The New York Review of Books does not often hand its pages to a cartoonist. This week it did, with an interview with Lisa Hanawalt about work on BoJack Horseman, published under the headline "From the Horse's Mouth" and conducted, by the sound of it, almost entirely in horse puns. The same week, the Guardian ran a long interview with Art Spiegelman — more than four decades after Maus transformed the graphic novel — in which he discusses Trump, the shadow of 9/11, and the rise of fascism in America. And Book Riot gathered thirty-nine YA graphic novels, comics, and graphic memoirs from 2026 alone, arranged so readers can slot them into themed collections.
Three outlets that mostly cover prose, all pointing the same week at drawings. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a novelty beat.
For most of the last century, comics were reviewed — when they were reviewed at all — as a curiosity that occasionally got ambitious. Spiegelman is the hinge in that story. Maus did not just find an audience; it changed the shelf it sat on, which is why the Guardian now interviews him the way it would interview a novelist about the state of the republic, and why the interview is about fascism rather than about ink.