Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948, Stockholm, Sweden) American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991) helped to establish comic storytelling as a sophisticated adult literary medium.

Spiegelman immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1951. The family settled in Queens, New York, and Spiegelman, inspired by the clever artwork and subversive humour of Mad magazine, studied cartooning. As a teenager, he attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and he embarked on a career as a professional artist, selling illustrations to the Long Island Post. He began a two-decade run as a contributing artist and designer for Topps Chewing Gum, during which he helped develop the wildly successful Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages trading cards. Spiegelman attended the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1965 to 1968, and he explored the alternative comics scene—most notably, the work of counterculture icon R. Crumb. After his mother’s suicide in 1968, Spiegelman left college without obtaining a degree, and he spent the early 1970s contributing to the flourishing comics underground. In 1972 he published two strips that represented a break from his previous work. The first was Maus, originally a three-page story that appeared in cartoonist Justin Green’s Funny Animals anthology. The second, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, was an attempt to understand his mother’s suicide through panels that evoked the bold intensity of German Expressionist woodcuts. These strips, along with other works, were collected in Breakdowns (1977).

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In 1980 he cofounded Raw, an underground comic and graphics anthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In it the pair sought to present graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Recognized as the leading avant-garde comix journal of its era, Raw featured strips by European artists as well as previewed Spiegelman’s own work. Beginning in Raw’s second issue (December 1980), Spiegelman resumed the story of Maus, in which he related the wartime experiences of his parents, Vladek and Anja, both survivors of the Auschwitz death camp. Compelling in its ironic anthropomorphic animal depictions—the Jews and Nazis are drawn with the faces of mice and cats, respectively—its historical veracity, and its personal accounts, the story is made more complex by its contemporary framework. Spiegelman portrays himself as the adult Artie Spiegelman, who is attempting to understand and reconstruct his parents’ past while coping with the legacy of his mother’s death, his aging and often difficult father, and his own sense of guilt. The literary quality of Raw and Maus pushed comix into the mainstream, and their success led to Spiegelman working as a New York Times illustrator, a Playboy cartoonist, and a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker.

The commercial and critical success of Maus earned Spiegelman a “Special Award” Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and a solo exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In addition, Maus II became a New York Times best seller. Initially appearing on the fiction list, it was moved to nonfiction after Spiegelman appealed for the transfer on the basis of the book’s carefully researched factual scenes. The two Maus volumes were translated into more than 20 languages, and they were published together as The Complete Maus in 1996.

In 2000 Spiegelman and Mouly launched Little Lit, a comics anthology for children that collected work from comics creators Chris Ware, Neil Gaiman, and Daniel Clowes, children’s authors Maurice Sendak and Lemony Snicket, and humorist David Sedaris, among others. Although Spiegelman achieved success with lighthearted fare for young readers—his Open Me…I’m a Dog! (1997) was well received—he was inspired by the events of September 11, 2001, to return to the comix format. Stating that “disaster is my muse,” Spiegelman published In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a collection of broadsheet-sized meditations on mortality and the far-reaching consequences of that day. In 2008 he released Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which repackaged his long out-of-print Breakdowns collection as part of a longer graphic memoir. In MetaMaus (2011) Spiegelman described the story behind Maus. Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, an overview of his career, was published in 2013. Spiegelman was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005.