Th’ New Yorker!
June 3rd, 2014 | Uncategorized
I have a cartoon in the latest issue of The New Yorker. I happen to actually be in New York, for the Lambda Literary Awards last night, where I got to give Nicole Georges the first graphic novel prize, and an event with Alysia Abbott tonight to talk about her book Fairyland. So this afternoon I bought the magazine hot off the press at a newsstand in Columbus Circle. I’ve been reading the cartoons in The New Yorker since before I could read. So it’s very strange and wonderful to have my own work in there.
38 Responses to “Th’ New Yorker!”
But you’ve been there before. — Congratulations!
Holy Yowzer Jeepers!! So happy for you. Now I gotta go read it.
Nice one.
Last summer was spent helping a friend clear her parents’ house. Too much had to get thrown away, but I had to rescue the 500+ copies of New Yorker, dating back to WW2. So now they are piled up in my hallway, awaiting attention. Probably to make serious money off them I should tear out the cartoons and covers and mount them and do one of those stalls on the South Bank, but that is just too sacriligious. Still thinking about what to do next, and happily browsing meanwhile.
So, missy, I read your news, looked at the picture of you reading the very issue, looked at your face, and had this thought, I swear to god: “She has GOT to up her meds.”
Is this not FABULOUS news? FUN news? FUCKING EXCITING NEWS? But, sigh and alas, our heroine is not impressed with herself.
Well, the rest of us are! Yea, Alison. The New Yorker. Damn.
OMG and to think I tossed it aside the way I usually do when I bring in the mail! I’m running off to rescue it and take a look. CONGRATULATIONS! {And do you know the work of my wonderful friend Mimi Pond, who wrote the graphic memoir Over Easy?}
Oh, to have run into you on that subway platform!
That is so lovely, Alison. The cartoon — with that great, ambivalent ache to it — and, whoa, to have it in The New Yorker. Yay!!!
Really good to get a glimpse of you and H. at the ceremony the other night, too. I’ve been thinking about what you said — in some ways, it was a kind of a template for my own evening, or, anyway I was in conversation with it, for sure.
PS To be clear — I’ve been thinking what you said in that funny, vulnerable, lovely speech you gave.
Such a wonderful strip, and such a wonderful (and fitting!) venue. Congratulations, Alison.
That was so lovely and so bittersweet.
Such a happy story, that The New Yorker published one of your strips, and such a sad story, in that strip. Anyway, I also love My Dinner With Andre. Perhaps there should be something called the Wallace Shawn Test, in which we look for movies that have at most two men in them, who talk to each other, about everything except a (living) woman.
Acilius #11: I think you may be on to something:
The Wilson Test: A movie in which a man and a volleyball don’t mention women at all.
I read it and loved it. Congratulations, Alison! Truly a venue worthy of your genius.
In unrelated news, have you seen this?
http://io9.com/why-the-bechdel-test-is-more-important-than-you-realize-1586135613/all
A lot of the commenters seem to have missed the point.
Congratulations! Heading to the closest newstand right now.
Do you have any signing scheduled while you’re in New York? I’m one of your French readers, and I’m currently working near NY for the summer. I missed your Angoulême presentation, and would very much like to make up for that.
Alison, it’s so nice to see you publish new work. It feels like it’s been a long time. “… Cultivated an unadorned, utilitarian look” is a great expression. The harder we try to be authentic, the more we’re performing.
Cybercita, your friend’s name rang a faint bell. Sure enough:
https://twitter.com/AlisonBechdel/status/456468456653602816
I haven’t seen the book, but she sure has impressive blurbs.
What they all said (above praise). 🙂 Also, I can’t help but notice A.B.’s red boot shoelaces. I wore red shoelaces in my boots during a research cruise I took with Scripps when I was a Navy postdoc. My boots kept getting strange looks from the others on the good ship New Horizons as we sailed along most of the California coast. I’m not sure why. Hadn’t they seen a pair of Doc Martins before???
Congratulations Alison! Yes, it must be a bit surreal to see your work in a longtime favorite classic magazine.
In other news, season 2 of OITNB is up, finally! Or at least some eps.
5 minutes into Ep 1, S 2 and I’m crying already-and Kate the Great hasn’t even shown up yet.
Glad NZ trip went well – hope Dr. W is well too.
I stumbled upon the AB cartoon earlier this week while magazine-surfing at Bunns and Noodle. Of course, I was far afield from home, B&N having abandoned Midtown altogether when the main store on 18th St. closed earlier this year.
I recall a time when an evening spent cruising the magazine racks was equal parts people and magazine cruising. Now my magazine purchases are like the one in AB’s photo; a quickie at a sidewalk or subway newsstand, perfectly functional, but devoid of charm, adventure, or the possibility of of romance.
In studying AB’s photo, it seems so reflexively New York; AB dressed in the all-black NY quasi-uniform, reading The New Yorker at a newsstand on a subway platform. Beautiful shot.
(… goes back to thinking about the nerve AB hit with the cartoon …)
Difference #143 between AB and myself:
Had it been me in the situation above, I would be shown holding my photo ID in one hand while stopping passers-by to point out the byline for the cartoon (and this, only after the owner of the kiosk had kicked me out and told me to stop pestering him)
Truly a lovely piece. Thank you.
Speaking of Wallace Shawn, the Wall Street Journal has an interview with him in this weekend’s edition:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/wallace-shawn-wrestling-with-success-1402091746?mod=Life_and_Culture_newsreel_3
A bunch of years ago, a friend and I were seated next to Shawn in a restaurant. He was dining with a woman whom I did not recognize, and I eagerly awaited my own personal “Dinner with Andre” experience. Alas, we barely heard any of the mundane conversation. After the waitress handed them the check, she started talking to the woman, whom she recognized as a well-known theatre personage (the waitress was also a thespian). She ignored Shawn, who seemed bemused by the exchange.
That’s the fun of living in this tough, overpriced city – the chance run-ins with notables in ordinary places, like perhaps stumbling into AB on a subway platform, nose buried in a magazine once edited by Wallace Shawn’s dad, scrutinizing her artwork as the world hurries by.
(… goes back to “Brunch with Hairball” …)
This is a somewhat radical blog-jack but:
I assume there are many folks here who are fans of Bill Watterson, the cartoonist behind the long lamented “Calvin and Hobbes”.
It turns out the Watterson recently resurfaced briefly in the comics pages in the strip “Pearls Before Swine” (Story [HERE]).
(And while I am very much not a fan of “Pearls”, I would add that 1] it’s nice to hear from Watterson –however briefly– and 2] all proceeds from the collaboration will go to fight Parkinson’s, in honor of the cartoonist Richard Thompson. A wonderful gesture by all involved.)
NLC (#22) Thanks for the post, but taking over a DTWOF blog is just wrong (wink wink). 🙂
The good news from out here is that the white supremacists who lived next door for the past year and made my life hell with their activities and their yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag are gone! But, not before I found out someone in the neighborhood convinced them that I was a combat veteran. I actually think that they were afraid of me. Anyway, what I wouldn’t give for a nice gay couple to move in next door. So, if any of the DTWOF blog folk are thinking of summering in Smallville-on-the-High Plains, just let me know!
@NLC (#22)
Great link. Watterson’s surreal landscapes make me giggle. I was expecting Spaceman Spiff to emerge amidst the Martian robot attack scene. I also see the lineage from MAD Magazine’s Al Jaffe, who created (creates?) the fantastic fold-in back cover.
(… goes back to her own “usual gang of idiots,” sans anthropomorphic teddy bear …)
Checking in after a long while away, and what do I find? New Work from Alison! And in such a prestigious venue! Congratulations!
I’ve had the “She’s Perfect, why am I not in love with her?” experience myself, and this strip captures the bizarre mix of feelings.
Strangely enough, an on-topic message:
FYI: If you happened to have bought the CD of the FH soundtrack from Amazon, I see that they have now enabled the “AutoRip” feature for the CD.
(For those who are unfamiliar with this feature, for many of the CDs which Amazon sells they have a feature called “AutoRip” by which, if you buy the CD, you get the digital download of the CD for free. [Curiously enough, for some CDs it’s actually cheaper to buy the CD and get the digital-download for free than it is to buy the digital-download independently.])
Also, note that AutoRip is “retroactive”; that is, if you’ve previously bought the FH CD (or any other AutoRip-ed CD) you should now be able to retrieve the digital-download (should you so desire).
There is an old Arab expression to the effect that not to love someone’s flaws is not to love someone at all.
“This thing about you that you think is your flaw – it’s the reason I’m falling in love with you.”
– Colleen Hoover (Slammed
… although, Tamar seems to have been perfect in every way. Can perfection be considered a flaw?
Off-topic (so what else is new?)…
Perusing the schedule for the Chelsea Music Festival, I was unsure if the flyer was a spoof. The events had titles that sounded as if they had been ripped right out of the panels of DTWOF, for example “Bach and Potatoes – Exploring the Creative Process, Product and Produce of an Artist.”
http://www.chelseamusicfestival.org/Festival-Schedule
Of course, this year’s festival theme also seems a bit DTWOF-ish, pairing German and Brazilian music, food, and art. Not exactly two cultures I would have contemplated in the same brainwave.
(… goes back to cursing the auto correct feature on this Android tablet that does not allow entry of the common two-letter abbreviation for Latin exempla gratis …)
Ha, ha, Alison. Did you notice in the photo that you’re being cruised by the woman standing under the subway sign?
Say, did anybody see that Game O’ Thrones finale?
No, Kate, but I did see the entire season 2 of OITNB, and the last ep was amazing.
Red’s gonna rise up again, I can feel it!
[re: Kate L, Calico: More fans, further afield…
OK, so there was a pingback to the blog. Sometimes, just to be safe, before marking them “approved” I dig into them a little to make sure they’re legit; especially if they look at all suspicious (or, as in this case, my Polish reading skills aren’t all I might hope they would be.)
In most cases (like this one, but, alas not all) things were fine. But while probing around on the site I found the following which I thought I would pass this along. (It’s always interesting how much survives translation…)
D?ugi weekend, ogl?dam na zmian? Orange is the New Black i Nurse Jackie, przeplatane Criminal Minds (Zabójcze umys?y […]) – o character arc, czyli ?uku bohatera.
Nie przez przypadek przypomnia? mi si? w?a?nie przy OITNB i Nurse Jackie – to seriale z bardzo wyra?nie zarysowanym ?ukiem postaci.
Ten tajemniczy character arc to nic innego jak metamorfoza, któr? the protagonist, […] Siostra Jackie z pierwszego […] ?e ju? nie wspomn? o Game of Thrones […]
–Mentor]
Off-topic, but at least with a hook to the OP… Something I’ve been wondering for a while.
There’s a micro-genre of memoirs by daughters of gay men: FH, Fairyland, The Bishop’s Daughter — I can’t remember the title, but there was one by a British woman whose father was also deeply involved in decorating the family’s large house, which was a hell of a coincidence if it was a coincidence. (“Coincidence” — I’m thinking of gay men and interior design, not plagiarism.) There’s a short, very bitter piece from around 1986 that was in one of the Pushcart Prize collections.
I can’t think of a single similar memoir by a child of a lesbian. Does anybody else know of one? I mean one that concerns itself with what it was like to be the child of a lesbian (at least initially closeted), not just a memoir by someone whose mother happens to have been a lesbian. There certainly were plenty of women who came out of the closet late after having had children. It would be nice to think there haven’t been any memoirs because their kids never had to struggle with it, but we know that’s not true.
Does anybody know of such a book? Any other comments?
The book I’m going to preorder the moment I find out about it, if it ever gets written, is a memoir by one of Adrienne Rich’s sons. But I have no reason at all to suppose any of them is even thinking about writing such a book.
Andrew B (#34)… Hmmm. Children of lesbian couples have been shown to be more well-adjusted than the average. Perhaps their memoirs wouldn’t be the best sellers? Mentor (#33) It’s times like these that I wish my mother had taught me Czech, like my immigrant grandmother had asked her to do. When I asked Mon why she hadn’t, she said “Why would I speak Czech to you? You wouldn’t understand a word that I said!” Btw, I had my very first plate of bangers n’ mash at the local British restaurant in Smallville. Gravy on sausages! Brilliant! 🙂
@Kate L: I’ve heard Eastern Europeans say that Czech is so hard that the Czechs don’t even understand each other. Perhaps your mother was revealing to you the literal truth of that saying!
[As side-note here: A Czech friend once sent me the following example of a valid vowel-less sentence in Czech:
– “Strc prst skrz krk”
(which Google-translate renders as “Poke your finger through the neck”). –Mentor]
Calico (#32). I had never seen an episode of Orange is the New Black, so I went to UTUBE land and found a series of clips of the characters. I was watching quietly when suddenly RED appeared on the screen! OMG! 🙂
Orange is not the new black. Red is the new black!!!
the lesbian community has loved and appreciated you for years.. Congrats.