Turin’s Circolo dei Lettori has host Art Spiegelman on Thursday the 19th January. The famous comic book maestro has teach a lesson with images in his only event in Italy.

Entry is free to the event, until seats run out.

On the following day, Friday the 20th January, the famous author was in the Scuola Holden’s guest for a meeting with the students of the biennial course in Writing & Storytelling, together with the well known Italian comic book writer, Igort, the founder of Coconino Press.

Art Spiegelman’s comics are well known to the public for their illustrative style, similar to carvings, and for their controversial contents.

In the lesson at the Circolo, entitled “What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?”, he accompanied the public in a chronological tour around the history of comics, showing the value of this expressive medium and why it should not be undervalued.

Spiegelman believes that the importance of comics in what McLuhan defined as a “post literate” society is destined to keep on growing as “comics are a kind of echo of the way in which the brain works. People think in iconographic images rather than in holograms, in linguistic explosions and not in paragraphs.”


Art Spiegelman (Stockholm, 1948) was the first author to free comic books from toy boxes and to manage to place them on the shelves of bookshops. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer prize with his masterpiece about the holocaust, Maus, an allegoric comic book in which Jews are depicted as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II, the second chapter in the saga, tells the story of his parents, who survived the Nazi regime and then fled to America. At the end of 2011 Meta Maus was released. It tells the story of why the author wrote Maus and how he chose his characters. The book is also accompanied by a DVD with special contents.

In 2011 Art Spiegelman won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, becoming only the third American ever, after Will Eisner and Robert Crumb, to receive the prestigious prize.