More of Art Spiegelman

Below is a link that I found very informative. It is an interview that The National had with Art Spiegelman. They discuss his early years, how he started in the industry, as well as he gives a good explanation of Maus and a deeper insight on the creation of the graphic novel. They also discuss his other work in this interview. 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZefKS-WEo4

Historical Context of Spiegelmans' Growing Up

Art Spiegelman in 1969
http://potrzebie.blogspot.ca/2011_11_01_archive.html

At a very early age, Spiegelman was drawn to comics. He described comics to be “a gateway drug into reading” (CBC, 2015). It all really began for Art Spiegelman when he was in high school and started studying cartooning at the age of sixteen, and he soon after began drawing professionally. His parents didn’t support his decision when he chose this career in high school, as they wanted him to become a dentist since it was a more secure occupation. Despite his parents’ disapproval, Spiegelman went to Harpur College and majored in art and philosophy. It was in that following era when Spiegelman became a regular contributor to various underground publications and his career began to succeed.

References 

Art Spiegelman. (2015). Comic book DB. Retrieved from http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=5328

CBC. (2015, January 12). How art spiegelman redefined comics. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/01/how-art-spiegelman-redefined-comics.html

Image References

Blogger. (2015). Retrieved on March 30, 2015, from http://potrzebie.blogspot.ca/2011_11_01_archive.html

Awards & Publications

Awards:

Art Speigelman has won many awards including:

1982: Playboy Editorial Award, Best Comic Strip

1982: Yellow Kid Award (de), Lucca, Italy, for Foreign Author

1983, 1984, 1985: Print, Regional Design Award

1986: Joel M. Cavior, Jewish Writing

1987: Inkpot Award

1988: Angoulême International Comics Festival, France, Prize for Best Comic Book, for Maus

1988: Urhunden Prize, Sweden, Best Foreign Album, for Maus

1990: Max & Moritz Prize, Erlangen, Germany, Special Prize, for Maus

1992: Pulitzer Prize Letters award, for Maus

1992: Eisner Award, Best Graphic Album (reprint), for Maus

1992: Harvey Award, Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, for Maus

1992: Los Angeles Times, Book Prize for Fiction for Maus II

1993: Angoulême International Comics Festival, Prize for Best Comic Book, for Maus II

1993: Sproing Award, Norway, Best Foreign Album, for Maus

1993: Urhunden Prize, Best Foreign Album, for Maus II

1999: Eisner Award, inducted into the Hall of Fame

2005: French government, Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

2011: Angoulême International Comics Festival, Grand Prix

Publications:

Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, an Anthology of Strips (1977)

Maus (1991)

The Wild Party (1994)

Open Me, I'm A Dog (1995)

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (2001)

In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (2008)

Jack and the Box (2008)

Be a Nose (2009)

MetaMaus (2011)

Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps (2013)

He has also been an editor for the following:

Editor:

Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations (with Bob Schneider, 1973)

Arcade (with Bill Griffith, 1975–76)

Raw (with Françoise Mouly, 1980–91)

The Narrative Corpse (1995)

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics (with Françoise Mouly, 2009)
Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts (2010)

References

Wikipedia. (2015, February 17). Art Spiegelman. Retrieved on March 25, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman

Image References

Penguin Book Australia. (2015). Retrieved on March 27, 2015, from http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780670916832/metamaus

Forbidden Planet. (2009). Retrieved on March 27, 2015, from http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2009/francoise-moulys-toon-books-art-spiegelmans-jack-and-the-box/

Amazon. (2015). Retrieved on March 27, 2015, from http://www.amazon.com/Open-Me-Dog-Art-Spiegelman/dp/0060273208

Maus | A Survivor's Tale Summary

How It All Goes Down

Book I

At the start of Book I, Art arrives at his father Vladek’s home in order to record his father’s Holocaust memories for a book he plans to write about his father’s life. Vladek begins his story with his life as a young man in Sosnowiec, Poland, in the years leading up to World War II. He meets and marries Anja Zylberberg, a young, intelligent woman from a well-to-do family who helps him to found his own textile factory.

After the birth of their son, Richieu, Anja suffers from a severe attack of post-partum depression, and Vladek accompanies her to a sanitarium in Czechoslovakia, where she will receive medical treatment. On the way there, they witness the spread of Nazism and anti-Semitism throughout central Europe, but are still relatively safe from it in Czechoslovakia. Anja recovers, and they return to Poland. Vladek discovers that in his absence, his factory was vandalized, an ominous foreshadowing of the violence to come.

With the onset of World War II, Vladek leaves for the front as a Polish soldier, where he is taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans. When he is finally released from the POW camp, he returns to a Poland, which is now occupied by the Germans, who extend their anti-Semitic policies there. Vladek loses his factory, but does what he can to make a living on the black market.

Gradually, Jews are taken from his hometown to the camps, including Anja’s elderly grandparents. After being moved to a ghetto, Vladek, Anja, and their family are taken to Dienst Stadium, where Vladek’s father, sister, and his sister’s children are all deported to the camps. Vladek, Anja, and other members of their family are sent with the rest of Sosnowiec’s Jews to Srodula. Vladek and Anja send their son, Richieu, to stay with a relative in another Polish town for safekeeping, but they find out later that the Jews there are also deported to the camps.

In order to avoid deportation, Anja’s sister Tosha commits suicide and poisons Richieu and her own children. When it becomes clear that the Germans intend to send the rest of the Sosnowiec Jews to the camps, Vladek and Anja go into hiding on a farm outside Sosnowiec. They pay smugglers to transport them out of Poland into Hungary, but the smugglers turn them over to the Germans.

Vladek is taken to Auschwitz, while Anja is taken to Birkenau. Conditions are terrible at these camps, but Vladek is able to survive by marketing his skills as a tin worker and a shoemaker. He is also able to save enough rations to barter Anja’s transfer to Auschwitz from Birkenau. They spend a year in the camps until, with the Allies on the horizon, the Germans decide to disassemble the camps and finish executing the Jews at different camps within Germany.

Vladek ends up in Dachau, where conditions are even worse than in Auschwitz, and catches typhus fever. He is then transported with other prisoners to the Swiss border, where they expect to be freed. But the German soldiers escort them into the woods, apparently to execute them. The German soldiers run away before they carry out their plan, afraid of repercussions by the American soldiers.

After another narrow escape, Vladek and his fellow prisoner and friend Shivek hide in a farmhouse until the American soldiers finally take over the town. Vladek returns to Sosnowiec, where he reunites with Anja. They emigrate first to Sweden, and then to the United States, where they begin a new life and a new family with the birth of Art, their second son.

Running parallel to Vladek’s personal history is the story of Art’s writing the novel, complicated by his tense relationship with his father. Art still experiences unresolved anger and depression over his mother’s suicide in 1968, and some of those feelings are directed at Vladek, who he views as partly complicit in her death. Vladek has remarried and his second wife, Mala, is also a Holocaust survivor, but they constantly bicker over money. At the end of Book I, Art is infuriated to learn that Vladek destroyed all of Anja’s diaries from the war.

Article by Shmoop University

References

Schmoop University. (2015). Maus: a surviver's tale summary. Retrieved Mar 26, 2015 from http://www.shmoop.com/maus/summary.html

Plot of Maus Part I | My Father Bleeds History

“A Plot is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, in a sequence, through cause and effect, how the reader views the story, or simply by coincidence. One is generally interested in how well this pattern of events accomplishes some artistic or emotional effect.”

-Wikipedia 

Maus: A survivor’s Tale is a graphic memoir written and illustrated by Art Spiegelman as he records events about his father, Vladek, and how he endured World War II as a highly religious Jew, prevailing as Holocaust surviver. The memoir is divided up into two halves, the first being Part I: My Father Bleeds History, and the second is Part II: And Here My Troubles Began. As a group, we evaluated the first half to introduce ourselves to the content, the atmosphere, surroundings, in order to truly grasp the vivid feelings and emotions of the protagonist, Vladek. The first half of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is divided into several sectors;

Chapter 1 | The Sheik

Chapter 2 | The Honeymoon

Chapter 3 | The Prisoner of War

Chapter 4 | The Noose Tightens

Chapter 5 | Chapter 2 | Mouse Holes

Chapter 6 | Mouse Trap 

The layout of this book serves as a graphic memoir/ comic book of how Art envisioned and recorded the information recalled and stated by his father. It almost proves to be a memoir within a memoir, how Art consumed the information being recalled by his father through his ‘vocal memoir’ or recollection during the 1930’s and 1940’s, and how he portrayed it through cartoon illustrations. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a uniquely contrived memoir, allowing the audience to obtain a more understanding view of the story-line through the implementation of anthropomorphism, otherwise known as personification. Being a Graphic Memoir, the graphic portrayal utilizes personification of the human body with animal-heads in order to represent various cultures and social statuses of characters seen throughout. 

There are 3 main character traits evidently seen throughout the memoir, this consisted of human bodies with: 

Mouse | representing the Jewish people 

Cat | represented Nazi’s

Pig | represented the ‘Poles’, or Polish people

References:

Wikipedia. (2015). Plot (narrative). Retrieved Mar 26, 2015 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_%28narrative%29 

Influences

In an interview, Spiegelman says he was largely influenced by Mad comics. As for other influences that inspired Spiegelman to become the graphic novelists that he is today, he states that he can’t tell how things influence him. He explains it as though there are a lot of things that he picks up as “stray strands.” However, he indicated that the work of the authors like Ranz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein has "stayed with" him.

https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=22540749

References:

Smith, Christopher, Monte. (2014). Indie Bound. Retrieved from http://www.indiebound.org/author-interviews/spiegelmanart

Image References: 

My Comic Shop. (2015). Retrieved on March 26, 2015, from https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=22540749

Art Spiegelman

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/11/prweb471703.htm

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden and then later immigrated with his family to the United States in 1951, settling in Queens, New York. Spiegelman attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and he began a career as a professional artist selling illustrations. He was inspired by the artwork and rebellious humour of Mad magazine. From 1965 to 1968, Spiegelman attended the State University of New York and majored in Art and Philosophy. After college, he joined the underground commix movement. Following that, within a few years Spiegelman became a regular contributor to a variety of underground publications. Some of those publications included; Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex. Besides his cartooning career, Art Spiegelman was also editing several commix magazines. His experiences led him to start his own magazine, called Raw with his wife Francoise Mouly in 1980.  His career succeeded with the publication of ‘Maus’ in 1972. He expanded the idea into an advanced graphic novel from 1980-1986. The success of ‘Maus’ gained Spiegelman the most fame during his career. As for his life in the 1990s, Spiegelman did illustrations for books and covers for The New Yorker, and used his skills to put together a children’s book magazine, containing comics for both children and adults. Since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, he has made a Sunday page format story about the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center in New York, called ‘Into the Shadow of No Towers’. At the age of 67, he is currently working on the story and sets for a new opera, "Drawn to Death: A Three Panel Opera".  

“Art Spiegelman has been of great importance for the re-appraisal of the comics genre as an adult artform.” - Comic Book DB, 2015

References:

Ray, Michael. (2013, October 10). Art Spiegelman. American author and illustrator. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/681048/Art-Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman. (2015). Comic Book DB. Retrieved from http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=5328

Smith, Christopher, Monte. (2014). Indie Bound. Retrieved from http://www.indiebound.org/author-interviews/spiegelmanart

Image References: 

PR Web. (2006). Retrieved on March 16, 2015, from http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/11/prweb471703.htm