Art Spiegelman is called the Kafka of comics. He's the man who set out to make us take the funny papers seriously, at least to credit cartoonists with high intentions and deep content. His novel in pictures, "Maus", was a breakthrough: it was the story of his father's survival at Dachau--the first Holocaust account presented in comic-strip form. It made the New York Times best-seller list for fiction--until he got it reclassified as history; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and gave him all the respectability he could handle.
Art Spiegelman made new waves with provocative covers for Tina Brown's New Yorker: the famous Valentine's Day image of an African-American woman kissing a Hasidic Jew, or the Tax Day crucifixion of the Easter Bunny. He's taught intellectuals to read comics without embarrassment, but he's aiming alternative fairy-tale comics at kids again, too. Art Spiegelman, the grown-up cartoonist is with us, this hour on The Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
