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France - US comic book artist Art Spiegelman won the top prize for his craft at France's Angouleme world comic strip festival, the organiser announced at a ceremony on Sunday.
The Swedish-born New Yorker Spiegelman, 62, is best known as the creator of Maus, an animal fable of his Jewish father's experience in the Holocaust - the only comic book to have won a Pulitzer Prize, the top US book award.
He also published political cartoons about the aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks.
"Considering my poor skills, I'm looking a little like the president Obama receiving the Nobel Peace prize," Spiegelman told the festival by telephone from the United States, calling the award "an incredible honour".
"I've learned so much from the French comics," he added, hailing the festival held in the west of comic-crazy France, before adding a Gallic expletive to celebrate his win.
"As my French wife said when she got the news: 'Merde'!" said Spiegelman, who is only the second American to scoop Angouleme's top Grand Prix, after Robert Crumb in 1999.
Maus shook up industry
The Angouleme festival's prize for best comic strip album went to 35-year-old Italian artist Manuele Fior, for his Five Thousand Kilometres Per Second.
Fior's work has appeared in Italy's La Stampa, Rolling Stone magazine and Le Monde Diplomatique.
The grand jury prize went to another American, David Mazzucchelli for his graphic novel Asterios Polyp.
American Mazzucchelli is best known for his Daredevil and Batman illustrations, where he worked with legendary writer Frank Miller.
Other foreign artists to win awards included Japanese Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezeuka and Belgian Brecht Evens, with French artists capturing many of the others.
Spiegelman was a leading figure in the underground US comic book movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
But it was the 1986 publication of Maus, or mouse in German, which shook up the industry.
In the comic strip, eventually translated into 20 languages and based on hours of interviews with his father Vladek, Hitler and the Germans are depicted as cats and the Holocaust victims as mice.
The animal depictions eerily echo Nazi propaganda that portrayed Polish people as pigs and Jews as mice or rats. His use of this iconography to depict the ravages of the Nazi era shocked many Holocaust survivors.
More honours for Maus
Maus attracted unprecedented levels of critical attention for a comic book and was honoured with a major 1991 exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
"The complex but masterfully orchestrated narrative is enriched by the all-too-human portrait that emerges of Vladek as a miserly and manipulative man whom the artist cannot help treating with a mixture of love, respect, revulsion and guilt," The New York Times wrote in a review at the time.
A year later, Maus won a special Pulitzer Prize.
Spiegelman lives in New York with his French wife, Francoise Mouly, art editor for The New Yorker.
His September 24 2001 cover for the prestigious New York magazine - coming just after the September 11 attacks - remains one of the decade's most powerful political cartoons.
A virulent critic of the policies of former US president George W. Bush, Spiegelman also published In the Shadow of No Towers comics in major European magazines and newspapers. It described the trauma of the 9/11 attacks for himself and his countrymen.
The 2011 edition of the four-day Angouleme festival drew 200 000 visitors to the southwestern French town.
