Illustrated New York City Life

Stan Mack's comics from another time

I look forward to seeing what the cover of The New Yorker will look like from one week to the next. It’s one of the little thrills I can always count on except for those parts of the year when they put two issues in one because I suppose even David Remnick needs a break. Part of the reason I love the covers is the wait. You don’t wait for much anymore, so there’s always a little burst of Oooohhh. New cover! when I see the latest for the first time. And now and then, it’s a cover I love or it’s by an artist that I can’t get enough of, like Roz Chast. She did the most recent cover and as an avid fan of her comics in the magazine, seeing her work in all its playful, neurotic glory front and center was a thrill.

But I also love the covers because they often feel like one of the last vestiges of a certain sort of New York-centric media that has largely gone away as publishers chase digital clicks over the World Wide Web. Sometimes they speak to national stories, but the ones I love show scenes of people walking on Brooklyn sidewalks or of old Manhattan buildings. The latest Chast cover should appeal to anybody, but my guess is the “Kasha cheesecake” bit probably only plays well here, in L.A., South Florida, and parts of New Jersey. The nods to Gowanus and Mill Basin are especially for the New Yorkers who read The New Yorker.

I’ve been a fan of old, regional-specific art in old magazines and newspapers for a long time, but the stuff from New York has always appealed to me on a different level. The comics that Stan Mack used to publish in the Village Voice, for instance, offered a blend of sociology and comedy that you just don’t see enough of these days. I came to Mack’s work through one of his books and just missed reading the Voice during his tenure from 1974 to 1995, so Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies is a godsend for me.

Mack was a reporter just as much as anybody else on staff at the old rag. His comics were often slice-of-life reports from the city sidewalks and parties, and they offered a funny, sometimes (I think…) embellished look at the lives of everyday New Yorkers in the 1970s into the Clinton era. Mack was paying close attention to their conversations, habits, vices, and neurotic tendencies, then drawing it all out for readers. Fantagraphics was nice enough to let me post a few here, but the whole book is well worth picking up because it shows how New York City is always changing and evolving, how a lot of that change and evolution can seem annoying or even bad in real-time, but there can be something wonderful about looking back at it.