Maus

It's been a long, hard road for comic books in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, attempts to build a comics community consistently met with economic hardship, and failed. It's only over the last several years that Western comic books have become a popular medium in Russia, and in that very short time, there have already been three highly publicized incidences of comics censorship.

On this day in 1992, Maus, a two volume graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, became the first comic to win the Pulitzer Prize. Looking back, it's tempting to attribute that win, and indeed the book's acclaim in general, to the seriousness of the subject matter. And it couldn't be more serious: Maus tells the true story of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek Spiegelman, and his experiences as a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, spending time in both Dachau and Auschwitz along the way.

Many comics creators can be applauded for garnering the art form a more popular legitimacy, but it can be argued that nobody has done more than Art Spiegelman. Born to Holocaust survivors on February 15, 1948, Spiegelman has acted as comics' ambassador for decades, working to reduce the gap between the perceived high art of the galleries and the perceived low art of the comics page. And it wasn't entirely because of Maus...

As conversations with non-traditional comic readers go, the term "graphic novel" almost always conjures up Art Spiegelman's Maus, which uses anthropomorphic animals to tell the story of how his father survived the Holocaust. Celebrated in equal parts for its craftsmanship, literary merit and historical importance, Maus is easily one of the most -- if not the most -- important comic works

So you hate your dad. It happens. Whether there's a break in ideology, he made you kill and eat your childhood dog, or you just have an Oedipal complex, you and Dad are not on good terms, and the sound of Father's Day approaching turns your spine to broken glass...