On sale date: June 11, 2024
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.
The first 150 orders of Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies include an exclusive bookplate signed by the author! Order now to claim yours.
Praise
"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
"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
"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)
"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
Specs
- Pages
- 336
- Format
- Hardback
- Color
- Black and white.
- Dimensions
- 12" × 9"
- ISBN-13
- 9781683969167