Towering Intellect; Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, Whose Two-Volume Graphic Novel Maus Reimagined the Holocaust with Cats Exterminating Mice, has Turned His Attention to September 11 in His Latest Book. Examining the Attack and Its Aftermath, This Time, He Says, It's the Lizards Who Are Dangerous. Peter Ross Journeys to Paris to Interview the Controversial Comic Book Artist

Sunday Herald › August 23, 2004

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Summary

IN THE days, weeks and months following September 11, 2001, Americans were forced to ask themselves a question: "Are you a man or a mouse?" Would they stand up and take the fight to the terrorists, wherever they may be, or would they scurry away from the world, hole up in their broad continent, perhaps even reach a detente with those cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the French? For Art Spiegelman, the decision wasn't quite so simple - he was a man and a mouse.

Spiegelman is perhaps the world's best-known living comic book artist and writer after Robert Crumb. And if Crumb is the Jerry Bruckheimer of comics - bombastic, priapic, larger-than-life - then Spiegelman projects a Woody Allen vibe - neurotic, intellectual, the sort of nebbish who says things like, "In the happiness index profiles, I don't rate that high." Although he has been a cartoonist for almost 40 years, starting out as part of the underground comics movement of the late Sixties, he remains best known for Maus, in which his Polish parents' experiences of the Holocaust were reimagined with the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Published in two volumes, 1986 and 1992, then as one complete book last year, Maus was a huge commercial and critical success, although not universally admired. It won Spiegelman the Pulitzer Prize, but was also burned publicly in Poland, where some were unhappy with the depiction of Poles as pigs.

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Towering Intellect; Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, Whose Two-Volume Graphic Novel Maus Reimagined the Holocaust with Cats Exterminating Mice, has Turned His Attention to September 11 in His Latest Book. Examining the Attack and Its Aftermath, This Time, He Says, It's the Lizards Who Are Dangerous. Peter Ross Journeys to Paris to Interview the Controversial Comic Book Artist

The consensus view, however, was that Spiegelman was a genius. Even now, 14 years on, his supporters are epic in their praise. The author Philip Pullman, no slouch in the genius stakes himself, comments that, "Maus is a work that should be firmly in any canon of great narratives. It is at once familiar and deeply, permanently strange. If this world were run properly, there would be international awards for 'Artistic Treasure Of The Human Race' or 'International Living Supreme Master', and among the first winners would be Art S.

"Also, he is a smoker of Olympi...

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