Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman (born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev on February 15, 1948) 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. The oversized comics 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 is an advocate for greater comics literacy. As editor and as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Spiegelman has promoted greater understanding of comics, and mentored younger cartoonists.