This image of kids with guns has been everywhere in the last week, linked to the Newtown school shootings by the acclaimed American comic artist Art Spiegelman. He reissued his still groundbreaking 1993 New Yorker cover on Facebook with this comment:

“Colombine happened in 1999, Newtown in 2012, nearly 20 years later. My wish for 2013: Let Newtown be remembered as the turning point – I’m hoping that kids with guns can become ironic again.” From his FB, here.  Spiegelman has been an influential force for decades.

The first retrospective on Spiegelman opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery next month, a noteworthy event of the 2013 exhibition season. The diverse works include magazine art, preparatory drawings, sketches, studies and panels relating to his early underground comics from the 1970s, and his best–known, and genre–defying work, Maus. (See this post on The Clyde Fitch Report for more on Maus.) In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the masterful Holocaust narrative, which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

Read more about how Spiegelman changed the face of comics on the links below.  Above, some representative work: (clockwise from top right) Breakdowns (book) – From-Maus to Now, An Anthology of Strips  /  A spread from Maus/ The inaugural cover of Raw (July 1980), the comics anthology of Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly /  “The Bastard Offspring…” from Lead Pipe Sunday # 2. Lithography, 1997 / Study for a cover of Raw  / Self portrait with Maus Mask, 1989.

Co-mix, Art Spiegelman : a retrospective of comics, graphics, and scraps is a travelling collaboration of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the New York Jewish Museum. It runs Feb 16 to June 9 in Vancouver.

A biographical profile of Spiegelman, here.

Represented by the Steven Barclay Agency, here.

Spiegelman’s Facebook, here.

His author’s site on Random House, here.

Related articles

• Understanding Maus (thepenguinblog.typepad.com)
• With Maus, Art Spiegelman made graphic novels mainstream (theglobeandmail.com)