Speaker 1: Don't be ridiculous.
Speaker 2: As president of Planet Spaceball, I can assure both you
Speaker 2: and your viewers that there's absolutely no air shortage whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Yes, of course I've heard the same room with myself. Yes,
Speaker 1: thanks for calling and not reversing the chargers yet. Bye, Shihead.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish contributors and
Speaker 2: contributions to American popular culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman and I'm
Speaker 2: Joey Angelfield producer engineer Mike Tomren is working somewhere behind
Speaker 2: the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of a dot
Speaker 2: Jabourine Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, the Jewish Museum of the
Speaker 2: American West, and Atheist United Studios. Hey, Joey, the pen
Speaker 2: may be mightier than the sword, but is it mightier
Speaker 2: than the apocalyptic threat of climate change?
Speaker 3: We're honored to chat with Peter Cooper, a prolific cartoonist
Speaker 3: whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation,
Speaker 3: Charlie Ebdoh, and Mad Magazine. He's the author of numerous books,
Speaker 3: including the graphic novels kafka Esque and Insectopolis, a Natural History.
Speaker 3: His latest book, Wish We Weren't here. Postcards from the
Speaker 3: Apocalypse is published by Fanographics. Peter, Welcome to Amusing Jews.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: You call pencils, pens, watercolors, and photoshop your weapons. Could
Speaker 3: you explain?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I'm hopefully you performing like a doctor,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing an operation on the problems that I'm encountering.
Speaker 1: And so that's my scalpel, and you know, my various knives,
Speaker 1: and it's the way that I'm able to communicate these ideas.
Speaker 1: So I feel like it functions that way, and or
Speaker 1: knows more and more, we're experiencing the notion that talking
Speaker 1: about things that are actually going on is a threat.
Speaker 1: So apparently those pencils, pins, et cetera are our weapons
Speaker 1: of a form.
Speaker 2: You got into comics when you were a lad, Did
Speaker 2: you always have a sense that they have this special power.
Speaker 1: I was working on a fanzine starting when I was eleven.
Speaker 1: Seth to Bachmann and I, who grew up in Cleveland,
Speaker 1: together did our first fanzine, which was called Fanzine with
Speaker 1: a pH. We were way before a fat you know.
Speaker 1: And then we did the official magazine of the Cleveland
Speaker 1: Graphic Arts Society, Gaslight as it was called, and so
Speaker 1: I was deeply, deeply into comics and going to comic
Speaker 1: convention in New York and Detroit, and when they came
Speaker 1: to Cleveland those two and so I was always attached
Speaker 1: to comics, but aiden started drawing them seriously until really,
Speaker 1: pretty relatively late. I mean, there was a point where
Speaker 1: I was drawing. When I started, when I was maybe fifteen,
Speaker 1: I was having a sketchbook, but I wasn't drawing comics,
Speaker 1: and I was daunted by the prospect of doing that.
Speaker 1: But when I started to draw comics, I realized that
Speaker 1: osmosis or whatever takes place from all, you know, reading
Speaker 1: a million comics was it was in there. And so
Speaker 1: when I started to try to do that, I started
Speaker 1: I had, you know, my sense of storytelling and all
Speaker 1: that was more built in than you know. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize how much that had seeped into my consciousness.
Speaker 2: You co founded the graphics magazine World War Three Illustrated
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy nine. How did that come about?
Speaker 1: Well, seth to Bachman from Cleveland. You know, we'd done
Speaker 1: a fanzine. He moved to New York. Then I followed
Speaker 1: him to New York. He was at Nyu in film school,
Speaker 1: and then we both ended up at Pratt Institute and
Speaker 1: we both were really into comics, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: the arc of my career is going to be going
Speaker 1: into underground comics. Right about the time that that industry collapsed,
Speaker 1: you know, they closed down headshops, they all the distribution disappeared,
Speaker 1: and it just that that was not an option. But
Speaker 1: since we had done a fanzine, it wasn't a crazy
Speaker 1: idea like, well, we're doing these comics and it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to get published. That were you know, this is
Speaker 1: like nineteen seventy nine. There was one collapsing industry, but
Speaker 1: there was one starting to get its legs. I mean
Speaker 1: like Love and Rockets came in nineteen eighty one, and
Speaker 1: you know that was originally self published. That there was
Speaker 1: a percolation of like, well, you know, the river's got
Speaker 1: to flow somewhere and seth and I feeling very much
Speaker 1: like with Ronald Reagan on his way into office, that
Speaker 1: was like percolating that was right about to happen that
Speaker 1: you know, there was the hostage crisis in Iran. Ironically,
Speaker 1: here we are again, and they were talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: it was going to be bomb Iran, and there was
Speaker 1: a definite move with generally a feeling of the atomic
Speaker 1: bomb is going to be used, and with Reagan, you
Speaker 1: know this like very be minus actor potentially going to
Speaker 1: have his finger on the button. The title World War
Speaker 1: Three Illustrated seemed appropriate. So we did the first issue
Speaker 1: while we were in art school. In fact, we did
Speaker 1: a couple of the issues in art school. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just publishing our own work. It was also there
Speaker 1: was all this work that people were doing in New York.
Speaker 1: I mean that was around the time Keith Haring was
Speaker 1: starting to draw on the subways, Bosquette was around. You know,
Speaker 1: this is the it was in New York. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of art on the streets that would maybe
Speaker 1: wash away with the first rain, and we wanted to
Speaker 1: capture that and say, especially with Reagan coming into office,
Speaker 1: to say like that there's a lot of people that
Speaker 1: don't agree with this direction and that we want to
Speaker 1: codify that history. And World War II was a place
Speaker 1: to do that. And when we did one issue, people
Speaker 1: started coming to us more. I mean we'd kind of
Speaker 1: gathered people for the first issue, but then people started
Speaker 1: to reach out to us, and one of the realizations
Speaker 1: we had was we're talking about these about the Cold
Speaker 1: War in Russia and the United States going to war
Speaker 1: and things, and these are things we read about in
Speaker 1: the newspaper, But we can talk about what's going on
Speaker 1: on East third Street in Manhattan, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be a reflection of what's going on in the world.
Speaker 1: And you know, our direct experience what was going on
Speaker 1: where there was there were a lot of abandoned buildings,
Speaker 1: but there was, you know, the rise of potential gentrification.
Speaker 1: Police were not busting drug dealers, you know, and so
Speaker 1: the situations would get worse so that they could come
Speaker 1: in and just get rid of a bunch of pease people.
Speaker 1: And it was a real vibrant time, and we had
Speaker 1: a lot of stories that we could tell that were
Speaker 1: our direct experience.
Speaker 2: Do you see parallels between when you started that magazine
Speaker 2: and now you mentioned the Iran situation and so forth.
Speaker 2: Is it kind of history repeating itself in some ways?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well, it was just reading a quote that said,
Speaker 1: what we learned from history is that we don't learn
Speaker 1: from history. It's a real So many of the things
Speaker 1: that we talked about you could just reprint and say, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that thing we were pointing at and saying, let's not
Speaker 1: do that. That was true with going into Afghanistan, going
Speaker 1: into Iraq. We were talking about all those things and
Speaker 1: waving our arms around about it. And you know, we're
Speaker 1: a small magazine. We didn't change the world that way,
Speaker 1: but that history does exist in the magazine. And by
Speaker 1: the way, Crazy, I'm working on a new issue right
Speaker 1: now as co editor. It's called Animal Rights. Planet Wrongs
Speaker 1: is the theme. So environmental issues and animal rights, which
Speaker 1: can join easily. And uh so we're into we're coming
Speaker 1: up on what I don't know, forty eight years of publishing.
Speaker 1: It's insane. Secret to our success. No one's never been paid,
Speaker 1: but Seth and I put into publish it and it's
Speaker 1: you know, it pays out in the positive possibilities of
Speaker 1: connecting people and uh you know, having a resource. One
Speaker 1: of the things that we get to do with the
Speaker 1: magazine is actually published people for the first time that
Speaker 1: you know, for an artist to be seen in print,
Speaker 1: it's one of the things that can make you continue
Speaker 1: or or stop. And that you know, it was you know,
Speaker 1: I was always very anxious, like I wanted to be
Speaker 1: in print. And it means a great deal, and that
Speaker 1: we've have such a long list of people that we
Speaker 1: who first started in the magazine at Eric Drucker, who's
Speaker 1: done a ton of New Yorker covers and many amazing
Speaker 1: graphic novels like you know, Flood, Blood Song and Naked
Speaker 1: Cities is a recent one. You know, that work was
Speaker 1: first appearing in World War Three. There was a book
Speaker 1: that Vertigo published called Seven Miles a Second by James
Speaker 1: Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook. It was the story of
Speaker 1: David Wanurovich. We published that first in World War Three.
Speaker 1: It became you know anyway, not I won't break my
Speaker 1: own patting ourselves on the back. It's it's you know,
Speaker 1: we've been a launch pad for World War three enjoining.
Speaker 3: The show, Click like and subscribe. You've been writing and
Speaker 3: illustrating Spy versus Spy for Mad magazine since nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3: What was it like taking over an iconic cartoon?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I grew up on Mad, so I
Speaker 1: started looking at that when I was in a probly
Speaker 1: eight something nine, definitely intensely when I was in my teens,
Speaker 1: early early teens, and it taught me everything that I
Speaker 1: need to understand about the collision of humor and politics,
Speaker 1: and so it was hugely important to me, and Spy's
Speaker 1: Spy was probably the first thing I went to. Ironically,
Speaker 1: when they reached out to me and said, do you
Speaker 1: want to try out for Spy Versus Spy? I almost
Speaker 1: said no because I was I just finished doing a
Speaker 1: book for Vertigo called The System, which was a wordless story,
Speaker 1: all done in stencils and spray paint. It was a
Speaker 1: completely insane project, and I was really starting to feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: now comics are about to you know, I'm about to
Speaker 1: get my footing with doing comics. And I should say,
Speaker 1: for the better part of the first decade, doing comics
Speaker 1: was almost a hobbyist thing. Like from seventy nine to
Speaker 1: two the nineties, if you were doing comics, you were
Speaker 1: just doing them because you were inclined to do them.
Speaker 1: There wasn't any money to speak of. There were almost
Speaker 1: no mainstream publishers, no book no libraries carried comics, and
Speaker 1: I took books to publishers and they just they looked
Speaker 1: at me like I was crazy. And that lasted into
Speaker 1: the nineties. In fact, that lasted until two thousand. There
Speaker 1: was the little Hits I had, like, like, I did
Speaker 1: a classics illustrated adaptation of the Jungle for First Comics
Speaker 1: right before they went bankrupt. And then then the system
Speaker 1: was for DC Vertigo, which is again ironic since it
Speaker 1: was Batman, you know, Superman and one of my books.
Speaker 1: So Mad asked me to try out for and they
Speaker 1: were like, well, pay you just you know, give it
Speaker 1: a try. And I'm like, all right, well, if I'm
Speaker 1: going to do this, I'm got I can't just mimic
Speaker 1: Antonio Broheus's style because then I'm just really like thrown
Speaker 1: in the towel on what I'm doing. And I just
Speaker 1: I was very deeply into cutting stencils out of pay
Speaker 1: and with toxic spray paint, spray painting, and so like
Speaker 1: all the entire the System was done that way. The
Speaker 1: Jungle was done that way. I did another book called
Speaker 1: Sticks and Stones, all done that way. And I was
Speaker 1: getting a ton of illustration work. I was surviving doing
Speaker 1: illustrations for mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek, and a
Speaker 1: lot of work for the New York Times. That's what
Speaker 1: I was living on as an artist while doing comics
Speaker 1: on the side. And so I thought, well, if I'm
Speaker 1: going to do this. I'm going to do something that
Speaker 1: looks like me. So I presented a stencil spray paint
Speaker 1: version of Spy Verse Spy, and I just absolutely assumed
Speaker 1: the editors take one look at it and go, thank
Speaker 1: you very much, mister Cooper, and show me the door.
Speaker 1: And it turned out that my lack of got to
Speaker 1: get this job was exactly the way to go. And
Speaker 1: you know, it was just dumb luck, which I feel
Speaker 1: like I run on much of the time, and so
Speaker 1: it was just it was kind of a perfect fit.
Speaker 1: But I did think I'll do this for a year
Speaker 1: or two and then it'll wear out its welcome and
Speaker 1: I'll move along. And then, for whatever reason, at one point,
Speaker 1: you know, when I just was thinking like, well, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of running dry here, they went color and that
Speaker 1: outpened the door on rainbows and lots of blood and
Speaker 1: and then you know, just at different points, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's been a life raft in terms of I mean
Speaker 1: it introduces I say, it's the gateway drug to my
Speaker 1: other work. Like people who've never seen my work, and
Speaker 1: as far as they know I do Spyrus Spy, that's it.
Speaker 1: And when they're like, oh, you did something else, so
Speaker 1: it's a really great, you know, like bridge to what
Speaker 1: I want people to look at as well. And I
Speaker 1: have a blast doing it. And the weird thing is
Speaker 1: it started to fade away in about twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: and then they asked me to do it and I'll
Speaker 1: Jaffy tribute piece, and there was the seventieth day anniversary
Speaker 1: and then they were like, hey, we're sort of bringing
Speaker 1: it back, would you like to do it? And that
Speaker 1: was maybe a year ago, and now I'm doing it.
Speaker 1: Did the cover of the last issue hand a strip
Speaker 1: and I'm doing one every issue now. So it's back
Speaker 1: full on, which is fantastic. And Mad's now every two
Speaker 1: months primarily by subscription. A lot of people think it's died.
Speaker 1: I've heard that from most people, like, oh man, I
Speaker 1: used to like this. It's like, well, you can continue.
Speaker 2: It's not just that you're drawing for Mad. You're doing
Speaker 2: probably the most iconic and popular part of Mad, Spy
Speaker 2: versus Spy.
Speaker 1: It's all very surreal in that way. It is so
Speaker 1: much in my DNA though. It's like when I sat
Speaker 1: down a lot, I was like, oh, yeah, I know
Speaker 1: this really well, and you know it's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: mostly it ceased being what its original tone was, cold war.
Speaker 1: It's now sort of lukewarm war. Although there's always ways
Speaker 1: to slip things in. I did something about during the
Speaker 1: elect I you know, had a little voting one and
Speaker 1: there's there's ways to you know, it's got that like
Speaker 1: mad in general, it has this subversive vibe.
Speaker 2: I first came across your environmental comics in the twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen anthology Slow Death Zero. What drew you to the
Speaker 2: climate crisis as an artistic subject?
Speaker 1: Well, I did a book for Fantagraphics in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight called It's Only a Matter of Life and Death
Speaker 1: that was focused on environmental comics. So one of the
Speaker 1: things I discovered while working on World War three, I'm
Speaker 1: you know, my I'm developing political philosophy. It keeps on developing.
Speaker 1: Doors always open to new perspectives on and new approaches
Speaker 1: to trying to talk about what's going on. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: think the punch in the face works. I think there's
Speaker 1: artists like Sueco and Seth Ta Backman who do a
Speaker 1: great job of straight up like here you go, this
Speaker 1: is a this is it, and you know there's there's
Speaker 1: not a laugh to be found. And I've experimented with
Speaker 1: that and that approach and and subtler ways to do it,
Speaker 1: and humor is fitting pretty neatly in my my ongoing
Speaker 1: general tone. What I found was when talking about politics,
Speaker 1: it's really easy to feel over over your head, overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: like where how am I allowed to talk about politics
Speaker 1: in general? And I just found the environmental subject matter
Speaker 1: is a unifying force for everybody. You don't have to
Speaker 1: talk about you know, an individual figure, you know, political figure,
Speaker 1: it's it doesn't have you know, the focus is a collective, existent,
Speaker 1: existential threat, and that you can talk about that in
Speaker 1: a way that that I found there was you know,
Speaker 1: there's a million ways to talk about it, but that
Speaker 1: struck me as a thing that kind of of it's
Speaker 1: less specific than talking about Reagan or Trump or George
Speaker 1: Bush or Obama or whoever it, and it's more urgent
Speaker 1: than all of the things that any of them talk
Speaker 1: about or maybe do, and that it touches all of
Speaker 1: us at it in a constant way, and that I
Speaker 1: can talk about it in a very personal way and
Speaker 1: not be you know, talking beyond my degree.
Speaker 3: Whish we work here illustrates news stories about environmental destruction
Speaker 3: in humorous and horrifying ways. What inspired this collection?
Speaker 1: I somehow got the email of the art director at
Speaker 1: Charlie Hebdo. Actually I got through Art Spiegelman. They were
Speaker 1: doing an issue on censorship, and Art reached out to
Speaker 1: me as somebody who knew sort of more broadly about
Speaker 1: people in illustration in different areas than he knew, and
Speaker 1: that Charlie Habdo had reach out to him say we
Speaker 1: want to do an article about artists in America being censored.
Speaker 1: So I wrote a piece about an experience I had
Speaker 1: with The New York Times. He wrote something, you know,
Speaker 1: different details. So I have this art director's email, and
Speaker 1: I sent a strip, a wordless strip, and said, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you take unsolicited. You know I'm soliciting,
Speaker 1: but I'm just sending you this one. See if you're
Speaker 1: interested in running it. And he wrote back and said,
Speaker 1: would you be interested in doing this every week for
Speaker 1: our environmental column? And apparently they checked in with Art
Speaker 1: and said you think this guy could pull it off?
Speaker 1: And he said yes, thankfully, Thank you, Art. And that
Speaker 1: was five years ago, and I've done it every week
Speaker 1: since then. So I have a rather large mountain of
Speaker 1: these environmental comics, and being that I don't speak French,
Speaker 1: it was ideal that it was wordless. Also, it is
Speaker 1: connected to a strip started in the New York Times
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three called Eye of the Beholder, and
Speaker 1: I started the strip there and it ran first comic
Speaker 1: to run in New York Times. I ran in a
Speaker 1: New York section called the City Section for six months
Speaker 1: before they came. Went woke up and said why were
Speaker 1: we running comics? And I loved the idea of the strip,
Speaker 1: which was a multipanel wordless morphing story like what I
Speaker 1: did with wish we Weren't here. And so those are
Speaker 1: the days of alternative papers where every town had an
Speaker 1: alternative paper. You may remember, the good old days of
Speaker 1: wherever you were, there would be the local free Village
Speaker 1: Voice was one of those papers. We had New York Press,
Speaker 1: I mean we had two papers for free and every
Speaker 1: town had one there was, and I was doing tons
Speaker 1: of illustration work for those those newspapers, you know Dallas,
Speaker 1: there was one in Dallas, all over the country, and
Speaker 1: that's how a lot of the political cartoonists were living,
Speaker 1: you know, making their living. Tom Tomorrow was doing that.
Speaker 1: Rubin Bowling Tom and dance doing comm the Dancing bug
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, the City by dirf All those
Speaker 1: were running in alternative papers. Originally that would have been
Speaker 1: you know, kind of launching that in many ways was
Speaker 1: Matt Greening with Life and Hell and Linda Berry and
Speaker 1: there's you know, there was an outlet for that. So
Speaker 1: I pitched it around this strip I was doing for
Speaker 1: The New York Times to these alternative papers, and I
Speaker 1: got about five or six papers, and I did it
Speaker 1: for them weekly for a decade, and so I had
Speaker 1: accumulated quite a few of those. Another French paper asked
Speaker 1: me to do a strip Liberacion. I did this wordless
Speaker 1: comment for them. So I was really pretty versed in
Speaker 1: in doing this kind of type of strip, and it
Speaker 1: just it's a it's an absolutely perfect fit, uh. And
Speaker 1: I so it's an opportunity for me to look at
Speaker 1: the I mean, the negative is that I have to
Speaker 1: look at the headlines all the time. I key on
Speaker 1: my news feed on environmental subjects is enormous, and so
Speaker 1: I'm hideously conscious of how much how close we are
Speaker 1: to a tipping point, but that we keep on being
Speaker 1: there and and somehow still you know, have our coffee
Speaker 1: in the morning and get on the subway. But I
Speaker 1: find it very It's a great opportunity for me to
Speaker 1: talk about these subjects and express them in which we
Speaker 1: weren't here. And also in the strip I do for
Speaker 1: Charlie Hebdo, there's a little news headline. I grab a
Speaker 1: news headline from the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post wherever,
Speaker 1: and it has a quick description so you know the
Speaker 1: context of the wordless four panel comic. And then I
Speaker 1: you know, constructed that in the book so that you
Speaker 1: can go to the websites and you know, you can
Speaker 1: look it up and go, oh okay, deeper dive. But
Speaker 1: my strip is an introduction to the subject.
Speaker 2: I guess as an artist it must be nice to
Speaker 2: have an endless supply of these stories, but as a
Speaker 2: human being it must be pretty depressing.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, everybody is always saying that about Trump
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, oh man, that must be great. As
Speaker 1: a political cartoonist. It's you know, it's material, but it's
Speaker 1: not the material I want. I'd be happy to, you know,
Speaker 1: draw trees and bunny rabbits if I could do that
Speaker 1: and not feel like I was missing critical urgent issues.
Speaker 1: You know, that's always that's an ongoing question. As an artist,
Speaker 1: I find myself perpetually looking into the abyss and saying,
Speaker 1: you know, like trying to figure out how much I
Speaker 1: should be doing looking at that and talking about it,
Speaker 1: and how much it's actually almost you know, for Trump,
Speaker 1: everything is thrown gasoline on a fire in a certain way.
Speaker 1: But then then there's the you have to talk about
Speaker 1: those things, so you know, you have to talk about
Speaker 1: McCarthy when there's McCarthyism, that these are it's important and
Speaker 1: and hopefully cast a light on it.
Speaker 2: You write that drawing existential threats and apocalyptic images to
Speaker 2: warn of impending dangers can feel like throwing a pebble
Speaker 2: in the ocean hoping to create a tsunami of change.
Speaker 2: Can your drawings have an impact well?
Speaker 1: As my friend Tom Tomorrow slash Dan Perkins said, well,
Speaker 1: it's more like, you know, a drip in a bucket,
Speaker 1: and you know you're filling up a bucket full of water,
Speaker 1: and Lord knows we need water to survive. So there's that,
Speaker 1: I think the connective tissue that happens when you do
Speaker 1: something like this that makes people feel like there's some
Speaker 1: solidarity that is you know in a march, the hilarious
Speaker 1: posters that you know that this is a glue that
Speaker 1: holds people together in a certain way. One of the
Speaker 1: things that you know, I've heard my whole life is
Speaker 1: is like, oh, you're preaching into theted And it's like,
Speaker 1: I did not come out, step out of the womb politicized.
Speaker 1: I had no idea about anything. And it's been a
Speaker 1: slow developing story. And that what I developed my political
Speaker 1: perspective on was the other things I saw that had
Speaker 1: political perspective, the Thomas Nasts and the Robert Crumb's and
Speaker 1: the all the artists that we're talking about what was
Speaker 1: going on. So that I don't feel like I'm preaching
Speaker 1: the converted. I feel like I'm well, first of all,
Speaker 1: I do it. I mean it's I'm happy to make
Speaker 1: a living at it, of course, but I do it
Speaker 1: because I feel compelled. But I do feel you know,
Speaker 1: when I see something that speaks to me like that,
Speaker 1: and that's in music, in all art forms, it means
Speaker 1: a great deal. It's a I mean, I feel in
Speaker 1: some ways it's helped me survive. It's it's it's a
Speaker 1: life raft, you know. I mean, how many songs have
Speaker 1: you listened to that you just feel heartened and you
Speaker 1: know they make you want to get up in the morning.
Speaker 1: And that's that's one of the roles that art can play.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's you know, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there's not a degree of frustration. And doing World
Speaker 1: War Three illustrated for forty seven years and talking about
Speaker 1: some in some ways. You know, we're talking about Iran
Speaker 1: in the first issue and here we are. It's it's
Speaker 1: frustrating to not feel like those things have you know
Speaker 1: that that the art has magically made them go away.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, if you look at the history
Speaker 1: of movements, they're a struggle. I mean, Jules Feiffer said,
Speaker 1: the thing about the you know, the the endless struggle
Speaker 1: is it's endless. It's like you know, you're you're the
Speaker 1: fight is going to be. It's not a simple you're
Speaker 1: in the march and you feel better and you go home.
Speaker 1: It's you're in a march, and then you're in another march,
Speaker 1: and then you're writing, and then you're et cetera, and
Speaker 1: and that's it's going to require of that. And you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like I've had a very e in terms
Speaker 1: of being able to bitch about what's going on and
Speaker 1: still have make a living and you know have essentially
Speaker 1: you know, food on the table, and that's you know,
Speaker 1: incredible fortune. But it's it is. You know, around the
Speaker 1: world people are experiencing the very horror show that I'm
Speaker 1: saying I hope doesn't happen. It's happened. It's happening. It's
Speaker 1: been happening, and you know, so my sense of like God,
Speaker 1: we have to fight to make sure this doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're in Gaza, you're not thinking about
Speaker 1: whether it might happen.
Speaker 3: You teach cartooning at Harvard. What are some of the
Speaker 3: dues and dunts you tell your students.
Speaker 1: I talk about failure in the first class, because it's like,
Speaker 1: what makes it possible to survive as an artist is
Speaker 1: very important to fail and get up the next day
Speaker 1: and then believe that you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: do it again. And that I just say, the fact
Speaker 1: that anybody that you see that's successful has like you know,
Speaker 1: in cartooning, it's like three graphic novels that nobody bought,
Speaker 1: or you know, mountains of cartoons. I mean, I submit
Speaker 1: cartoons to the New Yorker all the time. They get
Speaker 1: it between one thousand and fifteen hundred cartoons a week,
Speaker 1: and they pick thirteen. So failure is sort of like
Speaker 1: on your shoulder constantly. And if you can't dust yourself
Speaker 1: off and get up and then do that again, then
Speaker 1: you're not going to be able to pull it off.
Speaker 1: And you have to have a fairly strong ego. That way,
Speaker 1: a delusion be delusional. I mean I think that many
Speaker 1: of us are delusional. Or you just really feel shitty
Speaker 1: all the time, and you do it anyway because it's
Speaker 1: the only thing that makes you feel like it's you know,
Speaker 1: I have many great motivating factors for me. One of
Speaker 1: the big motivators since I was eight and saw the
Speaker 1: movie fail Safe about how the United States accidentally bombs
Speaker 1: Russia into a void World War three. We allow them
Speaker 1: to bomb one city, which happens to be New York City,
Speaker 1: where I want to move, and that sent to chill
Speaker 1: up my spine age eight. But it later came in
Speaker 1: handy because I always was feeling like I was running
Speaker 1: against the clock to get my book published before they
Speaker 1: drop the bomb, say, or you know, like got to
Speaker 1: do this cartoon, got to make love before they drop
Speaker 1: the bomb. Always very positive push there. It's like and
Speaker 1: it's still true. It still could happen at any moment,
Speaker 1: and so you might as well, you know, like if
Speaker 1: you go Buddhist and think about the moment and just
Speaker 1: be very I try to take as much joy as
Speaker 1: you can from every second that you're you know, blood
Speaker 1: is closer through your veins and you're not in pain,
Speaker 1: and even if you are in you know, have a toothache.
Speaker 1: But so I promote that that fact, and it's really
Speaker 1: easy to tell people that, you know, there's everybody has
Speaker 1: a story. I mean, if you if you dream, if
Speaker 1: you go to sleep at night and you have a dream,
Speaker 1: you've already got got a pretty interesting story that can
Speaker 1: involve flying or all sorts of things that are great
Speaker 1: source material. And everybody's lives are full of stories to
Speaker 1: draw upon. So that's just you know, tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1: In a fifteen week or seven week course. I teach
Speaker 1: during the summers now and then if I teach go
Speaker 1: up to Boston from you know commute, which I do periodically,
Speaker 1: then it's the fifteen week course. But I really I
Speaker 1: started teaching at School of Visual Arts in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: I was, you know, not too far out of school
Speaker 1: myself and learning how to teach. And one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I did it was because comics are so complex,
Speaker 1: there's so many moving parts, and there's so many things
Speaker 1: you have to remember to do a good comic that
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about it again and again and
Speaker 1: again so that I would remind myself of what to do.
Speaker 1: And I also jokingly said to students, you know, like I,
Speaker 1: I'm teaching so that you'll remember me, and when you
Speaker 1: go out into the world and get a job, you'll
Speaker 1: hire me. And that actually worked many many times. That
Speaker 1: was I was kind of joking when I said it,
Speaker 1: but it worked like a charm.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks so much, Peter for joining us.
Speaker 1: Happy to be here, thanks for giving me the opportunity.
Speaker 2: And to our audience. Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
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