I found a long (5 part) interview with Art Spiegelman online. Below is what he said about "Prisoner on the Hell Planet"…
"The year before, I’d worked on the three-page “Maus” comic that owed more to traditional comics exposition techniques, let’s say, but the subject matter had already moved me toward something more serious and on some level autobiographical, as inspired by Justin Green [of the seminal “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary”]. And my interest in the history and aesthetics of comics was already kind of full blown, so finding out how to harness and pull all these things together was already in progress when I sort of remembered the oddly repressed memory of my mother’s suicide four years before and it made me stop everything else I was doing to give that a shape."
I found it interesting that Spiegelman had already written the three page comic version of Maus before he had written "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". I also thought it was a bit strange that he said he wanted to write "something more serious", suggesting he didn't think of Maus as a serious comic.
SOURCE: http://www.printmag.com/Article/Art_Spiegelman_Part3 (interview between Hillary Chute and Art Spiegelman)
