Art Spiegelman: Decades of Groundbreaking Comics

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. 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.   In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the masterful Holocaust narrative, which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

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.

A biographical profile of Spiegelman, here.

Spiegelman’s Facebook, here.

His author’s site on Random House, here.