Art Spiegelman

Illustrator

• Born: February 15, 1948
• Place of Birth: Stockholm, Sweden

Spiegelman created a new kind of graphic novel with Maus, a work that uses the commonplace cartoon to relate the haunting memoir of his father’s survival during the Holocaust. The graphic novel became the first to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Early Life

Art Spiegelman, the second son of Vladek and Anja Zylberberg Spiegelman, was born on February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden. Art Spiegelman’s parents, Polish Jewish refugees, survived the horrors of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps during the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany, but they lost most of their family, including their firstborn son, Richieu. Devastated by their losses, Spiegelman’s parents decided to relocate to the United States.

They settled in the Rego Park section of Queens, New York, in 1951. As a child, Spiegelman immersed himself in the world of comic books. He loved Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD Magazine and found comfort in its humor, peppered with such Yiddish slang words as “ferschlugginer” (“damned”) and “feh” (an expression of disgust). He also treasured the Topps Chewing Gum baseball cards drawn by graphic artist Jack Davis. Although Spiegelman’s first professional sale was creating a cover for The Long Island Post, he was prouder of his own parody magazine, Blasé, inspired by MAD.

Spiegelman enrolled in the High School of Art and Design in New York City, hoping to become a professional cartoonist. His work soon attracted the attention of a scout for United Features Syndicate, but Spiegelman realized that a syndicated comic strip would only stifle his creativity. He was more attracted to underground comics and by the time he entered Harpur College (later the State University of New York in Binghamton) in the fall of 1965, he had already begun illustrating alternative magazines, such as The Village Other.

As he grew older, Spiegelman found his life with his emotionally scarred parents to be increasingly unbearable. Like other children of Holocaust survivors, Spiegelman bore his own “survivor’s guilt,” and, in March of 1968, he committed himself to a mental hospital in upstate New York. Although he came to a better understanding of his father’s compulsions, Spiegelman’s commitment did not improve his relationship with his parents. Discharged after only a month, he returned home to face even more chaos. A maternal uncle had passed away, leaving Spiegelman’s mother depressed. When she died by suicide in May, Spiegelman’s grief forced him to leave home.

Life’s Work

Leaving college in 1970, Spiegelman moved as far away from New York as he could. In San Francisco, using pseudonyms such as Skeeter Grant, Spiegelman published cartoons for magazines such as Bizarre Sex. He also created more personal works, such as Prisoner on the Hell Planet (1972), an account of his mother’s suicide. The same year, a friend asked Spiegelman if he had any unpublished work about animals. The resulting three-page comic strip, the basis for Spiegelman’s later work,Maus (1986, 1991), was included in a collection called Funny Aminals [sic] (1972).

In 1975, Spiegelman returned to New York to edit Arcade: The Comics Revue. In 1976, he met Françoise Mouly and married her on July 12, 1977. She encouraged him to publish a volume of his collected works, Breakdowns (1977), and to coedit a new magazine, Raw, dedicated to promoting new cartoonists. Mouly became Spiegelman’s most ardent supporter, converting to Judaism in the early 1980’s. Partners in every sense of the word, Spiegelman and Mouly had two children; a daughter, Nadja Rachel, in 1987, and then a son, Dashiell Alan, in 1992.

Spiegelman and Mouly spent eight years developing Maus. By 1985, Spiegelman had serialized enough of his father’s story to show his idea to prospective publishers. Pantheon Books extended an offer to publish what material he had. Thus, 1986 saw the release of Maus I: My Father Bleeds History followed by Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began in 1991. Both volumes were a critical success (the first edition alone sold more than 150,000 copies) and inspired the creation of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Spiegelman was given a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992, recognizing that Maus was, in fact, a biography. Spiegelman was offered a job as contributing editor for the New Yorker, although his art was often controversial, and he started to write children’s books: Open Me . . . I’m a Dog! in 1996 and Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies in 2000.

Spiegelman’s life was disrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC). On the morning of September 11, 2001, Spiegelman and his wife were at their home in lower Manhattan when the first plane collided with the North Tower of the WTC. Their fear led to the creation of a stunning cover for the September 24 issue of the New Yorker; it depicted a black-on-black silhouette of the two WTC buildings, and it was widely praised for its beauty and symbolism.

Afterward, Spiegelman’s political views became increasingly at odds with his colleagues, and he reluctantly resigned his post on September 11, 2003. In the Shadow of No Towers relates his difficulties, both professional and personal, in the years after 2001, but it was too controversial for the American publishing community until Pantheon reluctantly released it on September 7, 2004. Another series, begun in 2005, Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! anthologizes much of Spiegelman’s art since Maus.

Beginning in 2008, Spiegelman's wife, Françoise Mouly, began publishing a line of comics for young readers called Toon Books. Spiegelman contributed a comic, Jack and the Box, to the series. In 2011 Spiegelman and literary scholar Hillary Chute published MetaMaus, a book-length analysis of Maus with an accompanying DVD containing video, audio, photos, and an interactive version of the comic. MetaMaus won a 2011 National Jewish Book Award for biography, autobiography, and memoir and a 2012 Eisner Award for best comics-related book.

Exploring multimedia further, Spiegelman created a touring performance piece called Wordless! in 2014. The piece consisted of a speech by Spiegelman about his connection to the history of comics accompanied by wordless comics and woodcut art and live music by saxophonist Phillip Johnston. At the same time, the gallery show Art Spiegelman's Co-Mix: A Retrospective was traveling to various locations in Europe and North America. In 2015, Spiegelman was one of the hosts of the PEN American Center's yearly literary festival.

Spiegelman remained active as an artist into the 2020s, cowriting the 2021 graphic novel Street Cop with novelist Robert Coover and providing illustrations. Meanwhile, Spiegelman continued to speak out against censorship and in favor of freedom of speech. For example, when a Tennessee school district voted in 2022 to ban Maus from local schools, Spiegelman publicly spoke out against the censorship of books in general and highlighted the graphic novel's social value as a tool for teaching children about the Holocaust.

Significance

In 2005, Spiegelman was named one of Time magazine’s “Top One Hundred Most Influential People.” One of a generation of idealistic Jewish comic artists, Spiegelman is a staunch supporter of nontraditional media and nontraditional subject matter. Since 2001, Spiegelman has also frequently traveled the country lecturing about freedom of speech and censorship in the field of comic strips. His lecture “Comix 101: Forbidden Images and the Art of Outrage” has dealt openly with the controversy over an artist’s depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, in 2005. Even when his pictures have drawn sharp criticism from some viewers, he has never wavered from his belief that protecting the freedom of speech is more important than preserving the status quo.

In 2022, Spiegelman was named recipient of the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime honor given to authors who have made significant contributions to American literature. Spiegelman was the first comic book writer to receive the award.

Bibliography

“Art Spiegelman.” Steven Barclay Agency, www.barclayagency.com/speakers/art-spiegelman. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Cavalieri, Joey. “An Interview with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly.” Comics Journal Aug. 1981: 98-125.

Italie, Hillel. "Art Spiegelman to Receive Honorary National Book Award." Associated Press, 9 Sept. 2022, apnews.com/article/entertainment-philanthropy-national-book-awards-d6f85efbf7aadfc2c9d4ffa49b18400f. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Kaplan, Arie. “Kings of Comics: How Jews Transformed the Comic Book Industry, The Bronze Age (1979–).” Reform Judaism 32.3 (2004): 46–48.

Kerman, Judith B., and John Edgar Browning. The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film: Critical Perspectives. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. Print.

Spiegelman, Art, and Hillary Chute. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon, 2011.

Winkie, Luke. “Art Spiegelman on Maus and Free Speech: ‘Who’s the Snowflake Now?’ ” The Guardian, 2 Feb. 2022, www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/05/art-spiegelman-maus-book-ban-interview-life-career. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.