October 2, 2017

Art Spiegelman is presenting at the Pulp Culture Comics Arts Festival & Symposium. He 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.

Having rejected his father’s aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 15. 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 before being published by Pantheon, who have published many of his subsequent works including an illustrated version of the 1928 lost classic The Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March.