Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995

A gigantic collection of Stan Mack’s seminal comic strip that ran in the Village Voice from 1974 to 1995.

WINNER 2024-2025 New York City Book Awards, New York Society Library

Sketchbook in hand, Stan Mack haunted the New York City environs, watching, listening, overhearing, and interviewing its inhabitants. He drew a comic strip every week based on what he saw and heard, famously using verbatim dialogue for his graphic dramatizations. A mixture of humor, spontaneity, serendipity, and weirdness, Mack’s comic strip snapshots caught New Yorkers ― whether it is an extortionist calligrapher, a baby evading arrest at her first protest, a stroll up Broadway with a ferret, an evening with a male liberationist, or an unlucky-in-love dolphin trainer ― being who they are in all their unguarded and uninhibited glory. This collection includes a foreword by CNN journalist Jake Tapper (The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor) and an afterword by Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle).

Black-and-white illustrations throughout

Stan Mack pioneered a documentary style of cartooning with his notorious New York comic strip Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies,which ran in The Village Voice. His Stan Mack’s Out-takes for Adweek magazine and Stan Mack’s RealMAD for the online publication Mediapost covered the world of media. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, was a graphics specialist in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and is a former art director of the New York Herald Tribune’s Book Week, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

Jake Tapper is an anchor and correspondent for CNN. He's contributed to Emmy-Award winning journalism and is also a New York Times bestselling author.

Jeannette Walls is an American author and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of the New York Times bestseller The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood.