New Used Blab

A reversible book that includes half new offerings and half reprints from earlier numbers of Blab!

The incarnation of the celebrated art and comics annual Blab! Founded over a decade ago by Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp, Blab World features and celebrates artists and illustrators of different mediums. Over the years Blab! has evolved from a digest-sized comics magazine into a beautifully designed and printed keepsake, and now boasts countless design awards and honours.

Peter Kuper (b. 1958) is one of the country's leading cartoonists. His artwork has graced the pages and covers of numerous newspapers and magazines, including Time, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and the New York Times. He is a longtime contributor to Mad magazine, where he has been writing and drawing Spy vs. Spy for two decades, and the cofounder and coeditor of World War 3 Illustrated, the cutting-edge magazine devoted to political graphic art. Most of the interviews collected here are either previously unpublished or long out of print. They address such varied topics as world travels, teaching at Harvard, Hollywood deal-making, climate change, Spy vs. Spy, New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and World War 3 Illustrated. Among the works examined are his books The System, Sticks and Stones, Stop Forgetting to Remember, Diario de Oaxaca, and adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Kuper also discusses his graphic novel Ruins, which received the Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel in 2016. Along with two dozen images, this volume features ten lively, informative interviews as well as a quartet of revealing conversations, conducted in collaboration with Kuper's fellow artist Seth Tobocman, with underground comix legends Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé, Mad magazine publisher William Gaines, and Jack Kirby.

Although he’s best known for his two-fisted tales of the chopper-riding Trashman, Spain’s blunt graphic style and uncompromising gift for caricature, rendered in eye-punishing slabs of black and white, work equally well for more subtle fare ― such as these memoirs of his misspent youth. Cruisin’ with the Hound ranges from Spain’s days as an innocent young churchgoer to his time as a member of the Road Vultures motorcycle gang, with stops along the way for his discoveries of science fiction and other, more adult pursuits (“The Birth of Porn”) ― as well as the “The Education of an Underground Cartoonist,” describing his journey from a pimply Captain Marvel-reading scribbler to his arrival as a professional artist. But the heart of this collection is a cycle of stories (originally published in the acclaimed Blab! magazine) set during Spain’s teenage days in the 1950s, often featuring the doomed, dot-eyed Fred Tooté, a wild, flaky character in whose company some of his wildest escapades occurred.