COMIC ART: PETER MURPHYreviews MetaMausBy Art Spiegelman Viking, 300pp. £25

MUCH ART HAS come from the postwar generations' attempts to fathom the horrors of the death camps: Celan's poetry, Levi's memoirs, Schindler's Ark, Anne Frank's diary, Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. But of all Holocaust artifacts, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Talemust be the strangest. Some might have thought genocide an unfit subject matter for comics (a New York Timesreviewer once commented that "tragics" was a better way to describe Spiegelman's masterpiece), but substitute the word "cartoon" for the stuffy but more stately "sequential art" and notions of taste, good or otherwise, become less contentious.

Maus, originally published in two volumes – My Father Bleeds History,in 1986, and And Here Our Troubles Began, in 1991 – was ostensibly a biography of the experiences of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, in the prewar Jewish ghettos and, later, Auschwitz in 1944-5. It formed the cornerstone of the cartoonist's career until In the Shadow of No Towers, his attempt to confront the trauma of the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York.

Maus's depiction of Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs generated significant controversy at the time of publication, but the Animal Farmanthropomorphic treatment, rather than trivialising the subject matter, enhanced its allegorical potency. Spiegelman's images of mice hanging in the town square, or herded into gas chambers, or shovelled into death pits, were powerful enough. Had he used graphic images of starved children or heaped human corpses, the horror might have capsized the book's narrative. Who among us could withstand 300 pages of Holocaust Museum images in a graphic novel? Mauswas Vladek's story, but it was still, above all, a story, albeit one supple enough to cut between the present-day domestic and the dark historical. (Scenes depicting Art arguing with Vladek over the wearing of a windbreaker provided valuable comic relief: Spiegelman did not shy away from depicting his father as tight-fisted and stubborn, at the risk of Jewish stereotyping.)

Now, 25 years after Spiegelman won the Pulitzer, comes the lavishly packaged MetaMaus, which is neither a revision nor an expansion of the original book but a companion piece. Much of the text originates from a long-form interview with the author conducted by Hillary Chute, an English professor at the University of Chicago. The subject provided her with "free access to my rat's nest of files, archives, artwork, notebooks, journals, books, and dirty laundry". But Spiegelman's is far from the only testimony: there are interviews with his wife and children, as well as an edited transcript of conversations recorded with his father, which formed the basis of his research. (Vladek's deposition, in all its Polish-Jewish-American vernacular, with all its loops and digressions, is almost as compelling as Mausitself; the original tape recordings are included on the DVD that accompanies the book.)

MetaMausis divided into three sections: "Why the Holocaust", "Why Mice?" and "Why Comics?" In his introduction, Spiegelman speaks of being haunted by his creation: MetaMausgives him the chance to confront "the ghosts of my family, the death-stench of history, and my own past". Having wrought art from the experiences of his father (and the suicide of his mother, Anja), he finds he must now expunge the psychological weight of a work that consumed 13 years of his life. The result is a treasure trove for any comics historian or Holocaust scholar, containing rough sketches, alternate drafts and numerous reference notes and photographs. There are also reproductions of rejection letters from major publishers, which show that even the most prestigious editors can get it spectacularly wrong.

MetaMausis the most forensic analysis of an art form since Michael Ondaatje's The Conversationsprobed the dark recesses of Walter Murch's film-editing suite. It's encyclopedic but accessible: Spiegelman's comments on the work of Harvey Kurtzman, whose razor satire, he reckoned, was more responsible for shaping anti-Vietnam sentiment than pot or LSD, had this reader ravenous to plunder Madmagazine's annals. But, ultimately, MetaMausis one man's attempt to comprehend the darkest of family legacies. His exorcism is our enlightenment.

Peter Murphy is the author of John the Revelator(Faber). His second novel will be published in January 2013