Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman ( ; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is a Polish-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. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned his focus to the book-length Maus, about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern graphic novel depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, ethnic Poles as pigs, and citizens of the United States as dogs. Spiegelman spent 13 years on the project, completing it in 1991. In 1992 it won a special Pulitzer Prize and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work.
Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991. The oversized and graphics magazine helped introduce talents who became prominent in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, and introduced several foreign cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple worked for The New Yorker, which Spiegelman left to work on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), about his reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001.
Spiegelman advocates for greater comics literacy. As an editor, a teacher, and a lecturer, Spiegelman has promoted better understanding of comics and has mentored younger cartoonists.
Family history
Spiegelman's parents were Polish Jews (1906–1982) and (1912–1968) Spiegelman. His father was born Zeev Spiegelman, with the Hebrew name Zeev ben Avraham. Władysław was his Polish name, and Władek (or Vladek in anglicized form) was a diminutive of this name. He was also known as Wilhelm under the German occupation, and Anglicized his name to William upon immigration to the United States. His mother was born Andzia Zylberberg, with the Hebrew name Hannah. She changed her name to Anna upon immigrating to the United States. In Spiegelman's Maus, from which the couple are best known, Spiegelman used the spellings "Vladek" and "Anja", which he believed would be easier for Americans to pronounce. The surname Spiegelman is German for "mirror man".
In 1937, the Spiegelmans had one other son, Rysio (spelled "Richieu" in Maus), who died before Art was born, at the age of five or six. During the Holocaust, Spiegelman's parents sent Rysio to Zawiercie to stay with his maternal aunt, Tosha, with whom they believed he would be safe. In 1943, the aunt poisoned herself, along with Rysio and two other young family members in her care, so that the Nazis could not take them to the extermination camps. After the war, the Spiegelmans, unable to accept that Rysio was dead, searched orphanages all over Europe in the hope of finding him. Spiegelman talked of having a sort of sibling rivalry with his "ghost brother"; he felt unable to compete with an "ideal" brother who "never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble". Of 85 Spiegelman relatives alive at the beginning of World War II, only 13 are known to have survived the Holocaust.
Life and career Early life
He began cartooning in 1960 and imitated the style of his favorite comic books, such as Mad. In the early 1960s, he contributed to early fanzines such as Smudge and Skip Williamson's Squire, and in 1962—while at Russell Sage Junior High School in Forest Hills, Queens, where he was an honors student—he produced the Mad-inspired fanzine Blasé. He was earning money from his drawing by the time he reached high school and sold artwork to the original Long Island Press and other outlets. His talent caught the eyes of United Features Syndicate, who offered him the chance to produce a syndicated comic strip. Dedicated to the idea of art as expression, he turned down this commercial opportunity. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan beginning in 1963. He met Woody Gelman, the art director of Topps Chewing Gum Company, who encouraged Spiegelman to apply to Topps after graduating from high school. At age 15, Spiegelman received payment for his work from a Rego Park newspaper.
After he graduated in 1965, Spiegelman's parents urged him to pursue the financial security of a career such as dentistry, but he chose instead to enroll at Harpur College to study art and philosophy. While there, he got a freelance art job at Topps, which provided him with an income for the next two decades.
Spiegelman attended Harpur College from 1965 until 1968, where he worked as staff cartoonist for the college newspaper and edited a college humor magazine. After a summer internship when he was 18, Topps hired him for Gelman's Product Development Department as a creative consultant making trading cards and related products in 1966, such as the Wacky Packages series of parodic trading cards begun in 1967.
Spiegelman began selling self-published underground comix on street corners in 1966. He had cartoons published in underground publications such as the East Village Other and traveled to San Francisco for a few months in 1967, where the underground comix scene was just beginning to burgeon.
In late winter 1968, Spiegelman suffered an intense nervous breakdown, which cut short his university studies. He has said that at the time he was taking LSD with great frequency. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital, and shortly after he exited it, his mother died by suicide following the death of her only surviving brother.
Underground comics (1971–1977) In 1971, after several visits, Spiegelman moved to San Francisco and became a part of the countercultural underground comix movement that had been developing there. Some of the he produced during this period include The Compleat Mr. Infinity (1970), a ten-page booklet of explicit comic strips, and The Viper Vicar of Vice, Villainy and Vickedness (1972), a transgressive work in the vein of fellow underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson. Spiegelman's work also appeared in underground magazines such as Gothic Blimp Works, Bijou Funnies, Young Lust, Real Pulp, and Bizarre Sex, and were in a variety of styles and genres as Spiegelman sought his artistic voice. He also did a number of cartoons for men's magazines such as Cavalier, The Dude, and Gent.
In 1972, Justin Green asked Spiegelman to do a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny . He wanted to do one about racism, and at first considered a story with African Americans as mice and cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust that his parents had survived. He titled the strip "Maus" and depicted the Jews as mice persecuted by die Katzen, which were Nazis as cats. The narrator related the story to a mouse named "Mickey". With this story Spiegelman felt he had found his voice.
Seeing Green's revealingly autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary while in-progress in 1971 inspired Spiegelman to produce "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", an expressionistic work that dealt with his mother's suicide; it appeared in 1973Short Order Comix #1 entry, Grand Comics Database. Retrieved March 4, 2020.Fox, M. Steven. Short Order Comix #1, Underground ComixJoint. Retrieved March 4, 2020. in Short Order Comix 1, which he edited. Spiegelman's work thereafter went through a phase of increasing formal experimentation; the Apex Treasury of Underground Comics in 1974 quotes him: "As an art form the comic strip is barely in its infancy. So am I. Maybe we'll grow up together."Donahue, Don and Susan Goodrick, editors. The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics (Links Books/Quick Fox, 1974). The often-reprinted "Ace Hole, Midget Detective" of 1974 was a Cubist-style nonlinear parody of hardboiled crime fiction full of non sequiturs. "A Day at the Circuits" of 1975 is a recursive single-page strip about alcoholism and depression in which the reader follows the character through multiple never-ending pathways. "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" of 1976 is made up of cut-out panels from the soap-opera comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D. refashioned in such a way as to defy coherence.
In 1973, Spiegelman edited a pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations and dedicated it to his mother. Co-edited with Bob Schneider, it was called Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations. In 1974–1975, he taught a studio cartooning class at the San Francisco Academy of Art.
By the mid-1970s, the underground comix movement was encountering a slowdown. To give cartoonists a safe berth, Spiegelman co-edited the anthology Arcade with Bill Griffith, in 1975 and 1976. Arcade was printed by The Print Mint and lasted seven issues, five of which had covers by Robert Crumb. It stood out from similar publications by having an editorial plan, in which Spiegelman and Griffith attempt to show how comics connect to the broader realms of artistic and literary culture. Spiegelman's own work in Arcade tended to be short and concerned with formal experimentation. Arcade also introduced art from ages past, as well as contemporary literary pieces by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. In 1975, Spiegelman moved back to New York City, which put most of the editorial work for Arcade on the shoulders of Griffith and his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin. This, combined with distribution problems and retailer indifference, led to the magazine's 1976 demise. Spiegelman swore he would never edit another magazine.
Françoise Mouly, an architectural student on a hiatus from her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, arrived in New York in 1974. While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade. Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman, when Spiegelman was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After she read "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course.
Spiegelman introduced Mouly to the world of comics and helped her find work as a colorist for Marvel Comics. After returning to the U.S. in 1977, Mouly ran into visa problems, which the couple solved by getting married. The couple began to make yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends. Mouly assisted in putting together the lavish, oversized collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns in 1977.
Raw and Maus (1978–1991)