Interviewer: What's it like to be called the new Kafka?
spiegelman: I hadn't heard that one, I'm glad.
Interviewer: It's written in at least two different reviews.
spiegelman: I missed both. (Laughs)
art spiegelman (he prefers his name written in all lower-case) was born 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents were Polish Jew survivors Vladek and Anja from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.
They immigrated to the United States in the early 1950ies, and art enrolled at Harpur College (State University of New York at Binghamton) in 1965.
However, art had a nervous breakdown and dropped out in 1968, and later the same year his mother commited suicide. He wrote a comic because he felt he needed it, entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". He did not plan to publish it, but it eventually appeared in Short Order Comix in 1973 and in Maus in 1986. It tells us of art's struggles with guilt over his self-perceived failure and his mother's suicide.
In the 1970ies, spiegelman started Arcade Magazine with Bill Griffith, a collection of underground comix. In spite of promising himself he would never create another magazine when the pair stopped, he created RAW Magazine with his future wife Francoise Mouly in 1980.
"I didn't know what postmodernism was until I read an essay by Todd Gitlin in the New York Times Book Review in which he cited MAUS as a primary example of it."
-art spiegelman
spiegelman is perhaps best known for his comix (another spelling-preference of art), especially Maus, the modern fable about the Holocaust. art was awarded a Pulitzer for Maus in 1992, a thing that, according to himself, was a surpise.
art is not currently working on any major projects, but expects to start doing more work soon. Among his earlier creations are the Garbage Pail Kids and several The New Yorker covers.
art spiegelman married Francoise Mouly, his co-worker and publisher, in 1997.
Quotes are taken from the following interviews:
http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/interviews/art-spiegelman.html
http://arts.ucsc.edu/derek/Art.html
See also other Comics creators.