Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden, and later emigrated with his parents to the United States where he became a citizen.

He married Françoise Mouly, a publisher, in 1977; they have two children.

Spiegelman has worked as an artist and writer; he was at one time a creative consultant for Topps Chewing Gum and worked at the New Yorker from 1991-2003. He has also taught classes on comics at the San Francisco Academy of Art and at the New York School of Visual Arts.

He is co-founder and co-editor (with his wife Françoise Mouly) of the widely-acclaimed underground comic and graphic journal Raw

Raw is devoted to new wave comic art; it once declared itself to be “the Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism”

• Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Volume I: My Father Bleeds History, 1986; Volume II: And Here My Troubles Began, 1991)
  • a two-volume comic about the author trying to come to some understanding with his father through interviewing the older man about his experience in the Holocaust
  • was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize
• In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)
  • about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001
  • Spiegelman was an eyewitness to the destruction