The Koffler Centre of the Arts presents a remarkable evening with the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist/illustrator, comic book legend and author of 'Maus' and 'Maus II'.

Art Spiegelman’s comics are best known for their shifting cartoon styles and sometimes controversial contents. In his talk 'What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?', Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.”

Monday, January 26, 2015 | 7 PM

Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, 506 Bloor St W, Toronto

TICKETS: General $39, Students $29

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. As part of the underground comix subculture of the 60s and 70s, Spiegelman created 'Wacky Packages' and 'Garbage Pail Kids', and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 1980, Spiegelman founded 'RAW', the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative 'Maus' – which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. 'Maus II' continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003.

In 2004 Spiegelman’s 'In the Shadow of No Towers' was selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004. In 2005, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2007, and in 2008 played himself on an episode of The Simpsons.

Spiegelman won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2011, marking only the third time an American has received the honor. The honor also included a retrospective exhibition of his artwork, shown in the Pompidou Center and traveled to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum in NYC, and the last stop at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

'Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective' opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on December 20, 2014, and runs to March 14, 2015.