The Graphic Novel Feeding Ghosts Won the Pulitzer Prize, But for Some Reason It’s Gotten Little Reaction

The graphic caller Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) by Tessa Hulls has won the Pulitzer Prize, announced connected May 5.

Feeding Ghosts is the 2nd graphic caller to ever triumph the Pulitzer, the archetypal being Art Spiegelman’s Maus successful 1992. In that instance, Maus received a Special Award. Feeding Ghosts, however, won successful a regular category, Memoir oregon Autobiography, having competed against the champion English prose successful the world. What’s more, it’s Hulls’ debut graphic novel.

Widely considered the astir prestigious grant successful journalism, literature, and euphony successful the US, the Pulitzer Prize is 2nd lone to the Nobel Prize internationally.

It’s a momentous accomplishment, ostensibly the biggest quality successful the tract of comics. But surprisingly, it’s hardly been reported on. Since the publication won 2 weeks ago, lone a fistful of mainstream and commercialized property reported astir it—notably Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly—and lone 1 large comic publication quality outlet, Comics Beat.

The book, which according to Hulls took astir a decennary to create, was called by the Pulitzer Prize Board “An affecting enactment of literate creation and find whose illustrations bring to beingness 3 generations of Chinese women – the author, her parent and grandmother, and the acquisition of trauma handed down with household histories.”

Feeding Ghosts traces the reverberations of Chinese past crossed 3 generations. Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai writer swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a best-selling memoir astir her persecution and survival, but past suffered from a intelligence breakdown, from which she ne'er recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls watched some her parent and grandma conflict beneath the value of unexamined trauma and intelligence illness, which she dealt with by leaving location for the astir distant corners of the globe. Eventually, though, she returned to look her ain fearfulness and trauma, a generational haunting that could lone beryllium healed with the emotion of family.

“I didn’t consciousness similar I had a choice. My household ghosts virtually told maine I had to bash this,” Hulls said successful an interrogation past month. “My publication is called Feeding Ghosts, due to the fact that that was the opening of this 9 twelvemonth process of truly stepping into thing that was my household duty.”

Hulls’ archetypal graphic caller whitethorn besides beryllium her last, however. “I learned that being a graphic novelist is truly excessively isolating for me,” she said successful different interview. “My originative signifier relies connected being retired successful the satellite and responding to what I find there.” On her website, she says she’s “setting retired to go an embedded comics writer moving with tract scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits moving successful distant environments.”

Whatever the aboriginal holds for this groundbreaking artist, Feeding Ghosts deserves to beryllium recognized and celebrated extracurricular the satellite of comics and particularly within.

Roy Schwartz is simply a popular civilization historiographer and critic. He is simply a erstwhile CNN regular contributor, the writer of Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero and co-producer of the documentary JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience. Follow him connected Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz and astatine royschwartz.com.