“The cartoonists in that community were very intent on making their own way in life with the tools they enjoyed working with, rather than being slotted into a pathway of someone else’s devising.”
This podcast has been to Hicksville and Coconino, so why not Fairfield County, CT? Cullen Murphy‘s new book, Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (FSG), tells the story of Prince Valiant cartoonist John Cullen Murphy and the community of cartoonists, illustrators and comic-book artists who settled the southeastern corner of Connecticut in the ’50s and ’60s. Cullen & I talk about the confluence of factors that led to that community and his goal of preserving that golden age in this book, his realization that “cartoonist” was not a normal job for one’s dad, his own cartooning aspirations, what writing Prince Valiant with his father taught him about storytelling, how his upbringing around cartoonists affected how he worked with illustrators as a magazine editor, why his father stuck with realism and never worked in bigfoot style, and what Cartoon County taught him about himself & his family. Give it a listen! And go buy Cartoon County!
“When I was thinking of the audience for Cartoon County, I very much had my family in mind.”
This podcast has been to Hicksville and Coconino, so why not Fairfield County, CT? Cullen Murphy‘s new book, Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe
Cullen Murphy is the editor at large at Vanity Fair and the former managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His books include Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
