Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Art Spiegelman

 

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On February 15th, 1948, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden to Holocaust survivors Wladek and Andzia Spiegelman. The Spiegelmans emigrated to the United States in 1951.

Spiegelman showed cartooning skills and ingenuity at a young age and after contributing to various fanzines in the early 1960s, took a job with Topps Chewing Gum Company.

In 1971 Spiegelman moved to San Francisco and became immersed in the underground comix movement. There he experimented with form and explored more personal subject matters, with his first foray into the Holocaust and a work that addressed his mother’s suicide. Through the 1970s he experimented with styles—cubist, noir, soft-core, parody—while also promoting the work of others through editing Arcade The Comics Revue. In 1980, he began co-editing, with his wife Francoise Mouly, RAW, a graphics anthology that proved to be a powerful force in the world of alternative comics. And most significantly for Spiegelman, it serialized what would be his masterpiece—Maus.

In 1992, Maus became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. It interweaves two stories—the author/artist interviewing his father in 1978 about his life before and during the Holocaust, and flashbacks to his father’s life in Auschwitz. With the Jews drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs, it renders a harrowing tale of survival in the past and an anguished story of a father-son relationship in the present.

Following his Pulitzer, Spiegelman became a contributing artist at The New Yorker, a position he held until 2001, during which he created 21 covers for the magazine. Among his more notable publications of the past 20 years are In the Shadow of No Towers, his response to the attacks of September 11.