Noisy and nostalgic big-city comics reportage.
A collection of Real Life Funnies, a comic that ran in the Village Voice for two decades.
Purportedly composed entirely of verbatim conversations, Mack’s strips overflow with spoken snippets from the lives of New York City’s diverse denizens. While some comics capture elaborate, chatty stories, many are free of narrative cohesion and read like sound collages of a crowded city. Drawn in confident, busy linework and shaded with choppy cross-hatching, the comics appear dashed off but hum with an impressive, quiet control, as rackety dialogue hinges on neat drawings of the city’s stately architecture. While his cartooning is unassumingly adept, Mack’s greatest strengths are his journalistic, empathetic approach to memorializing the metropolitan zeitgeist. In the foreword, Jake Tapper astutely calls Mack’s work “sociology, even zoology in its way,” highlighting the cartoonist’s steadfast drive to cross thresholds and learn from lifestyles unlike his own. “I wanted to go places where I didn’t belong,” Mack recalls, “attend events outside my comfort zone.” He covered the gamut from art openings to séances and featured people both luxuriating in penthouses and living on the streets. He drew election rallies and counterculture protests, the rise of the yuppie, Reagan’s term, and the AIDS epidemic. While its subjects ranged from all corners of the city, Real Life Funnies had a sex-positive slant that found Mack visiting sex shops, sex therapists, and places like the West Village’s Erotic Baker and the “First Annual New York Transgender Conference and Dinner Dance.” It’s a dense body of work and best taken slowly: Some of Mack’s most clamorous strips land on the threshold of cacophony and are nearly exhausting in their attempts to cram so much city into such a small space. The book includes an afterword by Jeannette Walls.
Noisy and nostalgic big-city comics reportage.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781683969167
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
