I spoke with Stan Mack on Oct. 23, 2024 in the meeting room of a branch of the NY Public Library on 10th street and Avenue A, across from Tompkins Square, which appears frequently in Real Life Funnies (Mack's long-running strip of New York City over-heards, originally appearing in the Village Voice) as a backdrop for conflict and conversation.
I found the 1979 edition of Real Life Funnies in Strand bookstore about 15 years ago and it has been a major touchstone for my practice ever since. I was very excited to see Fantagraphics were bringing out a collection that will put make this crucial work accessible. A Graphic Novel is an entirely different species from a regular newspaper strip. The hardcover collection historicizes the strip and removes it from its original ephemeral and immediate life. It also protects it, preserves and distributes more widely this life’s work of experimental reportage.
-Matthew Thurber
Stan Mack, 2024MATTHEW THURBER: How would you decide who to talk to?
STAN MACK: That was the evolution. When I started it was just me hanging out, picking up stuff and for some reason, though I had no training– I had an ear for dialogue: What to leave out, what to keep, that sort of thing. So that every word balloon IS accurate. Not verbatim, which is what they called it– because verbatim means word for word and I would leave out an adjective here and there, I just couldn’t fit it in. But the WORDS… Well never mind. Anyway, you asked– when did I switch to interviewing? Gradually I became more sophisticated. I began to understand, I was a bit of a reporter and wanted to dig deeper. The way I imagined it was– I used to 'do the herd'. I would wander among all the herd, overhearing, and I thought, what I’d really like to do is cut one out, pull’m to the side and go deeper into what was behind these quick words I was picking up originally. So that was the motivation. Plus, I was becoming more sophisticated in understanding that New York was a place, and New York was changing, as much or more than I was. And whether being serious is good for– you can answer better– better for being a humorist? I don’ t know, but I became more serious. So I would want to know a bit more of your life, and how it links up with the changing tides of New York City. [The] 70’s and 80's were very different.
Yeah, the sort of individual versus the macro view of the whole picture…
Forest and the trees.
...is something that really interests me in the work. When I was walking over, up first Avenue, I saw one of those mosaics that’s still there on the telephone pole, which you used to see all around Astor Place when I moved here…
There’s two pages in my book all about him.
Yeah, I just read that, and I thought, this strip is probably gonna out-survive those actual mosaics made of stone. Your strip is gonna historically preserve that work…
To the extent paper gets preserved altogether-
Yeah, but its a record, a recording of this individual’s action.
Definitely. As much as possible, because I would draw as much as I could, WHERE I heard the dialogue, or where they were talking about, so that, you can go through there and find places where the people are talking– not only that, what they were wearing, which is very different from today.
Okay, I was wondering about your note taking process. Because there’s a huge difference between recording – like with these [indicates iphone being used to record interview] devices, or photography, especially, and visual recording of sketching. What do you remember about the note taking process. Do you remember what kind of tools you would use?
Very simple. A ballpoint pen, a little pad. And that was it. It had to be small.
Like a reporter pad, a flipping pad? Like, a spiral bound pad?
Definitely not spiral. Spirals can make ya crazy. You probably know that.
Ha ha ha, Okay so a bound…
I’ll show ya. I bought a whole batch of these things and I still have some. There’s my entire toolkit.
Amazing. Now this is a 3x5 pad of paper that’s stapled on one end, its probably glued and stapled. Is it lined?
The only way I would like them is the little squares. So if it had lines I would do it but I didn’t like it.
Cartoonists love little squares.
This is very interesting to me, the tools of your trade. What about the note taking itself? So you’re in the environment, and you are hearing something in a typical strip- tell me about that whole process.
Well, it was really a challenge. Ya know, I was so innocent. I wanted to learn to do these things. Even though I had a journalism background. I worked at the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times, so I had some understanding of reporting. But I would just furiously write, as much as possible –part of the problem was, I was pretending to be one of the people I was listening to. I wasn’t a reporter. I was really, but I had to appear to be one of them because why would they talk to somebody from outside?
So to the extent that I could, I would pretend…to be foolin’ around, or…sometimes I would write on a napkin….or something like that…but the idea was: Get down, as fast as possible what I wanted to get down from what they were saying…leaving out stuff I just didn’t feel was important…and it also meant I was self-editing as I went, there was no going back afterwards. The big problem in terms of editing afterwards was trying to figure out what I had written. Because it was so sloppy.
Fast.
At the same time, I’m sketching the person who said those words, to the extent I could. So that sort of lively, sketchy quality of the drawing, was partly because I was basing the finished drawings on my doodles. And that meant there was kind of a cariacature-y quality to a lot of the figures.
Yeah there’s a movement to them…
I was moving like mad!
So when you say you would “fool around”, would you concoct, kind of, things to do, like in a stage business kind of way?
There were times when I would interview somebody– these are in the later years– and I would stage the action that we talked about. I would go to the places that were referenced, and literally write a scenario based on the words– it was never my words– I would find out what the story was– and I didn’t know the story going in– that was part of the fun. It was to come out afterwards and look at this mass of material. But anyway, to answer your question, I would go back. Instead of me talking to somebody at a coffee bar, I would take his or her story and recreate it where it took place.
By going back to that locale.
Always going back.
You would always go back.
I’m very unimaginative. When it comes to this sort of thing. I had to make it right. I was afraid to screw up. Either in the words, or in the pictures. I didn’t trust my own ability as…as somebody….like a….a novel writer….or a filmmaker….ah…I have done that in the past but in this case, I wanted as much as possible to fade into the background, that’s why that funny little character sometimes is there. He never says anything. Its just a way to get the reader in to where I was experiencing.
He’s us: he’s the reader looking through you, at them .
I was wondering, when you were there, and you were sometimes having conversations with people. And the ones that are more like portraiture…If you were removing your own self out of the conversation, in the editing process.
Somebody once described Jules Feiffer, the way he worked, as, “The words were always in his head.” He would turn the spigot on, the words would come falling out, and when he filled up the page, he would turn it off again. I didn’t have that, but in a sense, that was what I was doing, I was letting this thing flow out, grab as much of it as I could, what I would do is take these little scraps of paper, originally, and scotch tape them on my wall and start moving them around, because sometimes the in effect the punchline was somewhere in the middle, and I’d go "Oh I get it, I’m gonna track it back from this line." Keep moving these little scraps of paper around to get to that point.
I had a question about punchlines and the staging. In some of the strips, like, the bikers, and the woman whose jumping for joy-
Who was my partner.
There’s a lot, there’s a lot of back story…
Every one of these things is a story. There’s one, if I can tell you one, that I think rather dramatic- if I can take the time to do it- is when I was covering the squatters. I was with a friend Bobby Fuller, who ran the Hobo Theater Company, in one of the squats. All the actors were homeless people. A bunch of protestors were taking over an abandoned building, a few doors down from here. On 10th just before B. They came over from the park, where the cops happen to be rousting all the homeless that day, which they did regularly. And they come running by, and Bobby and I were together…he has a kind of bandana around his chest. And Bobby says “Can we join you?” and they say “Yeam c’mon!” So we run upstairs, and they barricade themselves in an upstairs room. Cops spotted them, came running in, break down the door. Bobby says, “I really can’t afford to get arrested.” I said “I can’t either.” So we jump out the back window. There’s a one story– what used to be a garage, now is a restaurant– on B. We jump down, clamber down– I grab my pad as if I was still covering things– and Bobby runs to the corner. This is the back story. He runs to his corner, calls his wife Mary Beth. This is a couple who were really advocates for the poor, and very strong in their belief system. And I reveal, the reason he has this bandana, is because he has a two month old baby girl. Theirs. And he says to Mary Beth– her name is Emma in the strip- her real name was Che, after Che Guevera- and he says, "we occupied our first building but I couldn’t afford to get arrested because I didn’t have formula." Two months old.
Right. But with the idealism that would say, of course you take your child to the occupation.
That’s only the first half of the back story. I always wondered what happened to Che and Mary Beth. Bobby died very young of lung cancer. And she disappeared from my life. But I did always wonder, where was Che? During Covid, 30 years later, I get a phone call from a tattoo artist in Austin, Texas, whose gonna run a surprise birthday party for his wife Chaya. And he’s gonna have a zoom celebration for them and would I participate because it was the same woman. And she said to me, “I never knew my father. But your comic strips were my family album.”
Amazing. So this whole part of the Tompkins Square occupation and the portrait of him has this sort of reverberation for people. Did you think, coming out of this reporter training– you worked for the Tribune–
I was an art director, but yeah, I had to work with all the reporters. And these were Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe– these were famous people-
That’s another thing I want to get to –this is the New Journalism kind of echelon. Could you say something about how that influenced your storytelling, or ideas? The first thing you said is you didn’t know what you were doing, making it up as you go along but you were steeped in this tradition.
It was an important job for me. Something like you, I was an outsider. I came from Providence, Rhode Island. It was nothing like New York. I came here without any thoughts, except with a degree from RISD. But everything was changing.
Degree in?
Illustration. I graduated in the late '50s. But the drawing style I have here would never have flown.
Because it’s too cartoony?
There was no such thing as “cartoony”, for one thing. You know, it didn’t look anything like the Norman Rockwell crowd.
Okay, that was what was being held up as illustration.
Kind of. Well two things: that was, but also, what was hot in the fine art world was Abstract Expressionism. So the sense of spontaneity about seeing –I’m being kind of heavy here – seeing the result of the art, of the process as being part of the finish, was in a way what Ab Ex. was and those were our heroes, kind of.
And that even reflected in illustration at that time, became kind of…hip. Like abstraction…to me, like your line -and I’m interested in what your esthetic influences were- to me it's kind of pure cartoon, it maybe looks like 20s and 30s newspaper strips, Milt Gross or Krazy Kat…
Well that would have been. As a little kid I’d read …my father got the New York News. The sunday comics, in the late 30s and early 40s, was those guys you’re talking about, they were still around! More than superheroes, that stuff was probably in there someplace.
So was RISD kind of square, like they’re expecting you to do Saturday Evening Post kind of work?
It happened that the instructor had been a book illustrator. So there was a traditional classical way to illustrate books. There was the frontispiece, there were the inserts that expressed the storyline. Nothing like Graphic Novels at all and not even especially cartoony. But traditional, in the sense of 30’s, 40’s 50’s …
Like N.C. Wyeth?
N.C. Wyeth was my boyhood hero.
So that’s what made you want to do that but at some point you got more… I don’t know what to call it. How did you get from there to Jimmy Breslin?
Clearly my head was not like those traditional artists. It just wasn’t. I say jokingly, I had an attitude problem, always. So, somewhere in the 60’s, I’m working at NY Herald Tribune until it folded. And then the New York Times, where I became the art director of the Sunday magazine. So it was a big deal, it was a career.
So you moved to New York, was the Tribune the first thing that happened?
Well I had some shit jobs, like everybody does in New York. It wasn’t like I went to Cooper or SVA or Parsons, and those teachers were connected. I didn’t know anybody who was connected.
Hm. I got shit jobs, somehow, too. But…with this more free-wheeling concept of journalism…
It was a combination of working with these guys. I had to hire the artists to illustrate their pieces. So for one, I had a hell of an education. I had to read all of them carefully, in order to be able to come up with an idea that I could sell to the editors as the way to illustrate that piece. And I was also busy illustrating. There was really work for illustrators back in those days! 60s through the 70's…advertising work…
Push Pin Studios…the return of pen and ink drawing…
That’s a perfect way of saying it. I came up younger than Blechman and David Levine and Glaser and Ed Sorel…they were all about ten years older.
That’s a big difference career wise. In New York.
I was a kid….It was a revolution, really. From the 50s. It was a revolution.
And I worked for a guy who was a peer and friend of Milton Glaser– Peter Palazzo. Who was the creative director at the Trib'. Through him I was meeting these people whom I could then hire as illustrators. He had been hired to innovate. To change the whole concept of what newspaper design was. They set the tone for all the newspaper design changes that took place across the country from then on. In fact some of the young art directors became consultants to newspapers all across the country. This idea was partly Milton’s approach, partly Peter Palazzo’s. So I was riding a big wave of illustration and graphic design.
And then pairing it together with this kind of experiential journalism writing. What’s interesting to me is that your work, on the surface, could have something to do with Push Pin but then it takes the literary aspects of someone like Breslin whose looking at like the murky corners of what’s going on in the city…
Queens! Right! He was a man of Queens. And the bars of Queens. And the criminal element, all of that.
But like– expanding what a newspaper strip was– or could do. The difference between your strip and just, autobiography. Because you’re not centering your self. You’re looking at subjects and people, like you say picking people out of the crowd. You’re looking at the space and the phenomena. So I think there’s something your work converges this journalism and the return to the pen and the liveliness of pen-and-ink.
I was a practiced illustrator doing exactly that. I would get work that David Levine turned down. At first. But it was Milton Glaser who was key to this thing [Real LIfe Funnies].
Mm. Because he was at the Voice.
For about five minutes Clay Felker and Milton Glaser took over the Voice.
Interesting. And tried to revamp it and make it more…
Like New York magazine. The Sunday magazine of the Herald Tribune was called New York. And Clay Felker was the Sunday editor. And when the Trib' folded, he bought the name “New York”.
(laughing)
He used the same typeface, it was Caslon Swash letters. And it became the logo for New York magazine. He created the whole concept of a “city magazine”. Which then also spread across the country. So they, then bought the Voice. But they didn’t belong there. Felker was Mr. Upper East Side. He was not Downtown at all. I’m sorry, I could go on…
Oh no, it’s VERY interesting!!!
I’m fascinated…your whole world, how does it compare, to all the stuff I did which is so many years ago…and somehow, the continuum of it all. But maybe that’s… (laughs)
Well… I came in… from rural Washington to the middle of Manhattan and was, like, having my mind blown…. but the New York that I came into, I was like, "maybe I can do illustration?"
Yeah, that’s kind of gone. Compared to what it was.
I graduated in 2000. I would take my portfolio futilely to Steven Heller. But at that point I would laboriously try to do something that wasn’t me. And what I think is really interesting…
Okay, here’s a good question. How did you become You? How did you learn to trust what you did? Or was it a 20- year process or something? And to go back to Milton Glaser, who really gave you a chance at being a cartoonist… did you trust yourself at that point?
I left New York Times, I said “Screw this”. It's really corporate…I was really foolish. My parents almost had a heart attack. Because it was a real career. For a while I was the art director at the Book Review. Steve Heller has had that job, because that’s one of the ones I left. So, I go back to illustration. And I was doing some kid’s books. Like I’ve said, I’ve done a lot of shit. I recently did a Wikipedia page, a lot of it's in there. Nobody knows, they only know [Real Life Funnies] because it was SO long ago. I did kids books in the late 60’s, early 70’s. I mostly illustrated them. Random House, Pantheon.
You said I’m not in the center of this work, which is true, but I did a memoir, all about me and the woman who’s jumpin’ up and down at the bike race, who died of breast cancer at the very end of 1999. And I did a memoir which is probably the most important thing I’ll ever do. It's heavily illustrated but it’s not a graphic novel. I folded my illustrations in to a running text. Because at that point, which was the early 2000s, your world had not really taken off.
The graphic novel? Yeah and I have my own issue with that and my interest in the more newspaper-based, comic-based approach and the ephemerality. So Milton Glaser says, "Why don’t you do a comic strip?"
Well, I hit him. So I go back to illustration, and I’m thinking, I'm waiting for the phone to ring, I’m not a real writer, but can I come up with something where I can CREATE the project. I knew Glaser because I had been an illustrator at New York Magazine. And I said, "what if I do a piece where I walk around?" I had been doing that at the Times, both assigning it, and I went around with a friend, a reporter there, and I would illustrate her pieces, but I ended up doing some “Real Life Funnies” along with it. And she said “This is interesting, you got better quotes than I have.” So, I went to Milton, I said, "I’ll go around town, I’ll sketch, I’ll do a thing."
And it’s in the tradition of reportage. Not the fantastic cartoon strip.
There was no tradition. This was my own tradition. In a sense, because I didn’t know the history. Back in the 30’s, there was real newspaper cartooning, and before.
Even earlier, like a 19th-century thing.
Like 1904, I would say. There were guys who then became Milt Gross, became a cartoonist, but before then, they were being sent out on assignment. Especially sports.
Right, and pre-photography, they were recording and making jokes, there would be a little cluster of a bunch of views of some event. I mean, that’s the only tradition I see as a predecessor, but you reinvented it all through this lens of being a New York Flaneur and through the Village Voice, which opens it up to downtown radical goings-on.
Well that’s where my attitude problem came in. I was fascinated by downtown New York. And it was the 70’s: cults, spirituality, singles bars, rap sessions, sex, The Pink Pussycat boutique. No matter where you turned, there was stuff to participate in or look in on.
I kind of learned what the 70's were like on the ground through reading this first collection. I know how people talk, how politically incorrect they were. How people talk about sex all the time. There’s a lot of sex in the air.
There’s a lot of sex… maybe I was also horny at the time! (laughter)
Well it’s interesting, I feel like things are really different. Like this strip, this first strip is amazing, because it shows you, people used to smoke in taxis.
There’s a lot of prejudices, there’s one about somebody talking about registration in grade school and how they would do it in Spring before summer break and get everybody on board somehow but how the Puerto Rican parents didn’t show up ’til the fall… well, you couldn’t say that today.
But to have the accuracy of a reporter, fidelity to truth, like you're saying you're going back to these different locations– the truth is very important to you.
Totally! That’s where Jimmy Breslin and those guys came in… they were telling me, "You have to get it right." For example, when I handed in the first comic strip to the Voice, and the editors were Downtown people, they weren’t anything like Clay Felker, they say "What the fuck is this?" and I say well– I didn’t tell you the story, it was Bloomingdales. I had ONE assignment in 20 years, Felker says, "Go to Bloomingdales", so I did, I did the thing, whatever you want to call it... the Voice editors said What is this? Milton said, do it weekly, that’s what happened. I went to Milton to do a one shot he said, "Why don’t you do it weekly?"
So they said, "What is this?" I said, "Well, it’s uh, I went to Bloomingdales, wrote down what people said, drew them saying it, at the different counters", and they said, "that’s crazy. This is a comic strip, everybody knows comic strips are fiction… You’re saying this is real? This is a newspaper! We can’t fact check what you’re saying here!" That’s where the title, about “verbatim” and Real Life Funnies and my name being big up front, they were trying to….
Right, its a kind of liability…
It put the responsibility onto my shoulders.
Right, there’s a strip in here where somebody runs up to you after six years and says, “I’ve been looking for you, I’m gonna settle the score…” so you were concerned about issues like that happening?
She’s not named. You know who she’s talking about? I can tell you now: Wayne White.
Oh! That strip’s also in here, because at the end of that strip he gets dumped by somebody… and that’s the punchline of that strip. After his puppet show he’s on the phone…
And Ron Hauge, who you remind me of, physically, he gets mugged, he lives on Avenue B, he went on to be a writer and art director for the Simpsons and Seinfeld. Ron Hauge introduced me to Wayne and Mimi. He was originally with Pee-wee Herman, with Gary Panter…
I wanted to get to something, you’re doing something very different and you’re drawing on locations and the accuracy to the environment and that being really important is totally unusual in comics. Maybe in painting….
Well people like Joe Sacco… would make them accurate.
But he, I think, carries a camera and uses photo reference. But this is something interesting to me in your work versus other people who are making work about daily life on the street. There’s a lot of “street photographers”. Your work never just creates an image. It’s creating a kind of empathy with the subjects.
Kirkus reviewed it, and they used the word empathy. Which I guess is good. (laughing) What stood out to them was the empathy I seem to have for these people.
How did you become such a good listener that people would reveal all this to you? You said you had a good ear, but also, a good listener. And people are divulging these crazy life stories to you.
There’s a parenthetical here. I did use a camera. Because some things were impossible to sketch quickly and yet had to be accurate. An ambulance. A fire engine, things that require some care in drawing. I would go back and shoot policeman’s uniforms. I had to convince you– the reader. [indicating drawing] That’s Janet. See that’s my– we lived on 12th street at the time. Off 6th avenue, she got up 4:30, 5:30, everybody was asleep. I don’t know where the fuck that came from [the other drawing in the strip]
What I wanted to say was in terms of the punchline, sometimes, this one was interesting to me, sometimes they have these built in amazing punchlines. Sometimes no punchline and its not obvious gag or joke at all. This is almost like a collage of two totally separate events.
At the time I thought it was linked.
There is a linkage in that it happened the same week, you put them together. You observe both of them, we draw our own conclusions how they go together.
Yeah, they wouldn’t be there if there weren’t a link in my mind at the time. If you pick up on something there, that’s why it’s there.
There’s this hidden information. Occulted. There’s a lot you don’t say which I think is a secret of why these strips are so great. You don’t spell it out for us.
Well if you’re up in a place and this is happening here, [indicating the quiet basement meeting room of the library in which we are sitting] this place is really essential to the story. Film directors know that… but anyway, I’m very fact based. I did occaisonally make it up if I had to but as much as possible, the setting was part of it. The so-called New Journalism…describe the wholeness of it, and the emotion of it. My first wife was a journalist. We met at The Herald Tribune. But she was old school, had gotten journalism training at Boston University. She was bothered by this New Journalism because it didn’t do that traditional thing she’d been taught, Who-What-Where-When. Pete Hamill was bringing emotion to the stories. Gloria Steinem had been a Playboy bunny and then reported on it. And that was there, available to me, so this idea of bringing emotion, and while they talked about some of the characteristics of fiction in their writing, I guess I was bringing the characteristics of classical funnies, speed lines and sweat lines and… bubbles…
Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers all running together like weird… uh… Archie characters, or something.
I suppose you could also say silent movies.
Slapstick. Exactly, yeah, but I mean, comics and and silent films; the language is definitely linked through like this kind of pantomime acting that you're picking up on. And the -you know- expressiveness: this person is shaking their fist. And like, it is journalism, but it's not centering. You're saying these New Journalism people are putting their emotion and their first person self into it, isn't that kind of the way that everything is turned into that, in a very boring way. Nothing's bigger now than creative nonfiction, and essays, and autobio, memoir... what I like about your work is it's not any of these obvious things.
I even like the popularity of, you know, Spiegelman's Maus, which is an amazing work. But now 20 years later, 30 years later, that seems to be a major selling point for “the graphic novel”. As a newspaper, these ephemeral strips come out, and they're just so much more interesting to me in what they do than than another memoir -and I haven't read your memoir.
I would like to read, I need to, I should, I have to read it for the story, BUT I think what Real Life Funnies does is very different.
One thing that’s different from bookwriting, and memoir writing, is that I had a a deadline that was hard and fast. And I never was ahead. Unlike a lot of cartoonists who have to work ahead if they're in syndication, say.
Sometimes it didn't work. It would just wouldn't pan out. So I'd have to go get another one because the deadline was still there and I never didn't deliver.
I took a couple of vacations, but otherwise I never blew the deadline. I came close. I would deliver late on deadline night.
I lived in the West Village. They were around Cooper eventually. And this is The Village Voice, they were always under the gun. They were always being sued by some politician or another. So every Monday night, the lawyers were lurking and the editors were juggling between the lawyers and the writers, Breslin and so on, in order to be able to get in print, what was right. Because the lawyers had to pass on it. Or Breslin had to convince that lawyer: “It's okay.”
And I deliver, and supposedly, somebody’s supposed to read me, because I've got a pen…
I can't go back home again, It's too late…I’ve got a dip pen and a little India ink thing and some white paint.
If they find a misspelling, well, this book is filled with misspellings in bad punctuation, because the editors were preoccupied at that time.
It's kind of the license of the cartoonists, harder to edit.
And cartoonists get a pass. You're right. Very often-too much, maybe.
Well, it's like, the lowest of the low form, or something.
And there was no time. I use this image, which is not inaccurate. I would be working standing up with some rock band in the background with a fast pace. And I began to think, I'm making a pizza. I'm dropping the tomato with cheese and about it's gotta be delivered hot.
You know, it was a piece of paper about the size of a pizza. I go running over while it was still steaming to deliver it to the to the person who was buying it, which was deadline night at the Voice.
Yeah, you're delivering the goods. It's such an exchange and it's so lively. It's drawn from life and it's still alive almost when you're giving it to them, and then it gets reproduced and just immediately sent out, Except, for now, it's in this historical chunk [book], you wouldn't imagine this when you were making them.
Well, that happened because of the success of Amphigorey? Remember Edward Gorey? Brilliant stuff. He came out with a book, this was all brand new. I was kind of hot. The Voice editors didn't get it, but the people got it because they were in it? You know?
This was Putnam’s? Same publisher.
This went out of print immediately. It was only the first couple of years [of the strip]
I was really blown away by this introduction. This paragraph:
"I began to develop a system. Carry a little pad and pencil. Dress to blend in quietly. Get to the destination in enough time to case the joint. It helps to not be too tall, not too short, not too dark, not too light, not too handsome, not too ugly, not too old, and not too young. All of these I am, and it finally paid off, although I'm getting grey and wrinkled and can no longer fit in with the under 30 singles crowd. When I arrive, if I find that everybody knows each other, I make a quick exit and forget it. Otherwise, the system continues: smile and keep your ears open. Find the men's room (always good for a line), find coffee and food, which is very helpful unless you are trying to take notes. Look for a few convenient corners in which to hide. Learn to walk backwards in order to get closer to groups. Learn to stand in the middle of a mob and like it. And, finally, learn to change direction suddenly in order to follow a good line floating by. All of this, by the way, may make you horribly conspicuous rather than the invisible man, but what the hell. Appear preoccupied. If you are engaged in conversation, pay no attention to what you are saying. Say anything. Fake it. You can't listen and think at the same time. Float through the event. Each has its own particular current. Professional wrestlers and East Side gallery-hoppers move at different speeds. Hang around until it's over or until your feet hurt. Or until you just can't stand it another second. Wait for the last great line, settle for something less, and leave. Do not rush home. Put your notes away safely and go somewhere to decompress. I have had to rush home to produce a strip without sleep because of a deadline. Once it was after a St. Patrick's Day parade and evening- a long night not to be repeated except perhaps during wartime."
– excerpt from Stan Mack's introduction in the original 1979 edition of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies
When I read this, and I read this book, to me it created such a mythological image of a cartoonist as being a detective, or almost like a shape changer. And to me, that was very interesting 'cause you don't hear about cartoonists as, like, almost heroic or adventuresome figures very much.
I came back from Bloomingdale's, which had been an assignment, and I thought I can't do this… it's too easy. It was pretty ordinary, and, you know, I didn't quit The Times...
It wasn't a challenge enough?
No. So I thought, okay, you gotta go places where you don't belong. Where you're a little nervous, but you have to make up stuff, you have to pretend…
This was my battlefield, I wasn't going to Vietnam, I wasn't going someplace where you don’t know the language or was really dangerous, but, so it had to be someplace that, I mean- I did jump out of that window.
There's a number of strips in which you could have been arrested or are pretty shocking, like following the filming of a porno in Central Park.
We all could have been arrested for that one.
There's just things that I'm surprised you got access to.
Is that the one where the woman has a false leg?
There's lots of drugs.
The drugs were everywhere.
Okay… So you wanted to complicate it. Why do you think you had to make it harder on yourself? You didn't just want assignments.
It's gotta be some sort of an adventurous spirit. You don't wanna do something that's not exciting.
But did you know that when you started? You'd quit this more secure position and you wanted some sort of adventure, were you intentionally, like, "this will take place in like downtown in this sort of milieu?"
It was all about exploration, it was all about extremes. or, stuff that was… inappropriate. I decided to spend Thanksgiving evening at Port Authority bus terminal. Now, who does that? You know, thats bizarre. That combination of sad and boring and weird and lonely….
That was my Thanksgiving evening.
Then it almost makes sense with these strips, some of the real standout strips are where you're interviewing somebody, and you're like, why would they do this? Like the carpet guy, the a person who rolled up in the carpet who likes to be stepped on. And in a way that maybe the strip is a little like that, you're like, "why the heck would you do that?"
People said that to me. Is that all you do? I mean, is that enough money? I actually was doing a second one, for ten of the twenty years, for Adweek Magazine. I did the exact same thing, but it was a more of a a classical shape. It was a single strip of about four or five panels and it was beat, beat, beat, punchline.
Okay, they wanted it to be a funny comic strip. They wanted to run it because of the success of this one. So I could do anything I wanted. So it was just strips simultaneously for 10 years, two strips.
There is a tradition of undercover investigative journalism like the person who did like “How the other half lives”, people would wear a costume, and even Sir Richard Burton went to Saudi Arabia and like, 1850 trying to pass as an Arab, you know, to to bring back this information- I don't know all about it. I'll try to dig up more of this tradition, like Nellie Bly, I think- there’s a lot to risk…
I don't put myself in that category… for one thing, I was in New York, I had a family by then. So, everything I did was risky up to a point, but I wasn't free to take it that extra step.
You weren't like going in like, the mafia or in any really dangerous –
I didn’t hang out with the Hells Angels. I would hang out in that neighborhood, but I didn’t insert myself into that world.
There was a line. But I would cross police lines and and cover protests and anti-nuke things, for example, and there was a potential to get arrested, but I wasn't looking to get beat up.
Well, that's that's a different kind of artist, right? I think there's people who are sort-of danger hounds. Or, what- I don't know what to call them- you know, a war reporter type person. You don't seem like that. You seem like you're interested in, like, artists a lot. There's a lot of artists in this book.
I am an artist of sorts.
You're interested in other artists and people who are like artists…compulsive people or groups compulsive groups of people.
I would cover compulsive people, as you said, the guy who wrapped himself in the carpet. As you said, that's fascinating. The mindset of people who will go to those extreme risky situations and need it- what is that? I finally wanted to dig deeper. And ask the questions. Push it a little further.
Do you feel like there was a constraint? You have this deadline and you have a certain space constraint, was the strip pushing against the space that was allotted for it in The Voice?
Oh yeah, towards the end. Look at the look at the number of words in some of these.
They’re subdividing. You get more panels later.
The editor is at one point said, we're gonna redesign The Voice and they gave me that shape…! Which was impossible to work with! This big square instead of that kind of horizontal. That square thing came right at the time I was doing these squatters, and the protest over here. So it got filled with words.
There there was one strip called downsizing where you're like, "how can I fit all the buildings and all the people and all the text in there?"
They were shrinking my strip.
That was happening all throughout all the newspapers. There were shrinking all the comics, right? But what were they making room for? They were making room for ads or something?
I don’t know.
This this is a crazy how do you how did this (Beauty and The Beast, strip below) come up?
Because my darling partner, who I was with for 18 years 'til she died at breast cancer, was a character, and she had character friends. She herself had a very difficult life. We got together, was sort of part of my adventure outside the norms. It turned out to be a great relationship. But she had friends like that, because she had a boyfriend who was a privately important private detective in San Francisco. and through him she had met a lot of people, I guess. Because he had a huge business with with drug dealers. And we lived right next door to the New School at that point, and he was this guy who would threaten to break your elbow and knee if you didn't pay up what you owed. But at the same time, he was a graceful calligrapher, and was lecturing at The New School next to what where we live, and so he came over, visited with us, and then he actually put me out with a hold. Or I began to go out. Just to show off, he was a big guy couldn't help himself.
This is real, right? He is a thug.
Oh That's absolutely real. That's not retold.
I mean, there's some stuff where I'm like, "This is incredible." What is it? The world seems more tame, or something, I don't know if that's your experience... I don't know if it's just because you're digging deeper, that you're finding more weird stuff, and voices, and what people are saying. A lot of like the surface of what you hear about is very tame and boring.
I had that stuff in front of me. You need it as well, and if you're not finding it outside, you're gonna find it on the inside...
I really related to what seems to be your interest in… people who just can't hack it in normal society. They're just freaks and they have to be. Then sometimes they ARE are expressing what everybody secretly wants.
Like the strip about the Red Hot Chili Peppers I thought was really interesting because it's early on in their career, they're just running down the street like saying scatological stuff and “pus!”, “fart!” and and “voluptuous bowel movements!” They're just yelling, like, almost forbidden stuff.
Well, that's the cartoon version of what actually happened. I was with those guys in that run over to the Ritz. I met them because a publicist who worked in rock and roll introduced us. and I said, "Can I come along with you?" I mean, everything I did had to be immediate. I couldn't say, could we meet next Wednesday? So it was, we met, "What are you doing today?", "We're going over to the Ritz.", "Can I come?" "Sure, okay."
I grab my pen.
Well, there's a lot of stuff where you get drawn into the story, like there's one where there's a music video for like Lionel Richie.
I met him through my comic strips. He did a lot of commercials, his director. and he went out to Hollywood as well. Lionel Richie was his client. I checked in with him from time to time and I asked him what he was doing. He said, "well, I'm doing a music video with Lionel Richie out in LA." There was this big hangar they had rented. And literally, he said, "will you fill in?"
Back to the question of people couldn't believe that this was your real job, which I think is a kind of I think is a kind of a reflection of the hierarchy of you, a comic down here, and then you have illustration up here a little higher up the ladder than a writer and your graphic designer designer, higher than illustrator….
You’re exactly right by the way. Starting when I was in school, fine art was the big deal, art is on top.
After that, at RISD and after that too, in my mind, graphic designers came closest to being fine artists, because they were designing space. Then came illustrators.
Graphic designers for print?
Yeah, magazine would be the ultimate. There was there were awful lot of important magazines back then. there was a tradition of magazine design that goes back to Europe after the Second World War. The early important graphic designers were European. I'd have to check my history on this, but and then they became people of Milton Glaser’s generation. who kind of took over it and it all kind of came alive in the 60's, 70's, 80's and changed advertising. It became truly creative, and creatives like Bob Giraldi, George Wallace, they ran advertising.
It's not true anymore. Now it's entirely different, and nowhere near as exciting.
Yes, it's it's always interesting to me to see the Push Pin stuff and be like okay, Seymour Chwast, working for Mobil gas or something.
I did a comic strip for Adweek, in which Milton Glazer is working for a supermarket chain. Not only did he do I Love New York, and all the brilliant stuff he did, but He was designing soup and vegetable can labels.
The designer right? What's interesting is the responsibility, who are you responsible to?
I mean, there was a building over there in east 30s that was Push Pin, and he had to support the building. But I always look for the human moment. So Milton is at his desk and he's got a bunch of young designers he's working with, giving them instructions. And one guy comes up to him with, I forget what it was- let’s say it's string beans- and the kid says, what about this?
Milton says, Okay, but why don't you try this? And he goes, bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup- says, do that. And the kid goes, "I don't know, peas was much more exciting."
A young designer, learning from the master and having his own view of things. “Peas was much more exciting.” That isn't it, but it's very similar.
Can you talk a little bit about the rise of the yuppies as seen in the strip?
There was such a big difference between the 70s and 80s. And it was clear. The drugs, the cocaine, the crack, AIDS, of course, the MBAs, the women with the power shoulders… I think of it as the younger siblings of the older hippies, protesters of the early 70s and mid 70s.
To go back to the empathy thing, and kindness that's in this book. There's just all these strips about how people desire things and they want money they're very blatant.
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities.
Money buys happiness.
My background is nothing like the backgrounds [we saw at] SPX a couple weeks ago. To see this incredible world of committed, passionate, artists, writers, doing a ton of stuff. I mean, it was amazing. And I thought, "they must have entirely different reference points.."
Nothing like newspaper illustration.
No, but still drawing. There's something kind of eternal about drawing, I think.
There's something that you can connect with. I'm talking to students all the time and I don't know what comics they read and I don't really care. I try not to get too hung up in the in the kind of specifics reference points or something, I mean, there was an underground comics world.
It just seems like all of those people with those books. Nothing existed here. nothing like what you do. Pure. I can’t imagine somebody like you, suddenly appearing in 1970.
Well, there was underground comics then, in 1970. Do you like this emergence of this kind of graphics world, or do you wish it was… is there stuff missing? I mean, I see there's a lot of, I don't know, I want to call it, like, social conscience or something that's in your work.
It was a very political time. I mean, you can’t… what's going on today is fucking scary. But it was the end of Nixon in Vietnam. and civil rights had been all the 60's was all about that. and coming out of that, there was the remnants of that, and people who had been committed were committed, was part of who they were.
They had to go through where they were gonna go to Vietnam or not, or go to Canada, or whatever…and then they turned, and then there's a womens' movement in the 70s too, and they turned all these people, as Thomas Wolfe said, "it became the me decade." Oh, we can't change the world, we can at least redo ourselves, but there was this thing going on. I don't know what would be the comparable feelings today. I don't know where you get your signposts from.
I don't think it's comparable. These strips are always groups, and people are meeting, and people are talking, kibbutzing, and and sharing… now through the internet it's like people are spending so much time like on phones by and their little bubble. We're in this kind of bubble world, and even even newspapers are not the newspapers, the opposite of that. It's like, "BOOM, this thing is out! Let's all read it! Wow, did you see this?" you know, there's something exciting about that. I'm not sure, maybe the last place you can find that is kind of in these fairs.
I'm really happy this book exists. I think the graphic novel is kind of a marketing strategy that is like, "well, you can't be comic books", but now they're up on like talking about that hierarchy before. It's like it's raised it up from comic book to….
They’re struggling financially, aren't they? All those people are there, they can't be all that much money.
Oh, no, no one makes any money. It's kind of this throwaway… it's weird.
I had two things going for me that don't exist anymore. One was, there was advertising illustration work available, for everybody who did anything like what I did… kind of sort of comic graphic illustration.
And the other was, I had a gig for 20 years. I didn't have to struggle the way this current generation has had to.
On the other hand– you know how to be an entrepreneur, but you have to know how to market yourself.
Did you struggle after the strip ended to define what you were doing?
That's when Janet got sick.
I did a comic strip briefly for the Suburban sections of The New York Times. Doing a Real Life Funnies from the suburbs, which is pretty funny. I did a couple books in there… but Janet got very sick and I was her caregiver. So I basically walked away from working very hard and I had some things to do, but essentially, that's what I did to the end of the 90s and then she died, and if the next few years, I did this memoir. And it was both helpful and painful and that's really all I did..And then try to get back into it a little bit.
Well, I think I think that it would be great if every cartoonist, at least would read this book.
Thank you.
I think it would be very eye-opening for a lot of people working with trying to situate their work in real life, or reality, or trying to make work that's not just fantasy-
I like this conversation because… not that I'm working for work…. But it's more about the fascination now sort of opened up with the whole spectrum from 1904 to today and watching the evolution and talking about it, I'm gonna be speaking at Mark Newgarden’s class at SVA. Those kids that he's teaching, what do they know, and what would be interesting to have this discussion about– Mark was a student of mine in the life drawing class at SVA. That's how we know each other.
Oh, okay, so you were were teaching, in the 80s?
Life drawing at SVA. I love life drawing, its probably obvious.
Is it joyful to see it as historic collection, or is it is it like a lamentation in some ways? it's like gosh, I wish it was this fun. I wish I wish the world was this fun, I don't know- I mean, I hope it's a joy to see it.
I just wanted to ask about like sort of engagement, the engagement with reality, how were you able to sustain that?
For 20 years.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s a fair question. Because I look at it now and I said, "how fuck did I do that?" But you get into a groove at different stage of your life, and it's right.
And you go with it, and it became my life.
For a while I was doing illustration, then a couple of kids books. and finally, it took over completely.
Interesting. Well, maybe there's something about acceptance of chance, or accidents and passing comment.
And it's your life and accidents and chance and going with it. Glaser was thinking about something called in his redesign of the voice, he said that he was thinking of something called Urban Comics. So even then the idea of comics was percolating. We as illustrators would do comics just occasionally as a solution to an illustration.
But he could see that that's a valid form..
He could see that it was something.
Well, I think to bring that together so comics are part of design, and they're not just part of what superhero fantasy crap-
You sit down and you design a page.
You're composing in this crazy way: Time.
It is about time.
I think it's totally about time. The passing of time and the changing from then and now.
It fit in the newspaper philosophy, which was "cover it today, get it out, and go looking for tomorrow, tomorrow."
Right, this newspaper's kind of like an economic…. there's a need for it to be this immediate thing. But that somehow accidentally gives birth to this art. It's art, you know, an art of the immediate.
The immediacy of, the act of- that's what abstract expressionism is… it's kind of like action painting, but it's not the model that you grew up with, probably, which might have been post-Andy Warhol, whatever that might have been….
Well maybe comics are an art because they are unsettling people… There's some distrust of drawing, somehow, that people trust photography. They shouldn't. They shouldn't, because now AI is going to make every image untrustworthy.
So this is all you could trust firsthand.
That’s interesting, Are we entering a phase where a personally drawn image has more authenticity than the average photograph?
I think there might be something to do that because if you've witnessed something, no one can take that away from you or change it. Like, you really saw it. It's your truth, maybe it's subjective or whatever, like Rashomon, right? So you might edit it in your mind, but you still saw it, and that's real. So, yeah, I would buy cartoonist truth over any digital image.
I kept getting the question,…did that really happen? that didn't really happen. They didn't really say that. Even then, they weren't sure they could count on it being true.
English (US) · 