Tag: Art Spiegelman

Posted on

Podcast: The Guy Who Drew the Liver Spots

Drew Friedman & Brisket on The Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 21 –
The Guy Who Drew the Liver Spots

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

“I don’t like drawing young people, attractive people. I used to get assigned drawings of the cast of ‘Friends’ for Entertainment Weekly, and it was painful. I would finish a drawing of Jennifer Aniston, and to reward myself, I’d draw Shecky Greene.”

It’s the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt! Drew Friedman, the great painter, cartoonist, chronicler of modern fame (and infamy), and Howard Stern’s favorite artist, invited me out to 2nd Ave. Deli in NYC one Saturday morning to record a conversation about art, leaving New York, show biz, R. Crumb, Joe Franklin, Tor Johnson, the Friars Club, Howard Stern, Abe Vigoda, the gallery show commemorating his books on Old Jewish Comedians, and his upcoming book of portraits on comic-book legends (as in ‘artists, writers and publishers’). We also talk about how Harry Einstein died during a roast for Lucy and Desi, trade Gilbert Gottfried stories, discuss the state of the illustration market, explore why he used stippling effects and why he stopped, and more. This one’s a lot of fun. Go listen!

“There’s a theory about why there were so many Jewish comedians: the smile behind the pain, the haunted smile. I don’t buy into it. I think they’re all just a bunch of hams. They like to be up there, telling jokes, being funny, and meeting women.”

by Jay Ruttenberg Photo of Drew Friedman and Jerry Lewis courtesy of Jay Ruttenberg

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Drew Friedman is an award-winning illustrator, cartoonist and painter. His work has appeared in Raw, Weirdo, SPY, National Lampoon, Snarf, The New York Times, MAD, The New Yorker, BLAB!, The New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, HONK!, Rolling Stone, Field & Stream, TIME, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, and more. His comics and illustrations have been collected in several volumes, the latest, Too Soon?, published by Fantagraphics in 2010. His collection of portraits, Drew Friedman’s Sideshow Freaks, was published by Blast books in 2011. He has published three collections of paintings of Old Jewish Comedians (1, 2 and 3), but none of Old Episcopal Comedians. He also raises champion beagles with his wife, K. Bidus. You can find his full bio and buy his art at his fine art prints site and you really should read his blog.

Credits: This episode’s music is Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals by Raymond Scott. The conversation was recorded at the 2nd Ave. Deli in Manhattan on a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded in my home office on a Blue Yeti USB microphone. File-splitting is done on a Mac Mini using Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by a waiter at 2nd Ave. Deli.

Posted on

Podcast: Visible Cities

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 8 – Visible Cities

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

“My impulse is to break the windows of Starbucks, but I’d get arrested if I did that, so I make comics about people breaking the windows of Starbucks.”

Cartoonist and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship winner Ben Katchor joins us for the first live episode of The Virtual Memories Show (in conjunction with the New York Comics & Picture-stories Symposium). Ben & host Gil Roth talk in front of — and take questions from — an audience of 50 or so about Ben’s career in cartooning, including his new book, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories (Pantheon), which collects his monthly comic page from Metropolis magazine. During the episode, Ben even performs several of his comics. If you’d like to see the comics themselves, you can download Manumission Houses and Lossless Things.

“People ask about influences and where I get my ideas. A lot of people looked at all the stuff I looked at, and they’re doing something else. It’s not like there’s an equation, like you read Saul Bellow and you look at Poussin, and then you make my comics. It’s not an equation. It’s brute force.”

The conversation and Q&A also cover his work process (with a surprising revelation about how he draws!), how book publishing lost its identity, what he learned from working in other art forms (like musical theater), how he teaches cartooning, the allure of new technologies, his one critical audience demographic, the joy of imperfections, whether he has an ideal era for New York, what happened to his History of the Dairy Restaurant book, how fear of shame keeps him productive, how Google can help when you need to draw a Russian prostitute, what he picked up from the Yiddish humor strips he read as a child, which one book the Library of America should withdraw, and how to pronounce “Knipl”! He didn’t win a “Genius” grant for nothing!

“It’s a golden age of art comics. It didn’t exist when I started. Most bookstores wouldn’t carry a comic, or even something that looked like a comic, back then. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a young cartoonist now, when these things are taken seriously and there’s an audience for them.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out our archives for more great conversations!

Ben Katchor on The Virtual Memories Show

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

About our Guest

Ben Katchor’s picture-stories appear in Metropolis magazine. His most recent collection of monthly strips, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, was published in March 2013 by Pantheon Books. Up From the Stacks, his most recent music-theater collaboration with Mark Mulcahy, was commissioned in 2011 by the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and Lincoln Center and was performed at both venues. He is an Associate Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City. For more information, visit www.katchor.com.

Credits: This episode’s music is Big City Blues by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. The conversation was recorded in the Bark Room at The New School in NYC on a pair of AT2020 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. Mr. Katchor’s readings and some of the questions from the audience were recorded on a second Zoom H4n. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB mic into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by Amy Roth.

Posted on

Podcast: Classical Pop

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 14 – Classical Pop

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

It’s time for a (somewhat) long-delayed new episode of The Virtual Memories Show!

“Picasso said that the way you draw your circle is your style.”

This time, postmodern cartoonist Bob Sikoryak talks about the high/low mashups of his amazing book, Masterpiece Comics, the 1980’s art scene in NYC, the sea change in the acceptance of comics as art and entertainment, the (un)importance of having an individual drawing style, and more!

“It’s amazing to me how comics artists can speak to a generation, and that’s it. When you make something, it’s of your time, no matter what you do.”

We also reflect on the art of mimicry, the history of popular art, and who decides when it’s too soon to goof on Dostoevsky. I’ve been a fan of his work since I first read his Inferno Joe strip in 1989, so getting the chance to sit down with Bob for a conversation was a joy. (He’s the sweetest person I’ve met in comics.)

“My roommate in college said, “If you keep reading those comics, it’s gonna affect your style,” and clearly he was right.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Bob Sikoryak on the Virtual Memories Show

Photo by Kriota Willberg.

About Our Guest

R. Sikoryak has drawn cartoons for numerous media giants, including Nickelodeon Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as well as for independent publications, films and theater productions. His cartoon slideshow series Carousel has been presented around the U.S. and Canada. He also teaches and lectures on comics and illustration. He lives in NYC with his wife and frequent collaborator Kriota Willberg.

Listen to the conversation!

 About Our Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Out of Print Clothing! Visit their site and check out their great selection of T-shirts, fleeces, bags and other gear featuring gorgeous and iconic book cover designs.

The Virtual Memories Show is on iTunes! If you’d like to subscribe, visit our iTunes page!

If you’d like to check out past episodes, you can find us on iTunes or visit the Podcast page for all our back episodes, as well as e-mail signup and tip jar! And why don’t you friend the Virtual Memories Show at our Facebook page? It’d make my mom happy.

Credits: This episode’s music is Ambicion Eterna by Thievery Corporation. I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic into Audacity, and the conversation with was recorded in Mr. Sikoryak’s home in Stuy Town in NYC, on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder. All editing was done in Garage Band, with some post-processing in Audaity.

Posted on

Down and Up

It’s been an up and down day.

Up: Easy time driving out to the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival (BCGF), found a parking spot half a block from the site, and had no line for gas on the way out of NJ.

Down: The panel discussion with Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and Richard McGuire was too crowded to attend.

Up: We took the L train out to 14th & Union Sq., went down to the Strand, and I actually found a whole bunch of books I was looking for!

IMG_0657

(L-R: The New Adventures of Jesus (Frank Stack), The Complete Short Novels (Anton Chekhov), Confessions of Felix Krull (Thomas Mann), Journey Into the Past (Stefan Zweig), Officers and Gentlemen (Evelyn Waugh), Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis), and three Library of America editions of Philip Roth)

Down: After we left the Strand, the Sartorialist walked right by us on 5th Ave. and didn’t look twice at my wardrobe. (He didn’t have his camera with him, but I still felt deflated.)

Up: I had the lardo pizza for lunch at Otto.

IMG_1950

Down: Back at BCGF, the exhibit halls were way too hot, so I had to go back to my car and drop off my jacket.

Up: Got to meet Richard McGuire, whose 1989 6-page comic Here changed the vocabulary of comics and the understanding of how time and space can be represented on the page. Learned that he’s working on a full-length book of Here. He was friendly and said he was interested in being a guest on the podcast.

Down: Left my business cards in my jacket, so I couldn’t give him one as a reminder.

Up: I had a good conversation with David Mazzucchelli, which I skillfully started by talking about one of his obscure short comics, not his superhero work from the 1980’s. (I later told him that his Daredevil comics were pretty awesome when I was 15 or 16 years old. He was happy that I grew up along with his art.)

Down: He has no interest in being on my podcast.

Up: Gary Panter and Anders Nilsen both said they’d be on the podcast. (I went out to get my business cards, so I could give them reminders.)

Down: Art Spiegelman gave me the cold shoulder while he was talking to a pal of mine outside the show.

Up: Bought an awesome little book by McGuire, and a new edition of Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, about his girlfriend’s death from cancer.

IMG_0662

Down: Nilsen drew an empty chair for his sketch on the book’s frontispiece.

Up: Met Anne Ishii and Jillian Tamaki and had a nice conversation with them and my pal Tom Spurgeon.

Down: Made them really sad when I told them about Anders Nilsen’s follow-up book, The End, which has a 2-page spread that makes me want to cry.

Up: No one I talked to had any too-terrible stories from the hurricane and nor’easter. That makes it a good day.