Art Spiegelman doesn’t eat lunch. And Art Spiegelman doesn’t go to restaurants. In fact, since the smoking ban came in he doesn’t go out much at all. So, rather than lunch with the FT, the 60-year-old graphic artist proposes we meet for breakfast at his SoHo studio, set between an upmarket lingerie shop and Armani.

Spiegelman’s life’s work has been to memorialise his world and his experiences in cartoon-strips. What’s distinctive about these comics, though, is that there’s little comic about them. Maus (1986), his most famous work, is a book-length graphic novel about his parents’ incarceration in Auschwitz, in which Jews appear as mice and Nazis as cats. In 1992, the Pulitzer committee gave him a special Letters award; he’s the only graphic artist to earn that accolade.