Art Spiegelman American author and illustrator

Art Spiegelman

American author and illustrator

 In 1980 he cofounded Raw, a

 underground comic and graphics anthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In it the pair sought to present graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Recognized as the leading avant-garde comix journal of its era, Raw featured strips by European artists as well as previewed Spiegelman’s own work. Beginning in Raw’s second issue (December 1980), Spiegelman resumed the story of Maus, in which he related the wartime experiences of his parents, Vladek and Anja, both survivors of the Auschwitz death camp. Compelling in its ironic anthropomorphic animal depictions—the Jews and Nazis are drawn with the faces of mice and cats,

 respectively—its historical veracity, and its personal accounts, the story is made more complex by its contemporary framework. Spiegelman portrays himself as the adult Artie Spiegelman, who is attempting to understand and reconstruct his parents’ past while coping with the legacy of his mother’s death, his aging and often difficult father, and his own sense of guilt. The literary quality of Raw and Maus pushed comix into the mainstream, and their success led to Spiegelman working as a New York Times illustrator, a Playboy cartoonist, and a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker.