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Art Spiegelman has almost
single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and
onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize
for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus—
which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus
II continued the remarkable story of his parents’
survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America.
His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles,
their formal complexity, and controversial content. In his lecture
“Comix 101.1" Spiegelman takes his audience on a
chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while
explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be
ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance
of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way
the brain works."
Having rejected his parents’
aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied
cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at
age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College
before becoming part of the underground comix subculture of
the 60s and 70s. As creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum
Co. from 1965-1987, Spiegelman created Wacky Packages,
Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items, and taught
history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts
in New York from 1979-1986. In 2007 he was a Heyman Fellow of
the Humanities at Columbia University where he taught a Masters
of the Comics seminar. In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW,
the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise
Mouly—Maus
was originally serialized in the pages of RAW. They've
more recently co-edited Little
Lit, a series of three comics anthologies for children
published by HarperCollins ("Comics-They're not just for
Grown-ups Anymore") and Big
Fat Little Lit, collecting the three comics into one volume.
Currently, he and his wife publish a series of early readers
called Toon Books—picture books in comics format, and
are editing A
Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics
to be published in the Fall of 2009. His work has been published
in many periodicals, including The
New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer
from 1993-2003. A collection of his New Yorker work,
Kisses from New York was published in France, Germany
and Italy, and will be published in the U.S. by Pantheon, who
also published his illustrated version of the 1928 lost classic,
The
Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March.
In 2004 he completed a
two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages, In
the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of
European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit
and The London Review of Books. A book version of these
highly political works was published by Pantheon in the United
States, appeared on many national bestseller lists, and was
selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of
the 100 Notable Books of 2004.
Spiegelman’s
most recent work includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology,
Breakdowns (fall 2008); it includes an autobiographical
comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself,
entitled Portrait
of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; as well as a new
children’s book (published with Toon Books), called Jack
and the Box. Additionally, in preparation is a book with
a DVD about the making of Maus, entitled Meta Maus.
In 2009 McSweeney’s published a collection of three of
his sketchbooks entitled Be
a Nose. A major exhibition of his work was arranged by Los
Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the "15
Masters of 20th Century Comics" exhibit (November 2005).
In 2005, Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s
100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the
Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier
de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and—the
American equivalent—played himself on an episode of “The
Simpsons” in 2008.
•••
“Spiegelman has
become one of The New Yorker’s most sensational
artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that
are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach
up and tattoo your eyeballs with images once unimaginable in
the magazine of old moneyed taste ... From his Holocaust saga
in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the The
New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party
that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman’s cartoons don’t
fool around.”
— Los Angeles
Times |
