Bio: At parties it’s easiest to answer the question about my livelihood with the succinct answer, “Oh, I’ve had work in The New Yorker.” People’s eyes glaze over if I give the long-form answer:
I was the Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW Magazine. David Mazzuchelli and I co-created City of Glass, the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s book. My sister Judy and I wrote The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family. My anthology celebrating forgotten comics visionary and all-around sociopath, Fletcher Hanks, received an Eisner Award, the highest honor in the field. And, God willing, within the year, How To Read Nancy will be released, a book co-authored with Mark Newgarden, that explains the entire language of comics through the deconstruction of a single comic strip. (Yes, total madness, and you heard it here first.) And I teach and lecture about comics in the USA and abroad.
So, you see, it’s a lot simpler if I just tell people that I have had work in The New Yorker. That they understand, pour me a glass of champagne, and hand over the keys to their Bentley.
This is one of my favorite gags:
Here’s another — and here’s the story: I was thrilled when I heard that one of my gags got used on the cover of The New Yorker cartoon calendar. I was less thrilled when I saw how the drawing had been art-directed by someone with a taste in blue squares.
I do a semi-regular Graphic Report feature for my local newspaper, The Vineyard Gazette, about what people do and how they do it. In this one, I follow former New York Times Outdoors columnist, Nelson Bryant, as he goes fishing:
Find this Graphic Report here.
Two tools that I could not live without are the Uniball Vision pen with the “Fine” point, with which I do all my roughs (on smooth Xerox brand “Bold” copy paper), and the Blackwing pencil, with which I do most of my finish work (on Strathmore 400). My maternal grandmother used Blackwings for over 60 years to do the NYTimes crossword puzzle, so I was really glad when the pencil came back into production.
I am also fond of my Koh-I-Noor Technograph mechanical pencil that I have owned for over 40 years, but it was lost less than a week after this photo was taken, so I must learn to live without it.
My Mom (her mother’s daughter in daily crossword puzzle addiction, but she does the Times puzzle with a pen, at the age of 98, no less) bought me a drawing board when I was 16. I sit at that drawing board daily…I don’t always get much work done there, but I sit at it, anyway.
I literally draw in a closet.
To the right of my drawing board hangs this prophetic original cartoon by my pal, Mick Stevens, that explains why my drawing board is constantly covered with garbage.
Above that hangs a original New Yorker cartoon by Alain, personally inscribed to my father.
A Winsor McCay original editorial drawing depicting the humanized days of the week hangs directly in front of me reminding me of the slow passage of time (just in case I need to be reminded of such things as I sit before my drawing board).
Above my alcove is this masterpiece by Ernie Bushmiller, hanging like the sword of Damocles, above my head.
Finally, I do not know if I could live my life without this Curad tin.
Tools I wish I could use better:
I never got the hang of relaxing with a dip pen. The reason why I do my finishes in pencil is that my pen work is so lame. I choke up as soon as I dip pen into ink. Although my compositions get worked and reworked, the pencil allows me to give the final version a bit of (completely artificial) spontaneity.
On top of the pencil drawing, I lay down ink wash. I mix two batches for each new drawing: a light and a dark wash. These then get layered to create a wider range of grays on top of the pencils. I try to keep those brush marks loose.
I once owned a Laugh Finder device and could use a new one (hint hint), only highly-personalized. The original Laugh-Finder (created by cartoonist, Dan Runyon, and sold by an outfit called the Cartoonists Exchange of Pleasant Hill, Ohio) was a rotating paper disc that cartoonists (more likely: “would-be Cartoonists”) could spin to spontaneously link up Characters, Places, and Accessories (Grim Reaper : Desert Island : Whoopee Cushion) thus providing cartoonists with several million possible comedic scenarios. I could save a lot of time with a Laugh-Finder grown from my own, personal DNA. Without it, I spend a lot of time staring, staring, staring at blank sheets of white paper.
I have a blog here where I post stuff. It began as a travelogue.
http://paulkarasik.blogspot.com/
A Case for Pencils has a new Instagram that you can find here!
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