Winning a Pulitzer Prize for a comic was a rarity. But then so was a comic that started with a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."
Art Spiegelman pulled no punches in his harrowing account of his father's experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II. He is equally ruthless in the graphic novel depicting his relationship with his father. MAUS, published in 1973, leaps between Poland during the war to Rego Park, New York, as Spiegelman struggles to reconcile his parents' history and his own Jewish background. His Jewish characters are depicted as mice and the Nazis as cats, and the result is suitably chilling. The original artworks from MAUS are on show at the Jewish Museum.
In 1992 the Pulitzer Prize board created a special category to honour Spiegelman and the two volumes of the story: MAUS, A Survivor's Tale I: My Father Bleeds History and MAUS, A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Begin. The New York Times Book Review described the works as "a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness".
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Spiegelman's role as a staffer at the magazine became decidedly precarious when the editors saw the working drawings for his new book, In The Shadow of No Towers, which illustrates his emotional and political confusion since September 11.
"The work is on my feelings towards the hijacking and then the hijacking of the hijacking by the Government. I'm not so sure The New Yorker is being complacent. I'm sure I'd be welcomed back once I had found the right medication."
Spiegelman's new book is sure to cause as much, if not more, ruckus as MAUS. It depicts a government out of control, or, more chillingly, totally in control. "They had an agenda already on their mind before September 11," he says. "Drying up funds for health and education and moving the funds upward to the rich, all made more implementable by the war in Iraq."
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