Mike Rhode writes:
Since I first saw his cartoons about books and reading on the next-to-last page of the New York Times Book Review, Grant Snider has been one of my favorite cartoonists. His new book, The Art of Living: Reflections onMindfulness and the Overexamined Life (Abrams Comic Arts, $19) is full of his delightful single-page multi-panel cartoons that can make a reader pay attention and wonder about their lives and goals. I was very pleased to be offered the opportunity to talk with Dr. Snider (for he’s an orthodontist by trade, and a cartoonist by avocation.)
Mike Rhode: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?
Grant Snider: I do primarily web comics that get collected in books, like The Art of Living, which is coming out soon. Basically, I draw a weekly comic strip, find broader themes in those, and gather them together in book form.
Grant Snider: The big three that I was basically studying and riffing off of, and doing my versions of, when I decided I wanted to become a cartoonist were Roz Chast, the great New Yorker cartoonist; Matt Groening, the Simpsons creator who also did Life in Hell, a weekly alt comic strip in the eighties and nineties; and Tom Gauld, a British cartoonist who draws some New Yorker covers and some amazing graphic novels, and for a long time did a lot of literary comics, which I really love.
Grant Snider: I think early on, I just wanted everything to happen right away. I had my first comic strip published in the New York Times Book Review and I was like, “Okay, I’ve made it, this is it. I’m gonna get a big book deal. I’m going to get this huge audience.” And I think five to seven years later, I was still waiting for that to happen. Instead of more just kind of having fun with the creative aspect of it, and focusing less on where I’m getting my work published and who’s reading it. I think a lot of those things happen naturally just by consistently working.