Category: art

I started reading “Backstage at the Strips” again, by Mort Walker. I bought the book when I was a kid in the late ’70s and every few years I look at it.

I love that whole idea of the cartoonists being in their own little enclave in and around Westport, Connecticut. I like that life. I’m always tempted to move to New London or Mystic CT, but the cold is too much for a Florida guy. Vanity Fair did  a story not too long ago called, ‘When Fairfield County was the Comic Strip Capital of the World“, which describes exactly what Mort does in his book.

It seems like a perfect life – living on the waterfront in Connecticut and waking up in the morning and cartooning. I like the way Mort describes living an 80-year-old house at the time, in a shore community and working in an old barn.

I notice that in the book Mort says that Bob Gustafson handled his fan mail, so that letter I received so many years ago that I wrote about here, probably came from Bob and not Mort.

Backstage at the Strips, written in 1975 describes there being over 300 newspaper syndicates at the time and 1700 daily newspapers in the US, but still describes how hard it was to break into daily newspaper syndication. Now it’s almost impossible.

The book is really a great look at a cartoonist’s life with lots of valuable information about the cartooning industry at that time and before that time. The book is timeless. But it also encapsulates a time back then, in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s when things were different and times were simpler. It’s a place you want to go back to and just the fact that I first read the book when I was a boy it sort of does take me back to that time because as I read it, a lot of the passages remind me of the first time I read them back in the ’70s.

I thought I had written about it but guess not  . . . I am talking about the “Going Into Town” book by cartoonist Roz Chast. I finally got around to reading it. My cousin had handed it to me one day, she said she thought of me when she saw it so she bought it. She knows I love New York and cartooning and this book is perfect for both.

She asked me if I had ever heard of Roz Chast and I had to laugh because I found one of my favorite museums in New York because of Roz Chast. A few years ago, The Museum of the City of New York had an exhibit featuring Roz Chast’s work. There was a lot of original cartoon art from her New Yorker magazine work and so much more.

I had never been to that museum so I took the subway up to 103 Street and fell in love with the area. It’s sort of a Latin neighborhood with bodegas and lots of people and activity and then you walk over to the 5th Avenue end, where the museum is, right across the street from Central Park and it’s a different world. Thanks to Roz Chast, I have visited that neighborhood and that museum numerous times over the last few years.

Anyway, I finally got around to reading the book and it’s hilarious. It’s written in Roz’s hand, literally. It’s not typeset, it’s spelled out in her handwriting. It’s all about New York City in a truthful and funny way with the cartoonist accompanying the narrative. I think it’s for tourists but it’s funnier if you know the city yourself. Like where she explains that the sidewalks of NYC are a think shell covering a vast honeycomb of pipes and tunnels which is something you really don’t want to think about.

Roz explains the city’s street system – the grid system and uptown and downtown and she seems to like the random buildings in New York that have different businesses on different floors, you know, like very busy buildings with a dentist on one floor, a shoe store on another, a hat store on another and they are all displayed in the front windows as you look at the building from top to bottom.

She prefers cities to nature and she really gets into the city. It’s a funny book, and great for a person who loves New York City. You can see more about it her at Amazon.