US comic artist Spiegelman wins French prize

ANGOULEME: US comic book artist Art Spiegelman won the top prize for his craft at France’s Angouleme world comic strip festival.

Spiegelman, 62, is best known as the creator of Maus, an animal fable of his Jewish father’s experience in the Holocaust. “Considering my poor skills, I’m looking a little like President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace prize,” Spiegelman told the festival by telephone from the United States, calling the award “an incredible honour.”

A leading figure in the underground US comic book movement of the 1970s and ‘80s, Spiegelman shook up the industry with his 1986 publication of Maus, or mouse in German. In the comic strip, which was translated into 20 languages and based on hours of interviews with his father Vladek, Hitler and the Germans are depicted as cats and the Holocaust victims as mice. The animal depictions eerily echo Nazi propaganda that portrayed Polish people as pigs and Jews as mice or rats.

Maus also marked the first time a comic strip attracted so much critical attention, starring in a major 1991 exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York and a year later, won a special Pulitzer prize.

Spiegelman was born in Sweden but lives in New York and is the artistic director for The New Yorker. His September 24, 2001 cover for the prestigious New York magazine — coming just after the September 11 attacks — remains one of the decade’s most powerful political cartoons.

The Angouleme festival’s prize for best comic strip album was awarded on Sunday to 35-year-old Italian artist Manuele Fior, for his Five Thousand Kilometres Per Second. Two other Americans, David Mazzucchelli and Joe Sacco, and two Japanese artists, Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezeuka, also won awards.

The 2011 edition of the four-day Angouleme festival drew 200,000 visitors to the southwestern French town.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 1^st,  2011.