Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker, where he made several high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly, and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. Spiegelman first gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s. His work then was short and experimental, and often included autobiographical elements. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977. After Breakdowns, Spiegelman turned focus on a "very long comic book" about his father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor. The book, Maus, depicts Nazis as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and took thirteen years until its completion in 1991. It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and has come to be viewed as a pivotal work in comics, responsible for bringing serious scholarly attention to the medium. Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991.

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Art Spiegelman »