Virtual Memories Show 432:
Shary Flenniken
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“Being at National Lampoon was just like hanging out with your friends. In a way, my whole career has been like that: hanging out and doing cartoons.”
Legendary cartoonist & humorist Shary Flenniken joins the show to celebrate the long overdue collection of her amazing Trots & Bonnie comics (New York Review Comics). We get into her process of selecting the strips from Trots & Bonnie’s ~20-year run at National Lampoon, her realization of how funny her comics still are, the joy of seeing the restored artwork, and the fun of providing annotations for each of the strips. We talk about her time among the Air Pirates, the great advice she got from Charles Vess, what she learned during her stint as an editor at National Lampoon, the importance of Kermode’s The Sense Of An Ending and the challenge of a punchline, the impact of her comics on their intended and unintended audiences, and whether she considers her art’s place in the history of underground comics. We also discuss our dogs, her lifelong love of popular fiction, her new comics work, her favorite pen nib and her shift to digital art, and a whole lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Trots & Bonnie!
“The best artists, what they do for the world is make you see it differently.”
“It’s weird now, so many decades on from when I started, to look back and see what my opinions were back then. Sometimes it’s not fun; there are a couple of strips I left out of the book that were fine back then, but in today’s context. . . .”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Shary Flenniken is a cartoonist, writer, and editor. Her work has appeared in a variety of books and magazines including The American Bystander, Graphic Classics, and Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great. After living and working in San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Florida Keys, and New York, she now resides where she grew up, in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Shary holds degrees in commercial art, computer technology, web design, and professional technical education and instructional design. She loves post-apocalyptic science fiction, the artist Charles M. Russell, and walking her dogs. Her new book is Trots & Bonnie.
Follow Shary on Twitter and Instagram. And check out her alternate site, Slave To Her Pets.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone
