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

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

Feeding Ghosts is the second graphic novel to ever win the Pulitzer, the first being Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992. In that instance, Maus received a Special Award. Feeding Ghosts, however, won in a regular category, Memoir or Autobiography, having competed against the best English prose in the world. What’s more, it’s Hulls’ debut graphic novel.

Widely considered the most prestigious award in journalism, literature, and music in the US, the Pulitzer Prize is second only to the Nobel Prize internationally.

It’s a momentous accomplishment, ostensibly the biggest news in the field of comics. But surprisingly, it’s barely been reported on. Since the book won two weeks ago, only a handful of mainstream and trade press reported about it—notably Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly—and only one major comic book news outlet, Comics Beat.

The book, which according to Hulls took almost a decade to create, was called by the Pulitzer Prize Board “An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”

Feeding Ghosts traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations. Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a best-selling memoir about her persecution and survival, but then suffered from a mental breakdown, from which she never recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls watched both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, which she dealt with by leaving home for the most remote corners of the globe. Eventually, though, she returned to face her own fear and trauma, a generational haunting that could only be healed with the love of family.

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this,” Hulls said in an interview last month. “My book is called Feeding Ghosts, because that was the beginning of this nine year process of really stepping into something that was my family duty.”

Hulls’ first graphic novel may also be her last, however. “I learned that being a graphic novelist is really too isolating for me,” she said in another interview. “My creative practice relies on being out in the world and responding to what I find there.” On her website, she says she’s “setting out to become an embedded comics journalist working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits working in remote environments.”

Whatever the future holds for this groundbreaking artist, Feeding Ghosts deserves to be recognized and celebrated outside the world of comics and especially within.

Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. He is a former CNN regular contributor, the author 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 on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz and at royschwartz.com.