Art Spiegelman  (b. 1948) Prisoner on the Hell Planet LINKS Art Spiegelman http://www.ngc.peachnet.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/dproyal/spiegel.htm This Art Spiegelman research homepage is mainly bibliographical and includes lists of Spiegelman's works, interviews with the author, and critical works. BIOGRAPHY Art Spiegelman (b. 1948)  Spiegelman's parents, Anja and Vladek, were Polish Jews who survived imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and his family immigrated to the United States. He attended Harpur College (now State University of New York at Binghamton) from 1965 to 1968. His mother, Anja, committed suicide in 1968. In 1977 he married Françoise Mouly, a publisher. As a student, Spiegelman developed his talent for drawing and writing and became a creative consultant, designer, and writer for Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., where he produced novelty packaging and bubble gum cards. But he was fascinated by the provocative underground comics of the sixties, and began to create original and powerful comic book work addressed to an adult audience. The Complete Mr. Infinity appeared in 1970, succeeded by numerous other productions that culminated in Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986). Maus, based on his father's experience as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Joel M. Cavior Award for Jewish Writing. In his "comic book," Spiegelman portrays the Nazis as cats and the Jews as their victim mice. He published the second volume of Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began in 1991. In 1980, Spiegelman and his wife founded Raw—an annual magazine that showcases the talents of avant-garde artist-writers of adult comics.