Art Spiegelman

In Maus, Art Spiegelman drew Jews as mice and Germans as cats and told his father's life through them. Born in Stockholm on 15 February 1948 to Polish Jewish parents, Vladek and Anja, who both came through Auschwitz, he was raised in Queens and started at the Topps gum company at eighteen, co-creating the Wacky Packages stickers and, in 1985, the Garbage Pail Kids cards. With his wife, the editor Françoise Mouly, he launched the anthology Raw in 1980, and Maus began running there in instalments that December. It follows Vladek through German-occupied Poland and the camps while recording, just as plainly, how badly father and son got along in 1970s New York. The first volume reached print in 1986, the second in 1991, and a special Pulitzer Prize came in 1992, the first given to a work of comics. The Complete Maus puts the two together. Spiegelman drew twenty-one covers for The New Yorker between 1993 and 2003.