'I want a blood test," Art Spiegelman shrugs when asked about his status as the father of the graphic novel. Twenty years ago, the wise-cracking New York cartoonist changed the history of comic books with the first instalment of his Pulitzer prize-winning Maus: A Survivor's Tale - the story of how his parents survived Auschwitz, with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats. It remains the defining work of graphic memoir, the book that elevated a pulp mass medium to high art and proved that comics didn't have to be comic. But, as one frame in Spiegelman's new exhibition in Paris says, ever since then he's felt he has "a 5,000 pound mouse breathing down my neck".
Spiegelman, 61, looks just as he draws himself - a waistcoat, a constant cigarette; he is self-mockingly neurotic but infinitely wise, still carrying the heavy burden of guilt that plagues survivors' children. His vast career has ranged from the grotesque Garbage Pail Kids, to In the Shadow of No Towers, his comic-strip journal about September 11, and last year's reissue of Breakdowns, a graphic memoir described as "the Citizen Kane of modern comics".
Despite the awful details of his life, Spiegelman's confessional style makes his works almost impossible to put down. His parents were forced into the Polish ghettos in 1941, reluctantly handing their eldest son - Spiegelman's brother - over to relatives to hide him. The little boy was poisoned to death by his aunt during a Nazi raid; she thought it better than letting him go to the camps, and killed herself, too. His grief-stricken parents ended up in Auschwitz, which they survived. Spiegelman was born after the war and raised in New York, an only child with a "ghost brother". His father was brutalised and damaged; his mother took her own life when Spiegelman was 20 and didn't leave a note. All this is laid bare in his work. To him, Maus, published in 1986 and 1992, was, "as a blues musician would say, my crossover hit"; but he sees all his work on a continuum, "made from the same fractured psyche".
Next week, three of Spiegelman's sketchbooks will be published for the first time. These days it is standard for major cartoonists, from Robert Crumb to Chris Ware, to publish seminal sketchbooks, so it seems odd that Spiegelman hasn't before. It turns out he has such a neurotic fear of them that he can barely keep one going for more than a few days. What he calls his "efficiently casual" drawings in Maus took 20 to 30 drafts. He is so paralysed by the pressure of creating the perfect sketchbook that he prefers to draw while on the phone, on Post-It notes or envelopes, which he usually throws away. If he is drawing on a newspaper scrap, it is easier to shut down the left side of the brain, so the right side is free to move around; he won't know what the drawing is until it is finished.
Spiegelman tells me this in a stream of rapid-fire, Woody Allen-style self-deprecation as we walk down a Paris street. "I have too much respect for books, so to make a mark in a blank one seems like a violation," he says. "Then the neurosis compounds itself, because if you make a good drawing, you don't want to screw the book up by making a bad drawing after. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one drawing in them - a whole shelf full. And then if you make a bad drawing, you never want to look at the book again. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one page torn out that I never went back to. It's very rare that I can just get myself engaged and overcome all these strange inhibitions I've set up for myself." Still, he loves these drawings for their quality as "electrocardiograms, recording thought very directly". Publishing the sketchbooks has been liberating, he says. "When you've been revealed in all your pathetic nakedness, there's nothing else to lose. So yes, finally therapy that worked!"
The collection of three sketchbooks is called Be a Nose!, a reference to the cartoonist's quest to force a drawing to convey an idea. The first, Be, is Spiegelman's sketchbook from his first trip to Poland and Auschwitz in 1978, when he was 30. It features several dreams - including the nightmare of a noose made from his father's flesh - as well as annotations that became footnotes for Maus. But the direct notes for Maus are in a separate notebook, to be included on a DVD with a book called Meta-Maus, a kind of "making of" Maus. "I'm supposed to be working on it now. But there's only so much retrospection I can do without moving forward," he says.
The second sketchbook, A, or Autophobia, is "an intense conversation with himself about making drawings". This was an experiment in forcing himself to sit down every day and draw in a sketchbook in 2007. The self-analytical sketches include bloodstained "finished" drawings on a battlefield. "It was a kind of, 'What's your problem, Jack?'" he says. "And what the problem has tended to be over many years now is that ever since Maus resulted in this bright Klieg light always aimed in my direction, which has its benefits, it has also created this discomforting sense of always being observed, as if I had little eyeballs sitting on my shoulder with arms and legs, and all the eyeballs are saying, 'Oh look, look, he made a line!' That's not the best way to make lines." Will he ever escape the shadow of Maus? "It's even worse than that," he says, lighting a cigarette. "Most other cartoonists are afraid of the same thing." He means that every graphic novel is compared to Maus. "As a result, it's sort of a curse on me and all other cartoonists I know."
Spiegelman worries that this makes him sound like one of his drawings ("megalomaniac with an inferiority complex"), but he hates critics using Maus as a measuring stick for new work. "The thing is, Maus was not made to teach anybody except me anything. I knew I had a story worth telling. But it wasn't like, 'I know, I'll take the heaviest subject I know and turn it into a comic - that'll show the bastards.'" His aim was to "build the damn thing to last", by making a well-structured comic. Now, he feels, structure has been eclipsed by subject matter. "On the other," he says, "I realise I'm very fortunate. Maus has given me a licence to kill. I can even publish my sketchbooks."
Spiegelman, who prefers the spelling "comix" (a nod to the underground comics movement he emerged from), remains the champion defender of the form. His third sketchbook in this collection, Nose, was made when he and his wife, the French art editor Françoise Mouly, ran the 1980s comix magazine Raw, when comics were at their nadir of respectability. The underground comics explosion of the 1960s and 70s had come to an end, and even mainstream comic books were dying off. Spiegelman argued that when a mass medium, such as the comic, stops being so, "it either has to become art or die". He is currently compiling a vast anthology of American children's comic book literature from 1938 and 1961; this has meant unearthing the comics put on bonfires in the 1950s "when comics were the Grand Theft Auto of their moment", seen as causing delinquency.
With Maus, Spiegelman says he wanted to make "a long comic book that needed a bookmark and would have the density I associate with novels"; but he never used the term graphic novel. "I kind of like the unsavoury roots of the form," he says. "It's not like I want it all dressed up in a tuxedo so it can be in public. Comics are the hunch-backed dwarves of the arts and they should be proud of the fact." Recently, he was reading Posy Simmonds on a plane and a man said, "Oh I've heard of that graphic novel, is it good?" Spiegelman grins. "Ten years earlier, people would have given me a wide berth: that guy's a moron, he's reading comic books and he's a grown up. So I realise things have changed and as long as you call them graphic novels, it's OK to read them. If that's the case, so be it."
• Art Spiegelman: From Raw Books to Toon Books, is at Galerie Martel, Paris, until 11 July.
'Alive and awesome': Steve Bell on Spiegelman's sketchbooks
Art Spiegelman has just had three sketchbooks published, exquisitely tied up with an elasticated leg band (at least, it was too small for my head). I've never met anybody as painstaking as Spiegelman, nor anyone who has come close to producing a sustained masterpiece like Maus. These sketchbooks may explain why it is so good: he took infinite pains to get it right. It also explains why he has done nothing like it since: he just takes so long to do anything.
Spiegelman's agonising self-awareness is an essential part of his process. He has piles of almost-blank books, and stands in awe of sketchbooks published by cartooning cronies such as Robert Crumb (another cartoonist whose work I yield to no one in my admiration for). Yet Crumb's published sketchbooks simply rehearse the substantial talent as penman he has developed elsewhere. They betray very little of Crumb himself.
What I like about these books is the hesitancy, the awkwardness, the sense of the absolute inevitability of going wrong, coupled with the certainty of occasionally going triumphantly right, and above all the willingness to take risks. The drawings are alive. Some of them are funny - awesome, even.
Drawing comics (as Spiegelman puts it, "make boxes - fill them - cartoonists and undertakers - same business") is one of the most constraining art forms. "By pencilling and inking my comics," writes Spiegelman, "I cover my traces, dressing up my demons before they reach the public. The rehearsed snap of a 'professional' line replaces raw and intimate seismographs of thought." I couldn't have put it better myself. Drawing has to question, to record, to speculate - but above all, it has to breathe, free from the pressure to perform. Whether it's bound in books or not, that's what happens in sketches.
