th century to now. But I know that on some level, I want it to be able to not have to make everything have a joke, or an escapist adventure story."

His rocket launch into canonicity was both "liberating and also incredibly confining - trying to find places to go where I wouldn't have to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books". Even at the time, Spiegelman seems to have been conscious that Maus would be in danger of defining him. The next project he took on was illustrating Moncure March's jazz-age poem The Wild Party for a small press: "This was going to be a kind of polar opposite [to Maus]: decorative, erotic, frivolous in many ways and involved with the pleasures of making; although it didn't turn out to be so pleasurable in its third year. Every project I start turns into a coffin."

And yet, what coffins. Spiegelman's attention to his craft, to the grammar of comics and their narrative possibilities, is formidable. It seems quite in keeping that an apparently simple illustration project turned into a three-year job. Maus took more than a decade to complete - "I always assumed it would take about two years" - and in conversation he will zero in on the tiniest details in individual panels from memory. There's a single transition panel, for instance, where a train ticket goes in as the caption, that he identifies as having been drawn under the influence of Will Eisner's The Spirit.

In an afterword to Breakdowns, an anthology of his earlier work, Spiegelman writes of his younger self: "In an underground comix scene that prided itself on breaking taboos, he was breaking the one taboo left standing: he dared to call himself an artist and call his medium an art-form." But that aspiration doesn't mark a straightforward high culture/low culture divide.

"Lower middle class to middle class in terms of my upbringing," Spiegelman says, "I was very suspicious of high culture and kind of described myself as a slob snob. If it wasn't printed on newsprint, the hell with it. If I was learning about modernism, it was more likely to be from Winsor McCay and George Herriman than from Picasso. I was resistant. I read Kafka [and thought] he would have been a good script writer for The Twilight Zone. I was seeing it as a zone of culture that wasn't exactly high or low, that just had to do with culture I could use."

A thunderbolt moment was his discovery of Harvey Kurtzman and Mad magazine: "That was what changed my life," he says. "I guess Mad came out as the lowest of low culture, but it actually has become our culture. The irony, the self-reflexivity, the questioning, the parodic enveloping of everything seen through that lens." The recent demise of the print magazine was, he says, "mission accomplished. You know, there wasn't much more it could do."

And he is startlingly protean as a creator. A panel of Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes, Herriman, Bill Sienkiewicz or Jack Kirby is instantly identifiable as such. But you'd struggle to look at the urbane images for The Wild Party, or his psychedelic early work at Raw, or the cross-cutting of styles in In the Shadow of No Towers, and instantly clock them as the work of the author of Maus.And he still has people approaching him in astonishment to discover he was also the creator of The Garbage Pail Kids, the trading cards of 1980s playground fame. "It's kind of dissonant for people," he says. He is, as was said of the late Clive James, "a brilliant bunch of guys".

"That's nice phrasing," he says. "I took to heart a quote from Picasso: 'Style is the difference between a circle and the way you draw it.' I would like to think of myself as just using whatever style seems appropriate to the work, and the style is as much finding out what the work is as the work itself. Everything I've done comes after a lot of stylistic research. And the main thing that makes it my style is I just draw badly." That's not wholly self-deprecation. When he's tried writing for others to draw, he says, "I would find that other people couldn't draw it wrong the right way."

Incorporated into Maus is a full reprint of his short strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", which describes his nervous breakdown in the aftermath of his mother's suicide in a vividly expressionist idiom (and which portrayed Spiegelman wearing the striped pyjamas and striped cap of an Auschwitz inmate). One reason he did that, he says, is that the fact of his own breakdown "needed to be entered into the deposition", but the other was something necessary "formally - which was to show that the drawing style in Maus was a decision".

His one major foray into cartooning the political moment also had a drastic stylistic effect. In the Shadow of No Towers charted his response to 9/11, and found him out of kilter not only with his countrymen (David Remnick's New Yorker declined to publish a comic whose author was "equally terrorised by al-Qaida and my government") but with himself. "I think Towers came close to the any-port-in-a-storm kind of driving through a hurricane," he says. "The styles shifted from sequence to sequence and panel to panel. And that felt very correct for trying to deal with the fragmentation that 9/11 caused for me. And I think that's kind of where I'm at now."

Indeed, he delayed this interview for several weeks as he attempted to process the summer's chaos. "I am really trying to understand what the fuck?" he says. "The world was never a bed of roses, but at this point, every time I look up, it's like ... oh, man, you know? I feel like if I had a tattoo - which I'll never get voluntarily - it would be on my chest. It would say: 'You can't make this shit up', and it would glow bright red about five times a day." But he says he has no impulse to respond to America's current turmoil in art.

"Early on I realised I didn't want to become a Trump caricaturist - that it was just playing into his narcissism, ultimately. I just backed off and I'm now trying to see what the hell's been happening to us. It makes me recant something I rather cockily said back in 2001, which was when I found myself unable to move from September 11 to September 12. About three months later, my brains poured back in my head and I said: 'I guess disaster is my muse.'" He recants: "Now disaster is just a fucking disaster."

And in a sense, that was the theme of Maus - among whose many scrupulousnesses was a faithful rendition of the extremely difficult and annoying personality of Vladek. "I thought it was important to show that there's nothing ennobling about being victimised," Spiegelman says. "That's a very Christian concept. But people don't come out of it as better humans: they just come out of it seared, scarred. She came out with so much wisdom, or he came out as stupid as he went in, he came out even more traumatised and befuddled than when he went in. It's a spectrum. But what it is, is: it wasn't the best who survived, and it wasn't the worst. It was random."

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Graphic artist Art Spiegelman on Maus, politics and 'drawing badly'

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arly in the second volume of - the graphic novel about the Holocaust that made Art Spiegelman's reputation - he includes a passage showing the reaction to the publication of volume one. The artist is sitting at his drawing board, perched atop a mountain of dead bodies, as a succession of importunate reporters crowd in bombarding him with questions: "Okay...