Some context: 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
Hired by Tina Brown as a contributing artist in 1992, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years. Spiegelman's first cover appeared on the February 15, 1993, Valentine's Day issue and showed a black West Indian woman and a Hasidic man kissing. The cover caused turmoil at The New Yorker offices. Spiegelman intended it to reference the Crown Heights riot of 1991 in which racial tensions led to the murder of a Jewish yeshiva student. Spiegelman had twenty-one New Yorker covers published, and submitted a number which were rejected for being too outrageous. Within The New Yorker's pages, Spiegelman contributed strips such as a collaboration titled "In the Dumps" with children's illustrator Maurice Sendak and an obituary to Charles M. Schulz titled "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy". An essay he had published there on Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man, called "Forms Stretched to their Limits" was to form the basis for a book in 2001 about Cole called Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits. The same year, Voyager Company published a CD-ROM version of Maus with extensive supplementary material called The Complete Maus, and Spiegelman illustrated a 1923 poem by Joseph Moncure March called The Wild Party. Spiegelman contributed the essay "Getting in Touch With My Inner Racist" in the September 1, 1997 issue of Mother Jones. Spiegelman's influence and connections in New York cartooning circles drew the ire of political cartoonist Ted Rall in 1999. In an article titled "The King of Comix" in The Village Voice, Rall accused Spiegelman of the power to "make or break" a cartoonist's career in New York, while denigrating Spiegelman as "a guy with one great book in him". Cartoonist Danny Hellman responded by sending a forged email under Rall's name to thirty professionals; the prank escalated until Rall launched a defamation suit against Hellman for $1.5 million. Hellman published a "Legal Action Comics" benefit book to cover his legal costs, to which Spiegelman contributed a back-cover cartoon in which he relieves himself on a Rall-shaped urinal. In 1997, Spiegelman had his first children's book published: Open Me... I'm a Dog, with a narrator who tries to convince its readers that it is a dog via pop-ups and an attached leash. From 2000 to 2003 Spiegelman and Mouly edited three issues of the children's comics anthology Little Lit, with contributions from Raw alumni and children's book authors and illustrators.
What other works did he produce?
A: an obituary to Charles M. Schulz titled "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy".
Some context: Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) and to the works they jointly created. The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are among the best known. Gilbert, who wrote the libretti for these operas, created fanciful "topsy-turvy" worlds where each absurdity is taken to its logical conclusion--fairies rub elbows with British lords, flirting is a capital offence, gondoliers ascend to the monarchy, and pirates emerge as noblemen who have gone astray. Sullivan, six years Gilbert's junior, composed the music, contributing memorable melodies that could convey both humour and pathos.
Gilbert was born in London on 18 November 1836. His father, William, was a naval surgeon who later wrote novels and short stories, some of which included illustrations by his son. In 1861, to supplement his income, the younger Gilbert began writing illustrated stories, poems and articles of his own, many of which would later be mined as inspiration for his plays and operas, particularly Gilbert's series of illustrated poems, the Bab Ballads. In the Bab Ballads and his early plays, Gilbert developed a unique "topsy-turvy" style in which humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. Director and playwright Mike Leigh described the "Gilbertian" style as follows: With great fluidity and freedom, [Gilbert] continually challenges our natural expectations. First, within the framework of the story, he makes bizarre things happen, and turns the world on its head. Thus the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff, the soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes, and so on, and nearly every opera is resolved by a deft moving of the goalposts... His genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural. In other words, to tell a perfectly outrageous story in a completely deadpan way. Gilbert developed his innovative theories on the art of stage direction, following theatrical reformer Tom Robertson. At the time Gilbert began writing, theatre in Britain was in disrepute. Gilbert helped to reform and elevate the respectability of the theatre, especially beginning with his six short family-friendly comic operas, or "entertainments", for Thomas German Reed. At a rehearsal for one of these entertainments, Ages Ago, in 1870, the composer Frederic Clay introduced Gilbert to his friend, the young composer Arthur Sullivan. Over the next year, before the two first collaborated, Gilbert continued to write humorous verse, stories and plays, including the comic operas Our Island Home (1870) and A Sensation Novel (1871), and the blank verse comedies The Princess (1870), The Palace of Truth (1870) and Pygmalion and Galatea (1871).
When was Gilbert born?
A:
18 November 1836.