Art Spiegelman

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Art Spiegelman (born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics promoter best known for his graphic novel Maus.

His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker beginning in 1992.

He is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman's father, and he's married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly. Spiegelman began his career with the Topps bubblegum card firm in the mid-1960s, which was his primary financial assistance for two decades; in the 1980s and the Garbage Pail Kids, he co-created parodic series.

He rose to prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work.

In 1977, a sample of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns, after which Spiegelman shifted his attention to the book-length Maus about his father, a Holocaust survivor.

The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and it was not finished in 1991.

In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize for the first time and has a reputation as a pivotal work, responsible for bringing academic interest to the comics medium. Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991.

The massive comics and graphics magazine introduced talents who were not well known in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, as well as several international cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world.

The couple worked for The New Yorker, which Spiegelman left to work on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) about their reactions to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001. Spiegelman favors greater comics literacy.

Spiegelman, a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a lecturer, has promoted a better appreciation of comics and mentored younger cartoonists.

Personal life

In a New York city hall function, Spiegelman married Françoise Mouly on July 12, 1977. They remarried later this year after Mouly converted to Judaism to please Spiegelman's father. Mouly and Spiegelman have two children together: Nadja Rachel, a daughter, and Dashiell Alan, a 1992 graduate.

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Life and career

On February 15, 1948, Spiegelman was born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1951, he and his parents immigrated to the United States. Arthur Isadore was enrolled in the registry of immigrant, but his name was changed to Art later. Initially, the family lived in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and then moved to Rego Park, New York City, in 1957.

In 1960, he began cartooning and imitated the style of his favorite comic books, such as Mad. He contributed to early fanzines such as Smudge and Skip Williamson's Squire, and in 1962, while attending Russell Sage Junior High School, where he was a honors student, he produced the Mad-inspired fanzine Blasé. By the time he graduated high school and sold artwork to the original Long Island Press and other publications, he was earning money from his drawing. His talent was discovered by the United Syndicate, who gave him the opportunity to produce a syndicated comic strip. He turned down this commercial opportunity due to the belief of art as expression. In 1963, he began attending the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. He met Woody Gelman, the art director of Topps Chewing Gum Company, who urged Spiegelman to apply to Topps after graduating from high school. Spiegelman received a check for his work from a Rego Park newspaper at the age of 15.

Spiegelman's parents urged him to pursue education in a career like dentistry in 1965, but he opted to study art and philosophy instead. While studying at Topps, he found a freelance art job, giving him a steady income for the next two decades.

Spiegelman attended Harpur College from 1965 to 1968, where he served as a student cartoonist and edited a college humor newspaper. Topps recruited him as a creative consultant in Gelman's Product Development Department in 1966, such as the Wacky Packages series of parodic trading cards that appeared in 1967.

In 1966, Spiegelman started selling self-published underground comix on street corners. He had cartoons in underground journals such as the East Village Other and went to San Francisco for a few months in 1967, when the underground comix scene was just emerging.

Spiegelman suffered from a brief but severe anxiety breakdown in late winter 1968, which cut short his university studies. He has said that at the time he was taking LSD with a high frequency. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital, and, soon after, he departed it, his mother died by suicide after her only surviving brother died of suicide.

Spiegelman, a 1971-born Spiegelman, moved to San Francisco and became a member of the countercultural underground comix movement that had been flourishing there. 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, are among the comix he created during this period. Spiegelman's work also appeared in underground magazines such as Gothic Blimp Works, Bijou Funnies, Young Lust, Real Pulp, and Bizarre Sex, as Spiegelman sought his artistic voice. He also produced a number of cartoons for men's magazines, such as Cavalier, The Dude, and Gent.

In 1972, Justin Greenbeard ordered Spiegelman to do a three-page strip for the first issue of Funny Aminals [sic]. He wanted to do one about racial profiling, and first considered a tale about African-Americans as mice and cats rather than the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, he went back to the Holocaust that his parents had survived. He dubbed the strip "Maus" and portrayed the Jews as mice, who were killed by die Katzen, who were Nazis as rats. The narrator likened the tale to one of a mouse named "Mickey." Spiegelman found his voice in this story.

Binky Brown's autobiographical biography of the Virgin Mary while in-progress in 1971 inspired Spiegelman to create "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," an expressionistic work that dealt with his mother's death; it appeared in Short Order Comix #1, which he edited in 1973. Spiegelman's work during this period was also subjected to increasing formal experimentation; the Apex Treasury of Underground Comics in 1974 quotes him: "The comic strip is still in its infancy as an art form." I am as well. We may all grow up together," says the narrator. The often-reprinted "Ace Hole, Midget Detective" of 1974 was a Cubist-style nonlinear parody of hardboiled crime fiction full of non sequiturs. In 1975, "A Day at the Circuits" is a recursive single-page strip about alcoholism and depression in which the reader follows the protagonist through many never-ending pathways. The "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" of 1976 is made up of cut-out panels from Rex Morgan, M.D.'s soap-opera comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D.'s "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" The restyled in such a way as to defy coherence.

Spiegelman edited a pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations in 1973 and dedicated it to his mother. It was co-edited with Bob Schneider and titled Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations. He taught a studio cartooning class at the San Francisco Academy of Art from 1974 to 1975.

The underground comix movement was suffering a decline in the mid-1970s by the mid-1970s. Spiegelman co-edited the anthology Arcade with Bill Griffith in 1975 and 1976 to give cartoonists a safe place. The Print Mint published Arcade, which was covered by Robert Crumb in five issues. Spiegelman and Griffith's attempt to demonstrate how comics connect to broader fields of artistic and literary culture by having an editorial plan. Spiegelman's own experiences in Arcade were short and concerned with formal experimentation. Arcade has also included artwork from decades past as well as recent literary works by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. Spiegelman returned to New York City in 1975, where the bulk of Arcade's editorial work was done by Griffith and his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin. The magazine's 1976 demise was due to a combination of distribution difficulties and retail indifference. Spiegelman said he would never edit another magazine.

Françoise Mouly, an architectural student on a postponement of her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, arrived in New York in 1974. She came across Arcade while looking for comics from which to learn English. When Spiegelman was visiting, avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman, but they did not immediately develop a common interest. Spiegelman returned to New York later this year. The two girls would occasionally cross each other. Mouly felt the desire to contact him after she read "Prisoner on the Hell Planet." An eight-hour phone call triggered a deterioration of their family's family's relationship. When she was required to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course, Spiegelman followed her to France.

Spiegelman introduced Mouly to comics and helped her obtain a Marvel Comics-colorist job. Mouly's visa issues arose when returning to the United States in 1977, which the couple sorted out by marrying. The couple began going back to Europe to investigate the comics scene and brought back European comics to entertain their circle of friends. Mouly helped put together the lavish, oversized collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns in 1977.

Breakdowns had poor execution and sales, and 30% of the print run was unusable due to printing mistakes, which prompted Mouly to regain control of the printing process. She took courses in offset printing and bought a printing press for her loft, on which she planned to print portions of a new magazine she refused to launch with Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Mouly co-edited Raw, beginning in July 1980 with Mouly as the publisher. The first issue was titled "The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides." Although Raw included works by such well-known underground cartoonists as Crumb and Griffith, it brought readers of English-speaking audiences to translations of foreign works by José Muoz, Chéri Samba, Matthew Ware, Ben Katchor, Gary Panter, and others.

With the intention of establishing a book-length work based on his father's recollections of the Holocaust Spiegelman, he began to interview his father in 1978 and carried out a research trip to Auschwitz concentration camp, where his parents had been detained by the Nazis. Beginning with the second issue in December 1980, Maus appeared one chapter at a time as an insert in Raw. Spiegelman's father did not live to see its completion; he died on August 18, 1982. Spiegelman discovered in 1985 that Steven Spielberg was making an animated film about Jewish mice fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe by fleeing to the United States. Spiegelman was positive that the film, An American Tail (1986), was inspired by Maus and he wanted his unfinished book to be published before the movie to avoid comparisons. Pantheon refused to publish a set of the first six chapters after the publication in The New York Times of a rave review of the work-in-progress. The volume was called Maus: A Survivor's Tale and it was subtitled My Father Bleed History. The book attracted a large audience in part because it was sold in bookstores rather than in brick-and-paper comic shops, which had been the most popular bookstore by the 1980s.

Spiegelman began teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978 and continued until 1987, sharing his heroes Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. In print, "Commit: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview," a Spiegelman essay, "According to a Spiegelman essay, "An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview" was published. "High Art Lowdown," a Spiegelman essay that appeared in Artforum in 1990, condemning the Museum of Modern Art's High/Low exhibition.

Spiegelman created the parodic trading card game Garbage Pail Kids for Topps in 1985, following the success of the Cabbage Patch Kids line of dolls. The cards' gross-out factor was also controversious with parent groups, and its success sparked a gross-out fad among children. Topps is his "Medici" for the company's autonomy and financial freedom. The relationship was also strained over issues of credit and ownership of the original artwork. Topps auctioned off works of art Spiegelman had created rather than returning them to him, and Spiegelman broke the company in 1989.

Raw Vol. 9 in 1991 was born in 1991. No. 2, No. 2: No. The first issue of 3 was announced; it was to be the last issue. The closing chapter of Maus was not in Raw, but in the second volume of the graphic novel, which appeared later this year with the subtitle And Here My Troubles Began. Maus' work of comedy, which included an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work of comics.

Spiegelman was hired by Tina Brown as a contributing artist in 1992, and he spent ten years with The New Yorker. His first cover appeared on February 15, 1993, Valentine's Day, and depicted a black West Indian woman and a Hasidic man kissing. The cover at The New Yorker offices caused chaos. Spiegelman intended it to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot, in which racial tensions culminated in the assassination of a Jewish yeshiva student. Spiegelman's twenty-one New Yorker covers were released, but he also proposed some that were refused for being too extravagant.

Spiegelman's pages included strips such as a team "In the Dumps," with children's illustrator Maurice Sendak and an obituary to Charles M. Schulz, "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy." In an issue, Jack Cole, the maker of Plastic Man, was one of Spiegelman's essays, "Forms Stretched to their Limits." It was the inspiration for a book about Cole, Jack Cole, and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (2001).

In the same year, Voyager Company released The Complete Maus, a CD-ROM version of Maus, with extensive additional information, and Spiegelman illustrated a 1923 poem by Joseph Moncure March entitled The Wild Party. In the September 1, 1997 issue of Mother Jones, Spiegelman wrote "Getting in Touch with My Inner Racist."

In 1999, Spiegelman's fame and ties in New York cartooning circles drew the ire of political cartoonist Ted Rall. Rall accused Spiegelman of the ability to "make or break" a cartoonist's career in New York in an article in The Village Voice, while still chastising Spiegelman as "a guy with one great book in him." Danny Hellman, a cartoonist, replied by sending a forged email under Rall's name to 30 people; the prank escalated until Rall brought a defamation lawsuit against Hellman for $1.5 million. Hellman produced a "Legal Action Comics" benefit book to pay for his legal fees, to which Spiegelman contributed a back-cover cartoon in which he relieves himself on a Rall-shaped urinal.

Spiegelman's first children's book, Open Me...I'm a Dog, was published in 1997, with a narrator who attempts to inform its readers that it is a dog by pop-ups and an attached leash. Spiegelman and Mouly edited three issues of the children's comics anthology Little Lit from 2000 to 2003, with contributions from Raw alumni and children's book designers and illustrators.

After the September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, Spiegelman lived close to the World Trade Center site, which was also known as "Ground Zero." Spiegelman and Mouly rushed to their daughter Nadja's kindergarten, where Spiegelman's terror added to his daughter's apprehension over the situation. Spiegelman and Mouly designed a cover for The New Yorker's September 24 issue, which at first glance appears to be utterly black, but closer inspection reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. Mouly designed the silhouettes so that the North Tower's antenna breaks into the "w" of The New Yorker's logo. The towers were printed in black on a marginally darker black field using only four-color printing inks with an overprinted clear varnish. In some cases, the ghost images were only visible when the magazine was tilted toward a light source. Spiegelman was critical of the Bush administration and the mass media for their treatment of the September 11 attacks.

Spiegelman did not renew his New Yorker deal after 2003. He later regretted leaving when he did, but perhaps he should have stayed in protest if the magazine ran a pro-invasion of Iraq later this year. Spiegelman said that his departure from The New Yorker was a part of his general dissatisfaction with "the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush period." Following the September 11 attacks, he felt like he was in "internal exile" and didn't embrace the provocative art that he felt the urge to create. However, Spiegelman said he did not leave due to political inconsistencies, as had been widely reported, but the New Yorker was not interested in doing serialized work, which he did not pursue with his new project.

Spiegelman referred to the September 11 attacks with In the Shadow of No Towers, a German newspaper published in Die Zeit, where it appeared throughout 2003. The Jewish Daily Forward was the first American periodical to serialize the issue. The collected work appeared in September 2004 as an enormous board book with two-page spreads that had to be turned on end to read.

An article about the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy was published in Harper's Magazine Spiegelman's June 2006 issue; some interpretations of Islamic law ban the depiction of Muhammad. Indigo, a bookstore chain in the United Kingdom, has declined to sell the book. The essay, "Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage," explored the often fatal consequences of political cartooning for its designers, ranging from Honoré Daumier, who spent time in jail for his satirical work, to George Grosz, who was exiled. The essay in Indigo seemed to promote the perpetuation of racial stereotyping. Indigo workers were encouraged to tell people: "The decision was made based on the fact that the material about to be published had been known to spark protests around the world." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad endorsed an Iranian cartoon competition looking for anti-Semitic cartoons in reaction to the cartoons. The contest's promoters wanted to highlight what they considered to be Western double standards in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Spiegelman made a cartoon depicting a line of prisoners being led to the gas chambers; one stops to examine the corpses around him and says, "Ha!

Ha!

Ha!

None of this is really happening, which is really strange."

Mouly encouraged publishers to publish comics for children in order to foster literacy in young children. Disappointed by publishers' inability, she self-published Toon Books, a series of easy readers by writers such as Spiegelman, Renée French, and Rutu Modan, in 2008, and she sells the books to teachers and librarians for their educational use. Jack and the Box by Spiegelman was one of the first books published in 2008.

"Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*" was reissued in a reissued Breakdowns in 2008 in a new edition by Spiegelman. In the Virginia Quarterly Review from 2005, an autobiographical strip had been serialized. Be A Nose, a collection of Spiegelman's sketchbooks, appeared in 2009. MetaMaus followed Maus by Spiegelman and Chute with a book-length review of the earlier CD-ROM.

Spiegelman was hired by Library of America to edit the two-volume Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, which appeared in 2010, and contains the following information and annotations by Spiegelman. Wordless, a wordless book collection that was on display in 2014, culminated in a touring exhibition! With live music by saxophonist Phillip Johnston, you will be able to enjoy. Co-Mix: A Retrospective Journey began in 2012 at Angoulême and by the end of 2014, tourists had flown to Paris, Cologne, Vancouver, New York, and Toronto. Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, which complemented the exhibition, appeared in 2013.

Spiegelman, one of the replacement hosts, as well as other names in comics such as writer Neil Gaiman, declined to appear on a panel at the PEN American Center in protest against the upcoming "freedom of expression courage award" for the satirical French periodical Charlie Hebdo following the massacre at the PEN American Center earlier this year. Spiegelman retracted a report he had submitted to a Gaiman-edited "declaring the unsayable" issue of New Statesman when the company refused to print a strip of Spiegelman's. Muhammad is depicted in the strip, "Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist," which Spiegelman believes that the denial was censorship, though the magazine has stated that it never intended to run the cartoon.

Spiegelman co-creating a work Street Cop with author Robert Coover in 2021, according to Literary Hub.

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