THE MAUS EFFECT

 

Alison Bechdel, author of the critically acclaimed graphic novel Fun Home, said in a HuffPost interview October 3 that Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust-centric Maus set her free to take on serious subjects in what has always been a less than serious medium — comic books.

"Comics were once sort of [for] superhero action stories," she recalled. "That was pretty much all they did, and [then] people started pushing the boundaries. Underground cartoonists in the '70s started writing about more adult topics and themes."

She specifically credited "the more artistic cartoonists of the '80s" as well as Spiegelman as having "completely changed the medium" of graphic novels. "Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever," she said. "Comics now can be about anything — any topics that's as serious as you can come up with."