Class Photo

Robert Triptow stumbled across a real-life class photo of an anonymous 1937 public school under a pile of garbage and his imagination took off. Several years later, the result is the utterly charming, completely original graphic novella Class Photo. Using the photo as a springboard, each student’s fictionalized life is depicted in one-page installments. Triptow weaves these imagined lives in and out like so many dedications in a yearbook, mixing in social satire, elegant cartooning, occasionally disgusting hilarity, and plenty of good, clean fun. What began as a self-motivating formal exercise has yielded one of the more whimsically engaging, original, and entertaining graphic books in recent memory.

Robert Triptow is from Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the recipient of the first Lambda Literary Award for Humor, and one of the earliest contributors to Howard Cruse's historic Gay Comics anthology; he succeeded Cruse as editor. Triptow's comics also appeared in such seminal '90s indie comics like Young Lust and Naughty Bits. Most recently, Triptow's work was included in the Eisner nominated anthology No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics. As a journalist, he has written for various publications such as The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter, Frontiers, and the Sentinel, among other West Coast LGBTQ publications. He lives in San Francisco.