Born in Stockholm, Spiegelman started out as a comic strip artist in a series of underground magazines, including Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex. He also illustrated many of the Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids stickers and cards. He founded Arcade along with Bill Griffith) and RAW with his wife Françoise Mouly in 1980.
In 1986, he released the first volume of Maus (Maus: A Survivor's Tale, also known as Maus: My Father Bleeds History) which retraced his parents' story of survival of the Holocaust. The second volume, Maus: from Mauschwitz to the Catskills followed in 1991.
Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work in the form of comics, including an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Spiegelman worked for the New Yorker Magazine but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Spiegelman's post-September 11 New Yorker cover received wide acclaim. The cover at first appears to be totally black, but upon close examination reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black.
Spiegelman states that his resignation from the New Yorker was to protest the "widespread conformism" in the United States media. Spiegelman is a sharp critic of the administration of President George W. Bush and claims that the American media has become "conservative and timid". Spiegelman claims that the New Yorker censored his work including a 4th of July cover containing an atomic bomb and a Thanksgiving issue showing U.S. military aircraft dropping turkeys over Afghanistan and titled "Operation Enduring Turkey".
He is currently working on In the Shadow of No Towers, a strip where he relates his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects.
Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the medium of comics. He tours the country giving a lecture he calls "Commix 101." He and Mouly also edit a series of hardcover comic anthologies (of mostly newly commissioned work) for children, called "Little Lit."
