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“Disaster is my muse”, is his motto. Through his own parents’ tragic past as survivors of the Shoah, History laid the foundations of his graphic and narrative masterpiece, Maus, to which he dedicated thirteen years of his life.If as a child, with the support of his mother, his passion for comics momentarily helped him cope with his abyssal inner pain due to the weight of his parents’ traumatic experience and his strained relationship with his father, Art Spiegelman fell into depression at the age of sixteen. In the late 1960s he then moved to San Fransisco, became one of the most innovative “underground” counter-culture comics artists, co-founded and collaborated to experimental “comix” magazines in which were published the graphic “Avant-Textes” of Maus – “Prisoner of the Hell Planet” (1972), a cathartic creation designed four years after his mother’s suicide, and the first three-page version of Maus. These short works constituted the major steps in the long creative process towards the final two-volume version of Maus. Thus having reached the distance necessary to shape the testimony of his father into a narrative, graphics was for him the only medium to represent his own family’s past, and History and its after-devastating effects. That is how he could honour the memory of his mother and his brother, and express his own suffering and guilt as a child of survivors in order to work through the transmission of trauma.