Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist who drew the Holocaust in pictures his father thought were beneath it

Art Spiegelman still remembers his father’s initial reaction to the idea of turning the Holocaust into a comic book. Vladek Spiegelman, who had survived Auschwitz on strategic cunning and extraordinary luck, did not think much of comic books. He did not think much of comics as a form for telling serious stories. He was not entirely wrong — in the 1970s, almost nobody did. What Spiegelman produced anyway, over the course of two decades, was Maus, a two-volume graphic novel that in 1992 became the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, an honor no one had previously considered possible for the medium.

That gap — between what the form was supposed to be capable of and what it actually carried — is the engine of Spiegelman’s work and his career. He grew up in Rego Park, Queens, the American-born son of Polish-Jewish refugees who had lost most of their family in the Nazi camps. His father was a difficult man, fractured by survival in ways he could not articulate and Spiegelman could not stop trying to understand. His mother, Anja, took her own life in 1968, leaving behind diaries she had asked to be destroyed, which her son nonetheless searched for obsessively until he learned, years later, that his father had already burned them.

Spiegelman arrived at comics through the underground. He studied art and philosophy at Harpur College — now Binghamton University — in the mid-1960s, but his real education came through the countercultural press: The East Village Other, Screw, the transgressive world of underground comix that existed outside the distribution channels and content codes of mainstream publishing. He worked for Topps, making Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids stickers, which paid the bills. He co-founded Raw, a groundbreaking avant-garde comics anthology, with his wife and collaborator Françoise Mouly in 1980. Maus was serialized in its pages.

The idea of using animal metaphors to represent ethnic categories — Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs — was not new to cartooning. What made Maus different was that it refused to use the metaphor as a simplification. Spiegelman’s mice are complicated, sometimes petty, sometimes heroic, always specific. His father Vladek is a man you might not like but cannot stop reading. The book is also, insistently, a story about the making of the book: Spiegelman appears throughout as the son who keeps demanding answers from a father whose answers only create new questions. It is a work about testimony, about what it costs to survive and what it costs to listen.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was published in two volumes — the first in 1986, the second in 1991 — and the Pulitzer Prize came the following year. The prize was technically a “special citation,” because the Pulitzer board had no existing category for a comic book, which tells you something about how the world was organized at the time. The book went on to become one of the most taught texts in American high schools and universities, an anchor of Holocaust education, and one of the most translated graphic works in history.

Not everyone has welcomed Maus into the canon quietly. His choice of the animal metaphor has drawn sustained criticism — from survivors who found it undignified, from scholars who questioned whether any metaphor is appropriate for the Holocaust, from readers who found it too playful, too ironic, too formally aware for a subject that demands solemnity. Spiegelman has never fully resolved these objections. He has instead made them part of the work: MetaMaus (2011), a book-length examination of the making of Maus, is in large part a document of his own doubts about what he was doing and why. The question of whether comics can bear that weight is not answered in the book. It is the book.

The most recent challenge came not from scholars but from a school board. In January 2022, the McMinn County school board in Tennessee voted unanimously — 10-0 — to remove Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum. The stated reasons were eight curse words and a drawing of a nude woman that depicts the suicide of Spiegelman’s own mother, though the ban coincided with a broader national wave directed at texts dealing with race, history, and marginalized experience. Spiegelman called the decision “Orwellian.” Sales of the book jumped 753 percent within weeks. A ban that was supposed to limit the book’s reach introduced it instead to millions of readers who might not otherwise have encountered it.

What has changed is the direction of his current political work. He and his longtime collaborator Joe Sacco published “I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On” in The New York Review of Books in March 2025, a three-page graphic conversation about the Israeli campaign in Gaza, drawing on the same framework of historical witness that produced Maus but applied it to a present conflict that divides his own community. Their joint exhibition, Never Again!.. And Again… And Again…, opened at the Galerie Martel in Paris in December 2025 and raised over 80,000 euros for UNICEF.

The documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, won the Metropolis Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC in 2024 before appearing on PBS’s American Masters. It is a portrait of an artist who has never made the comfortable choice and who, at 78, shows no particular interest in starting. The Penn Humanities Forum opened its 2026 season with him. The Guardian ran a full profile in August 2026. Whether his restlessness is temperament or the inheritance of having learned early that history does not wait for you to be ready is a question that Maus, across all its translations and editions and attempts to keep it out of reach, keeps asking.

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