Art Spiegelman

ART SPIEGELMAN
Comic Book Artist
Maus
Born: 1948 Stockholm, Sweden

Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel memoir, Maus. He is married to and frequently collaborates with artist and art editor Françoise Mouly.

Spiegelman was a major figure in the underground comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to publications such as Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex.

Spiegelman co-founded two significant comics anthology publications, Arcade (with Bill Griffith) in San Francisco during the early 1970s and Raw with his wife, artist (and, later, Art Editor of the The New Yorker) Françoise Mouly, in 1980.

Together with many other innovative works, Raw serialized Maus, which retraces his parents' story as they survived the Holocaust. In 1986, he released the first volume of Maus (Maus I: A Survivor's Tale). The second volume, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began followed in 1991. Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work in the form of comics, including an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Spiegelman has also worked in more commercial forums: After a summer internship (when he was 18) at Topps Bubble Gum, he was hired as a staff writer-artist-editor in Woody Gelman's Product Development Department. With Mark Newgarden, he co-created Garbage Pail Kids stickers and cards.

Hired by Tina Brown in 1992, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in response to "widespread conformism" in the United States media. Spiegelman is a sharp critic of the administration of former President George W. Bush and claims that the American media has become "conservative and timid."

In September 2004, he released In the Shadow of No Towers, in which he relates his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects. Since Fall 2005, Spiegelman's new series "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

In 2005, Time Magazine named Spiegelman one of their "Top 100 Most Influential People."

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