Maus and the Graphic Novel: How a Comic Won a Pulitzer

In 1992 a comic book won a Pulitzer Prize. Maus, Art Spiegelman's account of his father's survival of the Holocaust, received a special award, and the idea that comics were only for children never fully recovered.

Maus remains one of the most studied works in the history of comics, and one of the most argued about. Its story, from an underground magazine to school curriculums and a school board's ban, says a great deal about what comics can do.

A father's story

Maus was serialised in Raw, an avant-garde comics magazine edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, from 1980 to 1991. It alternates between two times. In the present, in 1978 and 1979, Art visits his father Vladek in Rego Park, Queens, and records interviews about the war. In the past, from the mid-1930s to 1945, Vladek's story unfolds: life in Poland, the ghettos and Auschwitz.

The frame story is as important as the past. It shows the difficult relationship between father and son, the guilt of a survivor's child, and the problem of turning a parent's memories into a book.

Two volumes

The first six chapters were collected as Maus I: My Father Bleeds History in 1986. The rest followed in 1991 as Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. The years between saw the comic gain a reputation far beyond the comics world.

Personal loss runs through the work. Spiegelman's mother, Anja, also a survivor, died by suicide in 1968, and Vladek later destroyed her diaries, a loss the book returns to. Vladek himself died in 1982, before the book was finished.

Mice and cats

Maus is famous for its animal metaphor. Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs, with other nationalities as other animals. The device echoes the Nazis' own dehumanising imagery and turns it back on itself, while also giving readers a little distance from scenes that would be almost unbearable to show realistically.

The metaphor has always been controversial. Critics objected to it on artistic and moral grounds, and to the portrayal of Poles in particular; the Polish edition of 2001 drew protests. The portrayal of Vladek, often difficult and prejudiced himself, also divided readers. Spiegelman built those arguments into the book itself, where his own doubts about the metaphor appear on the page.

The Pulitzer and after

In 1992 Maus received a Pulitzer Special Award in Letters, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. It had already won the prize for best foreign album at the Angoulême festival in France in 1988, and Maus II won Eisner and Harvey awards in 1992.

Along with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, published in the same years, Maus changed how publishers, bookshops and critics saw comics, part of the story we tell in graphic novel vs comic book.

The most studied comic

Maus has received more academic attention than any other work of comics. The scholar Marianne Hirsch developed her concept of postmemory, the inherited memory of trauma passed from survivors to their children, partly from her study of the book.

Its techniques are studied as closely as its subject: how panels control time, how the frame story comments on the past, how simple drawings carry immense weight. Our guide to how to read a comic explains some of the tools Spiegelman uses.

A ban and a bestseller

In January 2022 the McMinn County school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to remove Maus from its curriculum, citing profanity, violence and nudity. The decision provoked a wide backlash, and within days Maus had risen to number one in Amazon's sales charts.

The episode showed that, three decades after its Pulitzer, the book still had the power to provoke, and that attempts to restrict it tend to bring it new readers.

Reading Maus today

For a first-time reader, Maus can be surprising. Much of it is about ordinary things: Vladek counting pills, arguing about money, complaining about his second wife, telling his son how to save string. Those scenes are not filler. They show how the past lives on in a survivor's habits, and how hard it is for a son to love a difficult father.

The two volumes are best read together and slowly. The second volume is darker and more fragmented, and includes Spiegelman reflecting on the success of the first, a reminder that the book is as much about telling a story as about the story itself.

Why it still matters

Maus proved that comics could carry the weight of history and memory as seriously as any other form. It did so not by imitating prose but by using what only comics can do: putting the past and present on the same page, letting readers fill the gaps, and finding in a simple drawing of a mouse a way to show the unshowable.

Many of the graphic memoirs and non-fiction comics published since owe it a debt. Readers who start with Maus often find it opens the door to a whole medium.