Morning Edition, January 26, 2004 · With Maus, a comic book based on his parents' survival of the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman won international acclaim -- and the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. In the latest installment of Intersections, a Morning Edition series on artists and their inspirations, NPR's Susan Stamberg explores how the artist was first inspired to use the visual language of comics to tell a dark tale.

At the beginning of the Second World War, on June 22, 1941, I was 15 years old. I was a high school student in one of the four Hebrew high schools in Kovno, the capital of Lithuania. Our community also had a Jewish theater, a Jewish hospital, a Jewish orphanage, two daily Jewish newspapers, numerous synagogues, a Jewish technical college, one of the most well known yeshivas in the world (Slobodka), and many other community organizations, such as Jewish burial services, Jewish fellowships for assisting the poor, kosher restaurants, etc.

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Maus grew out of a comic strip I did in 1971 for an underground comic book: a three-page strip that was based on stories of my father's and mother's that I recalled being told in childhood....In 1977 I decided to do [a] longer work, [and] I set up an arrangement to see my father more often and talk to him about his experiences....Although I set about...to do a history of sorts, I'm all too aware that ultimately what I'm creating is a realistic fiction. The experiences my father actually went through [are not exactly the same as] what he's able to remember and what he's able to articulate of these experiences. Then there's what I'm able to understand of what he articulated, and what I'm able to put down on paper. And then of course there's what the reader can make of that....It's important to me that Maus is done in comic strip form, because it's what I'm most comfortable shaping and working with. Maus for me in part is a way of telling my parents' life and therefore coming to terms with it....It's not a matter of choice in the sense that I don't feel I could deal with this material as prose, or as a series of paintings, or as a film, or as poetry....In looking at other art and literature that's been shaped from the Holocaust-a historic term I find problematic - that material is often very high pitched....I feel a need for a more subdued approach, which would incorporate distancing devices like using these animal mask faces. Another aspect of the way I've chosen to use this material is that I've entered myself into the story. So the way the story got told and who the story was told to is as important [as] my father's narrative. To me that's at the heart of the work.