By: Art Spiegelman

This is a perennial fixture on Best Comics Ever Written lists, a book that can win over even those who think that any story told with drawings must be for kids. Art Spiegelman tells the story of his Holocaust-survivor father over two breathtakingly powerful volumes, alternating between the story of his life during World War II and his later years in the US. The book’s conceit has the Jews drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats, Americans as Beagles and so on – but it’s the human stories that come unflinchingly through that give this work its power, both in the tragedies and trauma of mankind’s darkest hour and in the smaller tribulations of a survivor’s later life. A Pullitzer Prize winner, this deserves a place on the shelf of anyone with literary pretensions.