Art Spiegelman at the opening of his Paris retrospective in 2012 Credit: Bertrand Langlois When Art Spiegelman was offered the commission for his latest project – to illustrate a “novelette” by the veteran author Robert Coover – he accepted with his standard disclaimer. “I wrote back to say, ‘As long as it has no mice or Jews, I’d like to see if I can do this.’” Where some artists get pigeon-holed, Spiegelman has become mouse-holed. His most famous work is Maus, the 1980s comic book based on his parents’ tribulations in Auschwitz, which defamiliarised and recaptured afresh the obscenity of the Holocaust by depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. But its brilliance has overshadowed a huge body of work that has tackled many themes in many different styles.