He brings astuteness to the graphic novel and does not shy away from bold art. His covers for The New Yorker have occasionally been controversial. The terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001 allowed for Spiegelman to comment on the impact of tragedy on the individual, the nation, and the world. He is quoted as saying, “that at last he understood something of the experience of his parents' generation”. His cover design for The New Yorker showing two barely visible twin towers in black remains a powerful memorial to that horrific event and a testament to Speigelman’s forte.
He has co-edited collections of children's stories as well as illustrating several books. Spiegelman and Mouly co-edited volumes of the Little Lit series: Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies (2000), Strange Stories for Strange Kids (2001), and It Was a Dark and Silly Night (2003), sophisticated children's stories in comic-book form. But once again bringing intelligence to his genre he adds depth, culture, and history to these stories. The stories in this series that Spiegelman himself contributed is based on a Hasidic tale. Having reaffirmed his Jewish identity with the Maus volumes, Spiegelman remains close to his ethnic origins. 
His major Holocaust work, Maus, A Survivor's Tale (1986, 1991), is a graphic novel, an extended comic book that treats serious subjects in greater depth and with a wider variety of techniques than is possible in the severely circumscribed popular comic book. Despite its designation as a "novel," that is, a work of fiction, the graphic novel is not exclusively limited to fiction but often includes autobiography, biography, and other forms of verifiable narrative.
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