Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 3.0

Spiegelman spent thirteen years on Maus, a graphic novel recounting his father's survival of the Holocaust that rendered Jews as mice and Nazis as cats — an unflinching, formally radical choice that won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first ever awarded to a comic. Before that, he spent two decades supporting himself at Topps, co-creating Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, while building a parallel reputation in underground comix and, with his wife Françoise Mouly, editing the influential magazine Raw. He later spent a decade as a contributing artist for The New Yorker.