Cartoonist, born in Stockholm, Sweden. Brought to the USA as a three-year-old, he studied cartooning in high school. While a student at Harpur College (NY) (19658) he began creating novelty cards for Tip Top Chewing Gum, and in later years continued to work for them as a creative consultant. In the 1960s and 1970s he contributed a series of comics to underground periodicals, under pseudonyms such as Al Flooglebuckle, and from 1979 he taught about comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. With his wife, he founded Raw (1980), a yearly review of avant-garde comics. His reputation was confined to a small circle until he published his comic-book novels, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began (1991). Drawing on his father's accounts of his experiences during the Holocaust, he defied expectations by drawing the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, and somehow his simple drawings enhanced the pathos. In 1992 he won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award for his Maus books, and the same year he became a contributing editor at the New Yorker.
| Art Spiegelman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 15, 1948 Stockholm, Sweden |
Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic memoir, Maus.
Life
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden to Vladek Spiegelman and Anja Spiegelman (née Zylberberg), who were Polish-Jewish refugees. Spiegelman grew up in Rego Park in Queens, New York City, New York and graduated from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan.
He had one brother named Richieu who died before Art was born. (Maus, Volume 1) Art mentions in Maus that he felt like he had a sibling rivalry with a photograph, since his parents were still upset over the death of their first-born son. 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. He co-founded two significant comics anthology publications, Arcade (along with Bill Griffith) in the early 70's in San Francisco, and RAW with his wife, artist (and, later, Art Editor of 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. 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 consultant and remained as such for 20 years. For Topps, Spiegelman invented "Garbage Candy" (candy in the form of garbage, sold in miniature plastic garbage cans), the Wacky Packages card series, and co-created (with Mark Newgarden) 'Garbage Pail Kids' stickers and cards, Ring Pops (rings with a candy popsicle insert), and countless other hugely successful novelties. Spiegelman, who had assigned Topps work to many of his cartoonists friends or students, left over the issue of creative ownership and ownership of artwork (Topps auctioned off the original artwork they had accumulated over the decades, and kept the profits.)
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. Spiegelman states that his resignation from The New Yorker was to protest the "widespread conformism" in the United States media. Since Fall 2005, Spiegelman's new series "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!"
In 2005, Time Magazine named Spiegelman one of their Top 100 Most Influential People.
Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the medium of comics.
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