Join Stan Mack on Tuesday, July 2 at a book signing and reading for his new book, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies. S.W. Conser from KBOO’s Words and Pictures will join Stan in conversation.
From 1974 to 1995, in the pages of The Village Voice, cartoonist Stan Mack’s “Real Life Funnies” chronicled the everyday, the extraordinary, and the downright outlandish lives of New Yorkers—with every story told entirely in the subjects’ own words. New Yorkers (and New Yorkers-at-heart) ate it up. For the first time, a comprehensive collection of those comic strips has been included in one volume.
Sketchbook in hand, Stan Mack haunted the New York City environs, watching, listening, overhearing, and interviewing its inhabitants. He drew a comic strip every week based on what he saw and heard, famously using verbatim dialogue for his graphic dramatizations. A mixture of humor, spontaneity, serendipity, and weirdness, Mack’s comic strip snapshots caught New Yorkers — whether it is an extortionist calligrapher, a baby evading arrest at her first protest, a stroll up Broadway with a ferret, an evening with a male liberationist, or an unlucky-in-love dolphin trainer — being who they are in all their unguarded and uninhibited glory.
WHO: Stan Mack
WHAT: Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 book signing and reading, in conversation with S.W. Conser
WHEN: Tuesday July 2, 5-7pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 1223 Lloyd Center
Stan Mack pioneered a documentary style of cartooning with his legendary New York comic strip “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies,” which ran in The Village Voice. A giant collection of those strips, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995, is published by Fantagraphics.
Mack’s other long-running comic strips include “Mule’s Diner” for National Lampoon, “Stan Mack’s Outtakes” (Adweek) and “Stan Mack’s RealMAD” (Mediapost.com). He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a former art director of the New York Herald Tribune’s Book Week, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Tags: Fantagraphics
