Art Spiegelman (; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker, where he made several high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to designer and editor
"All comic-strip drawings must function as diagrams, simplified picture-words that indicate more than they show." Spiegelman suffers from a lazy eye, and thus lacks depth perception. He says his art style is "really a result of [his] deficiencies". His is a style of labored simplicity, with dense visual motifs which often go unnoticed upon first viewing. He sees comics as "very condensed thought structures", more akin to poetry than prose, which need careful, time-consuming planning that their seeming simplicity belies.Spiegelman's work prominently displays his concern with form, and pushing the boundaries of what is and is not comics. Early in the underground comix era, Spiegelman proclaimed to Robert Crumb, "Time is an illusion that can be shattered in comics! Showing the same scene from different angles freezes it in time by turning the page into a diagram--an orthographic projection!" His comics experiment with time, space, recursion, and representation. He uses the word "decode" to express the action of reading comics and sees comics as functioning best when expressed as diagrams, icons, or symbols. Spiegelman has stated he does not see himself primarily as a visual artist, one who instinctively sketches or doodles. He has said he approaches his work as a writer as he lacks confidence in his graphic skills. He subjects his dialogue and visuals to constant revision--he reworked some dialogue balloons in Maus up to forty times. A critic in The New Republic compared Spiegelman's dialogue writing to a young Philip Roth in his ability "to make the Jewish speech of several generations sound fresh and convincing". Spiegelman makes use of both old- and new-fashioned tools in his work. He prefers at times to work on paper on a drafting table, while at others he draws directly onto his computer using a digital pen and electronic drawing tablet, or mixes methods, employing scanners and printers.

Q: What is his style?
A: He says his art style is "really a result of [his] deficiencies".
How old was he when he began developing his unique style?
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