 Spiegelman began his career with the Topps bubblegum card company in the mid @-@ 1960s , which was his main financial support for two decades ; there he co @-@ created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and the Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s . He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short , experimental , and often autobiographical work . A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977 , after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book @-@ length Maus , about his relation with his father , a Holocaust survivor . The postmodern book depicts Nazis as cats , Jews as mice , and ethnic Poles as pigs , and took thirteen years until its completion in 1991 . It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work , responsible for bringing scholarly attention to the comics medium . 
