How did a comic about mice and a childhood in Iran prove comics could be literature?

They told grave true stories in plain drawings, and the world took notice. Art Spiegelman's Maus, serialized from 1980 to 1991, shows him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, and in 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. At a time when comics in the English-speaking world were considered children's fare, strongly associated with superheroes, Maus was credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be.

Those books gave a name a meaning. A graphic novel is a self-contained, book-length form of comics. The term is contested, and has even been described as a marketing term for comic books. It was coined in 1964 by the fan historian Richard Kyle, gained popularity after Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the successes of Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

Maus represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. Spiegelman chose a pared-down style, with simple animal heads on human bodies, which he found more direct and immediate. He drew the cat-Nazis the same size as the mouse-Jews and dropped villainous expressions so readers could make their own moral judgments. He said the animal metaphors were meant to self-destruct, revealing the inanity of dividing people this way.

Another landmark is Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, an autobiographical series about her childhood and early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Iranian Revolution. It was first published in French in four volumes between 2000 and 2003. Satrapi used black-and-white, high-contrast art with minimal panels. Both books pair simple drawings with serious true stories.