The Realist Cartoons - Hardcover

Crumb, Robert; Spiegelman, Art; Wilson, S. Clay; Lynch, Jay; Robbins, Trina; Gerberg, Mort; Williamson, Skip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606998943 ISBN 13: 9781606998946

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2016

Synopsis

The Realist was a legendary satirical periodical that ran from 1958 to 2001 and published some of the most incendiary cartoons that ever appeared in an American magazine. The Realist Cartoons collects, for the first time, the best, the wittiest, and the most provocative drawings that appeared in its pages, including work by R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, S. Clay Wilson, Jay Lynch, Trina Robbins, Mort Gerberg, Jay Kinney, Richard Guindon, Nicole Hollander, Skip Williamson, and many others.

About this title

About the Authors

Paul Krassner, born 1932, is an American author, journalist, comedian, editor, and a founding member of the Yippies. Krassner was a contributor to early issues of Mad magazine, and is the only person to win awards for both Playboy and the Feminist Party Media Workshop.

Ethan Persoff is an archivist, cartoonist, and sound artist. His website Comics with Problems has brought historically significant comics to 21st century audiences and has been featured on multiple segments of The Rachel Maddow Show, as well as on CSPAN and Air America. It won a SXSW award in 2002. Fantagraphics has published his original comics work.

Art Spiegelman is one of the world’s most admired and beloved comic artists, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, Maus. Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman studied art and philosophy at Harpur College before joining the underground comics movement in the 1960s. Spiegelman taught history and the aesthetics of comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1979 to 1986, and in 1980 he founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. Honors Spiegelman has received include induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame and the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. In 2005, he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007, and in 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2015, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2018 he became the first comic artist to receive the Edward MacDowell Medal.

Born in Philadelphia, Robert Crumb is one of America’s most celebrated artists. Thrust reluctantly into fame as a defining voice of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture with comic strips like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep on Truckin’, then again in the 1990s with the acclaimed documentary Crumb and more recently the 2025 biography Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, he continues to push himself and his chosen medium from his home in the south of France.

Comics herstorian Trina Robbins (1939-2024) was an American cartoonist. She was an early participant and one of the first women in the underground comix movement. She co-produced the 1970 underground comic It Ain't Me, Babe, which was the first comic book entirely created by women. She co-founded the Wimmen's Comix collective, wrote for Wonder Woman, and produced adaptations of Dope and The Silver Metal Lover. She was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and received Eisner Awards in 2017 and 2021. As a scholar and historian, Robbins researched the history of women in cartooning. She wrote several nonfiction books including Pretty In Ink (2013), and Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (2020).

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606998943
• ISBN 13: 9781606998946
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Krassner Paul, Groth Gary, Persoff Ethan