New Voices blog post

Art Spiegelman is an American illustrator who was born on February 15, 1948. He was born in Stockholm, Sweden to Polish Jewish parents but later immigrated to the United States with his parents at a young age in 1951 to escape WW2. His family settled in Queens, New York and there, Art became fascinated by artwork and humour in the comics by Mad magazine. He began to study cartooning in high school and started to draw professionally at the age of 16. He attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design and later studied art and philosophy at Harpur College despite his parents wishes of making him a dentist. During his time in high school, he worked for Topps Chewing Gum, a company that is known for the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Art dropped out of college in 1968 after his mother committed suicide and began to join the underground comics movement throughout the 70s. During the 70s would move to San Francisco to do graphic novels or comix(comics that are more oriented towards adults) for underground comic publications like Real Pulp, Young Lust, and Bizarre Sex. He would later move back to New York to work for various publications such as New York Times and Playboy. In 1980, Art and his wife started a new magazine called Raw, an avant grade comics magazine with the goal of making graphic novels more popular among the public. The magazine would help many young talents on the main stage like Mark Beyer, Chris Ware, and Charles Burns. In 1978, Art published one of his most famous works called “Maus”, a comic strip book that details the life of Jews during the Holocaust and shares Art’s parents’ experience in Europe. The book portrays the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats and it also discusses Art’s struggle of understanding his mother’s past and legacy while also confronting his sense of guilt. Maus became best seller and made Art win a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Art would work on other comic such as Little Lit, a comics anthology in collaboration with other illustrators including Maurice Sendak, and In the Shadow of No Towers, a story about the 9/11 terrorist attack. Art Spiegelman has won many awards and has done many exhibitions where he shows his work. He is still alive and continues to do work.

I think Art Spiegelman is a very versatile cartoonist and illustrator. He does a lot of different variations on the comic book style but still manages to convey the message or theme really well. His style varies from the classic bold line pop art style of comics, to black and white ink or innocent children illustration. His different styles show pretty well how talented he is but I think what makes his illustrations and work so memorable is how he is able to use deceitful innocent drawings to convey dark and horrifying imagery. Maus is a good example of this, he uses simple cartoonish like drawings to show the horrors of the Holocaust thanks to his use of bold lines and contrast between black and white. Overall, Art is a person who can do a lot of things and he is pretty good at doing all of them especially showing horror.