Spiegelman

2. Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been highly influential, and he spent a decade as contributing editor of The New Yorker starting in 1992, where he also made a number of high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to Françoise Mouly.Spiegelman's work first gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s. His work in this period was short and formally experimental, and often included autobiographical elements. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977. After Breakdowns, Spiegelman wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He settled on the theme of his father's experiences during as a Holocaust survivor.

3. Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991. The oversized comics and graphics magazine helped introduce a number of talents that would become prominent in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Ben Katchor and others. It also introduced a number of European and Japanese cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple edited comics and cartoons at The New Yorker.

4. The book, Maus, would take thirteen years to complete. It drew both praise and criticism for depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The book won a number of prizes, most prominently a special Pulitzer Prize. It has come to be viewed as a pivotal work in comics, responsible for bringing serious scholarly attention to the medium.

21. Raw was a comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly and published by Mouly from 1980 to 1991. It was a flagship publication of the 1980s alternative comics movement, serving as a more intellectual counterpoint to Robert Crumb's visceral Weirdo, which followed squarely in the underground tradition of Zap and Arcade. Along with the more genre-oriented Heavy Metal it was also one of the main venues for European comics in the United States in its day.

22. Spiegelman has often described the reasoning and process that lead Mouly to start the magazine: after the demise of Arcade, the '70s underground comics anthology he co-edited with Bill Griffith, and the general waning of the underground scene, Spiegelman was despairing that comics for adults might fade away for good, but he had sworn not to work on another magazine where he would be editing his peers because of the tension and jealousies involved; however, Mouly had her own reasons for wanting to do just that. Having set up her small publishing company, Raw Books & Graphics, in 1977, she saw a magazine encompassing the range of her graphic and literary interests as a more attractive prospect than publishing a series of books. At the time, large-format, graphic punk and New Wave design magazines like Wet were distributed inindependent bookstores. Mouly had earlier installed a printing press in their fourth floor walk-up Soho loft and experimented with different bindings and printing techniques. She and Spiegelman eventually settled on a very bold, large-scale and upscale package. Calling Raw a "graphix magazine," they hoped their unprecedented approach would bypass readers' prejudices against comics and force them to look at the work with new eyes.

23. Raw featured a mix of American and European contributors (including some of Spiegelman's students at the School of Visual Arts), as well as various contributors from other parts of the world, including the Argentine duo of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, the Congolese painter Cheri Samba, and several Japanese cartoonists known for their work in Garo. Though comics were the main focus, many issues included galleries of non-comics illustration and illustrated prose or non-fiction pieces; for example, Raw Volume 2 Number 2 featured one of the earliest published articles on Henry Darger, complete with fold-out color reproductions of his paintings and diaries. Raw also frequently reprinted public domain works by cartoonists and illustrators of historical significance such as George Herriman, GustaveDoré, and Winsor McCay. The most famous work to come from the pages of Raw is Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus, which was published serially in Raw. Individual chapters were packaged as small comic books bound within each issue of Raw Volume 1, starting with Raw 2 (a few color comics, such as Spiegelman's "Two-Fisted Painters: The Matisse Falcon" and Yoshiharu Tsuge's "Red Flowers", were also packaged as inserts). By Volume 2 Raw's own dimensions had shrunk to match those ofMaus.