Focusing on the history and legitimacy of comics, artist and cartoonist Art Spiegelman on Wednesday told a packed crowd in Harris Hall that comic books are a potent art form.

“Comic books have the power to pierce their way into your brain very directly,” said Spiegelman, who made sure to have a cigarette lit through the lecture’s two hours.

Spiegelman is known for “Maus” and “Maus II,” comic book renditions of his father’s Holocaust experience that portrayed each group of people as a different animal. The Pulitzer committee created a special prize to recognize the first book.

Spiegelman most recently received acclaim came for a cover of the New Yorker magazine that was published 13 days after Sept. 11. The illustration, a black background with two barely discernable black towers in the foreground, is meant to be looked at twice, he said.

“At first it looks black, except the (New Yorker) logo is interrupted a little, and then a phantom tower sort of comes at you,” said Spiegelman, who was picking up his daughter from high school about a block away from the World Trade Center when the first building fell.

“I kept turning around to see if it was still there,” he said. He said the feeling that the towers were still behind him was the motivation behind the cover.

He also is working on a comic strip about Sept. 11, called “In The Shadow of No Towers.”

“It’s the beginning of a project for me of trying to understand what happened to me,” Spiegelman said.

He then concentrated on the essence and evolution of comic books. He said comic books are a storytelling medium with each page serving as its own architectural unit.

“Each box is a unit like a musical rest,” Spiegelman said.

Although he displayed examples of multiple comic strips, Spiegelman focused on his primary influences: MAD Comics, “which I studied like it was a late entry into the Talmud,” and George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat.”

Spiegelman described “Krazy Kat” as the one early comic that escaped critics’ wrath because of its ambiguous use of language and gender, which caused critics to misinterpret its meaning.

“It was the only thing I could look at after Sept. 11,” Spiegelman said. “I finally realized what made it so profound was that it has to acknowledge the existence and attraction of evil. That’s the closest I come to religion.”

He also talked about the original Superman character, which he described as two Jewish men’s idea of “the uncircumcised