Virtual Memories Show #179:
Andrea Tsurumi
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“I’m not a foodie, but I love other people’s obsessions about food. I love watching Kings of Pastry and seeing two men carefully bisecting a pastry and sharing it. They’ve got the most serious looks own their faces.”
Rising comics star — don’t blame me, that’s what Publishers Weekly just called her — Andrea Tsurumi joins the show to talk about her new collection, Why Would You Do That?
“The problem with freelance illustration and comics is just that there’s not enough money, especially if you’re living in New York City. If you don’t have enough money, you don’t have enough time. And if you don’t have enough money or time, you have to make hard choices, and you’ll never have enough wiggle room to have a healthy balance.”
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This episode was recorded at the School of Visual Arts, where Andrea studied and where she does some teaching nowadays (that’s her standing next to a print by Jim Rugg). Past guest Nathan Fox, chair of the MFA Visual Narrative Department at SVA, offered us a space to record. SVA’s low-residency MFA Visual Narrative Program includes two years online and three summers in NYC. The program focuses on the growing need for original content creators in advertising, video games, picture books, graphic novels, film, comic arts, illustration and animation, and it prepares artists and authors to become innovators in the ever-evolving art of visual storytelling. Now go listen to the show!
“You know when you’re growing up and you have these moments of dramatic realization of the obvious? That’s what the growing up is.”
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About our Guest
Andrea Tsurumi is an illustrator and cartoonist who likes history, absurdity, dogs and monsters (in no particular order). Her first book, Why Would You Do That?
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at the School of Visual Arts on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
in his new book, 
(First Second), the massive implications of crowdfunding for cartoonists and other creators, the problems with ‘balance’ in comics pages, his rebellion against Facebook, the Laurie Anderson model of comics, how he defines success, how to keep a happy marriage inside the comics world, and more! 
is probably off the hook now, because I finally did a comic even more sentimental. So now I made Craig look like Gary Panter.”
– Scott McCloud
– Scott McCloud
– Scott McCloud
– Art Spiegelman
– Chris Ware
– Wendy Pini
– Frank Miller
– Alan Moore
– Kerascoët, Fabien Vehlmann
– Roz Chast
– Jules Feiffer
– Richard McGuire
– Matthew Farber
– Joan Didion
– Tom Hart
– Orwell
– Joshua Foer
– David Byrne
– Alice Munro
– Joyce Carol Oates
and a pair of 
feeding into a 
digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a 
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. McCloud by me.
– W.G. Sebald
– W.G. Sebald
– W.G. Sebald
– Laurent Binet
: An Autobiography – Stephen Fry
– Benoit Peeters
– Thomas Bernhard
– Brad Goreski
– Ron Wilson, John Byrne, Armando Gil
, but eh.
, on a shelf, so I grabbed a copy of that. I remember wanting to buy it for the Kindle when it was first released, but it was listing (and still is) at $15.99, and there’s no way on earth I’d pay that much for an e-book, unless it had the answers in the back.
. It was a hardcover, as was the Feiffer book. I know nothing about it, but at this price (80% off $24.95), I couldn’t go wrong.
and 
. I’ve never read her, but I enjoyed her recent 
. I gave up on 
pretty early, on account of authorial arrogance, but one of my magazine’s readers recommended I pick up this book of aphorisms. I bought it for my Kindle this summer, but found that the aphoristic style didn’t work for an e-book; I found myself reading too quickly. I thought it would be better in printed format, so I could scribble notes in the margins and otherwise just look at a line on a page. So I grabbed that, too.
