Art Spiegelman

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Art Spiegelman is a critically acclaimed and highly influential artist and graphic novelist. He was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 and soon after immigrated with his parents to Queens, New York. Though his parents wished for him to become a dentist, Spiegelman enrolled in Harpur College in upstate New York to study art and philosophy.

His early career as an artist began in 1966 at Topps Gum Company, where he drew Bazooka Joe comics and helped to create the cult classic Garbage Pail Kids. He worked at Topps for twenty years, until a dispute over the ownership of his original artworks caused him to leave.

During his time at Topps, he also began publishing his own artwork in underground magazines. In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW (Real Art Works), a magazine of unconventional comics, with his wife, the artist Francoise Mouly. The first volume of Maus was first published in serial form within the pages of RAW between 1980 and 1985, and was released as a book the following year, to enormous critical and popular success. After the second volume of Maus was published in 1992, Spiegelman was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for his work. In addition to the Pulitzer, he has received several other awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an Eisner Award, and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine.

Art Spiegelman lives in New York City with his wife and two children, Nadja and Dashiell. His work has been published in the New York Times, Playboy, The Village Voice, and the New Yorker.



Author's Comment: I wanted to create comics as soon as a I learned humans were behind them, that they were not natural phenomena like trees and boulders.

Nationality: Swedish/American