When the graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale won a Special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its vivid depiction of the Holocaust and its effects, critics and mainstream audiences recognized that a comic book was capable of exploring complex aesthetic, moral, and cultural themes. Maus’s creator Art Spiegelman (b. 1948) became the most famous alternative cartoonist in America.

Art Spiegelman: Conversations reveals an artist who had long been working to establish comics as a serious art form. With his wife Francoise Mouly, he founded and edited RAW-the most in-fluential showcase for avant-garde comics in America-which published early work by such well-established cartoonists as Chris Ware, Kaz, and Gary Panter. Spiegelman’s essays and lectures helped to establish that comics have a history and a canon.

This collection of interviews and profiles spans 1976-2006 and covers Spiegelman’s career as an artist, critic, educator, and art historian. A previously unpublished interview conducted by the volume’s editor discusses themes rarely touched upon in earlier profiles.

Joseph Witek is director of graduate studies and professor of English at Stetson University. He is the author of Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (University Press of Mississippi), and his work has appeared in many publications.