Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman was born to Vladek and Anja Spiegelman on February 15, 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. He has come to be an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best-known for his graphic novel Maus. This book has recently been completed in Prof. Baker’s Social Justice in Modern and Contemporary Literature course. This novel was serialized from 1980 to 1991. It is based on the life story of his father, Vladek Spiegelman whom had lived and survived World War II as well as the Holocaust. To give a better description of the novel, it depicts Art Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It is told from his own understanding in which he is trying deal with understanding the nature of these very traumatic events as well as trying to deal with his relationship with his father. This novel is an allegory in which it represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. An allegory is a form of art, whether it be a picture or story which gives us its meaning through the use of symbols, many people would consider an allegory an extended type of metaphor.

When Art was a child, comics were to be considered as illicit as pornography but for him, they were like literature. He felt that they could be used to speak the unspeakable like he had in Maus. Maus is to be considered the first true graphic novel not because of its images but due to the story itself which is all true. He produced covers for The New Yorker where his covers were “courageous” and even “outrageous”. He spoke more on comics in his documentary. He explained that he might have helped domesticate comics. He is all for comics being as vulgar and nasty as they can be as well as sophisticated. The reason that this may be is because these types of images are literally a reflection on the lives that we live today. They exhibit great realism and truth. With this there has been a great debate on whether comics with said images should be made for child reading. I think it greatly depends on how far the images go with their vulgarity. Specifically speaking on Maus, it should be added to course curriculum for historical purposes.

He does not really care to be labeled as the father of comics but explains that it works just depending on what people mean by it. He says that if graphic novels are thought to be ambitious content than he would certainly be okay with being attached to this said label. Much of his work is influenced by his familial relationships with his mother and his father.