Overview

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. This collection includes a foreword by CNN journalist Jake Tapper (The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor) and an afterword by Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle).

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9781683969167

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Reviews

Stan Mack's brilliant, hilarious cartoons are about one of the greatest joys of living in a city: eavesdropping on one's fellow humans as they innocently go about their business and say the things they say. His drawings are sharp, but never mean. It's what we sound like! All the world's a stage, and for a cartoonist, it's all material.--Roz Chast Back in the day, Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a weekly treat that became addictive to many readers, including Voice writers like me. We couldn't turn away from the words and images so innocently set down by the wandering artist as he overheard New Yorkers blurting out the social, political, sexual, and status anxieties of a generation. Indelibly candid, funny, startling, and occasionally even profound, these vignettes depict a magical lost metropolis that forever shaped our culture.--Joe Conason (journalist, author, and former Village Voice staff writer) Having been the primary and incidental subject of a few of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, I applaud his genius for finding the wit in any situation, including those where the humor was not so obvious.--Steven Heller How great to discover that I got in on the Stan Mack ground floor -- he was only two years into his 21-year tenure at the Village Voice when I, age 21, arrived in New York and became a weekly Village Voice reader, happily gobbling up every installment of Real Life Funnies. The strip's singular comedy-reality hybrid depicted and defined the city of my youth, shaping my sensibility then, still amusing and charming me now.--Kurt Andersen Thank goodness we have Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies to remind us that New York was once a wild, weird, creative place filled with people who always had something interesting to say. And thank goodness Stan Mack was around to hear them say it.--Jeremiah Moss (author of Feral City and Vanishing New York)

"Mack's greatest strength is his journalistic, empathetic approach to memorializing the metropolitan zeitgeist.-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" Stan Mack's brilliant, hilarious cartoons are about one of the greatest joys of living in a city: eavesdropping on one's fellow humans as they innocently go about their business and say the things they say. His drawings are sharp, but never mean. It's what we sound like! All the world's a stage, and for a cartoonist, it's all material.--Roz Chast This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack's Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York. Like a crowded apartment building, the volume's chock-full of stubborn individuality, and the joy and pathos of urban life.-- ""Publishers Weekly Starred Review"" Back in the day, Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a weekly treat that became addictive to many readers, including Voice writers like me. We couldn't turn away from the words and images so innocently set down by the wandering artist as he overheard New Yorkers blurting out the social, political, sexual, and status anxieties of a generation. Indelibly candid, funny, startling, and occasionally even profound, these vignettes depict a magical lost metropolis that forever shaped our culture.--Joe Conason (journalist, author, and former Village Voice staff writer) Having been the primary and incidental subject of a few of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, I applaud his genius for finding the wit in any situation, including those where the humor was not so obvious.--Steven Heller How great to discover that I got in on the Stan Mack ground floor -- he was only two years into his 21-year tenure at the Village Voice when I, age 21, arrived in New York and became a weekly Village Voice reader, happily gobbling up every installment of Real Life Funnies. The strip's singular comedy-reality hybrid depicted and defined the city of my youth, shaping my sensibility then, still amusing and charming me now.--Kurt Andersen Thank goodness we have Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies to remind us that New York was once a wild, weird, creative place filled with people who always had something interesting to say. And thank goodness Stan Mack was around to hear them say it.--Jeremiah Moss (author of Feral City and Vanishing New York)"

"Mack's greatest strength is his journalistic, empathetic approach to memorializing the metropolitan zeitgeist.-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" Stan Mack's brilliant, hilarious cartoons are about one of the greatest joys of living in a city: eavesdropping on one's fellow humans as they innocently go about their business and say the things they say. His drawings are sharp, but never mean. It's what we sound like! All the world's a stage, and for a cartoonist, it's all material.--Roz Chast For more than 30 years Mack took pencils, pens, and sketchbooks to bars, restaurants, art galleries, movie queues, sex clubs, parks, and anywhere else New York's denizens gathered. Now, 50 years later, hundreds of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies have been transmuted from yellowed newsprint into big glossy pages between hardcovers.-- ""Village Voice"" This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack's Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York. Like a crowded apartment building, the volume's chock-full of stubborn individuality, and the joy and pathos of urban life.-- ""Publishers Weekly Starred Review"" Back in the day, Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a weekly treat that became addictive to many readers, including Voice writers like me. We couldn't turn away from the words and images so innocently set down by the wandering artist as he overheard New Yorkers blurting out the social, political, sexual, and status anxieties of a generation. Indelibly candid, funny, startling, and occasionally even profound, these vignettes depict a magical lost metropolis that forever shaped our culture.--Joe Conason (journalist, author, and former Village Voice staff writer) Having been the primary and incidental subject of a few of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, I applaud his genius for finding the wit in any situation, including those where the humor was not so obvious.--Steven Heller How great to discover that I got in on the Stan Mack ground floor -- he was only two years into his 21-year tenure at the Village Voice when I, age 21, arrived in New York and became a weekly Village Voice reader, happily gobbling up every installment of Real Life Funnies. The strip's singular comedy-reality hybrid depicted and defined the city of my youth, shaping my sensibility then, still amusing and charming me now.--Kurt Andersen Thank goodness we have Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies to remind us that New York was once a wild, weird, creative place filled with people who always had something interesting to say. And thank goodness Stan Mack was around to hear them say it.--Jeremiah Moss (author of Feral City and Vanishing New York)"

Author Information

Stan Mack pioneered a documentary style of cartooning with his notorious New York comic strip Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, which ran in The Village Voice. His Stan Mack's Out-takes for Adweek magazine and Stan Mack's RealMAD for the online publication Mediapost covered the world of media. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, was a graphics specialist in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and is a former art director of the New York Herald Tribune's Book Week, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Jake Tapper is an anchor and correspondent for CNN. He's contributed to Emmy-Award winning journalism and is also a New York Times bestselling author. Jeannette Walls is an American author and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of the New York Times bestseller The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood.

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