Profile of Art Spiegelman on Famous Like Me

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist.

Born in Stockholm, Spiegelman was a major figure in the underground comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to publications such as Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex. In early 1968, he had a nervous breakdown at Harpur College, in Binghamton, New York, where he was a student. Taken to a mental hospital, he recovered. Shortly after that, his mother, Anja Spiegelman, an Auschwitz survivor, committed suicide while Spiegelman was spending the weekend with his girlfriend, Isabella. [] Spiegelman later included his 1970s comic "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" in Maus detailing this traumatic event. Later he illustrated many of the Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids stickers and cards. He founded two significant comics anthology publications, Arcade (along with Bill Griffith) and RAW with his wife, artist and graphic novelist (and later, Art Editor of the New Yorker Magazine) Françoise Mouly, in 1980. In 1986, he released the first volume of Maus (Maus: A Survivor's Tale, also known as Maus: My Father Bleeds History) which retraced his parents' story of survival of the Holocaust. The second volume, Maus: And Here My Troubles Began followed in 1991. Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work in the form of comics, including an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Spiegelman worked for the New Yorker Magazine but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Spiegelman's post-September 11 New Yorker cover received wide acclaim. The cover was inspired by Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings: at first it appears to be totally black, but upon close examination reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black.

Spiegelman states that his resignation from the New Yorker was to protest the "widespread conformism" in the United States media. Spiegelman is a sharp critic of the administration of President George W. Bush and claims that the American media has become "conservative and timid". Spiegelman claims that the New Yorker censored his work including a 4th of July cover containing an atomic bomb and a Thanksgiving issue showing U.S. military aircraft dropping turkeys over Afghanistan and titled "Operation Enduring Turkey".

In September 2004, he released In the Shadow of No Towers as a book, a strip in which he relates his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects.

In 2005, Time Magazine named Spiegelman one of their Top 100 Most Influential People worldwide.

Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the medium of comics. He tours the country giving a lecture he calls "Comix 101." He and Françoise Mouly, his wife, also edit a series of hardcover comic anthologies (of mostly newly commissioned work) for children, called "Little Lit."

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