Weird Cartoonist Tales
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Adrian Tomine, Kate Carew & Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Marshall Ramsey, and Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK).
A Comic Artist’s Antidote to the How-To Guide
[Adrian]Tomine, it turns out, is an adept conversationalist — or at least his latest book, Q&A [link added], suggests as much. Recently released by his longtime publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, the book is a chatty call-and-response between Tomine and his readership through a series of questions culled from an open call posted on social media by the publisher and the artist himself. The queries range from more complicated musings about process to “Do you ever do sketches for fans?”
Sarah Hromack-Chan for Hyperallergic reviews Adrian Tomine‘s Q&A book.
To be the bigger person is a battle that Tomine has seemingly been fighting all along: He has regularly answered his readers’ letters since the outset of his decades-long career. Q&A doesn’t posit a new form for his work but rather is a natural extension of something he just does. It is a gesture of acknowledgment and even gratitude, delivered from a safe distance by Tomine to his readership — people who don’t know him at all, but feel a sense of kinship nonetheless.
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Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist
“Cartoonists spend most of their life sitting at a table; we don’t get out very much. But that’s the very thing that distinguishes Kate Carew from all the others.”
Cartoonist & historian Eddie Campbell returns to the show with his fantastic new book, KATE CAREW: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Underground), which explores turn-of-the-(20th)-century artist, cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, interviewer & journalist Kate Carew. We get into how Eddie discovered Kate’s work while researching The Goat-Getters, how Kate wound up interviewing the likes of Mark Twain, Picasso, the Wright Brothers, and other celebs (& non-celebs) of her time, how her self-caricatures serve as a sorta graphic autobiography (and precursor to the whole world of graphic memoir storytelling), her support of women’s suffrage…
Gil Roth at The Virtual Memories Show presents a 90 minute audio interview with author/cartoonist Eddie Campbell.
Eddie mentions he has already started on his next comics history book about America’s midwestern cartoonists. He name checks John T. McCutcheon, Frank King, and Clare Briggs.
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Art Spiegelman Won’t Shrink Back From Controversy
On the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maus(1986), Art Spiegelman’s wife, Françoise Mouly, was quoted as telling him that, “next to making Maus, your greatest achievement may have been not turning it into a movie.”
Today, more than a decade after that remark, we have a movie. Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) is a bio-doc rather than a strict adaptation of Maus, the memoir of Spiegelman creating a comic from his father’s time in Auschwitz. Not that there’s all that much of a difference.
David D’Arcy for Hyperallergic reviews the Art Spiegelman film and interviews the cartoonist.
At a tight 98 minutes, the documentary by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dollin should have been longer. We never learn from it, for example, that Spiegelman was the creator of the cheeky Garbage Pail Kids, trading cards designed to offend in the spirit of MAD Magazine in the era of treacly commercial Cabbage Patch Kids.
And as in most films on art, the shots of images are too brief.
Yet the doc will introduce viewers to Spiegelman’s early work, situating his stories and images in the history of comics.
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Marshall Ramsey signs copies of his newest children’s book
MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) – A nationally recognized newspaper cartoonist stopped by the Queen City Tuesday to show off his latest book.
Marshall Ramsey set up shop in the crooked letter in downtown Meridian Tuesday evening. He was there on his statewide book signing tour.
His book, Saving Sam! a Banjo the Dog Story [link added], is a fun children’s book he decided to name after his own pets. This is the second book in Ramsey’s series, which he started nearly ten years ago.
Norman McLeod of WTOK-TV interviews cartoonist/author Marshall Ramsey.
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Cartoonist and TV vet Bruce Eric Kaplan details the Hollywood life in memoir
Bruce Eric Kaplan wrote for “Seinfeld” and wrote for and was an executive producer of both “Six Feet Under” and “Girls.” He also has been a longtime contributing cartoonist to the New Yorker.
Despite all these successes, Kaplan is still plagued by doubts about his work and his career, so in 2022 he decided to put those feelings down in a journal, which is now being published as “They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir.” [link added]
Stuart Miller interviews Bruce Eric Kaplan for The Orange County Register.
Q. Did you worry about how you come across in the book?
I just didn’t feel like I had a choice. I felt like I had been picked to illustrate the torturous fever dream that is my brain. It’s always the goal that you expose yourself so that others can identify with aspects of oneself. So I’m a person trying my best. I don’t achieve my best a lot of the time, but I am trying.
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