Stan Mack—wotta guy!
Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies. The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995. Foreword by Jake Tapper. Afterword by Jeannette Walls. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 330pp, $50. (On sale date: June 11, 2024).
Guest review by Paul Buhle
Sometime in the last decades of the late nineteenth century, urban journalists sitting or strolling among the middle class masses coined the term “flaneur.” The relaxed, curious style of looking, almost randomly, at such things as which department store windows would be designed in ever more intense sales efforts or which open-air cafes flourished, would be taken up by American writers, painters and even monument-makers, by the 1910s.
Lots of interesting art epitomized by Ashcan styles (but not exhausted by them) found its origins here. Perhaps because the art schools began to flourish and young radicals (in every sense) began to see a life for themselves within the emerging culture.
How this art became more public than museums or art shows poses difficult and interesting questions. The illustrated Left-leaning or outright left-wing magazine or newspaper had appeared, a genre originally carrying only cartoons but gradually enabled by changing technology to offer decent half-toned prints. The Masses magazine (1911-17) hugely popularized the work of the Ashcan artists and of cartoonists as well—until it was suppressed for opposing US entry into the First World War. The Liberator and New Masses carried on with interesting art, intermittently, as did Der Hommer, in Yiddish, into the 1930s. Even when the art quality of the Left papers trailed off due to limited page space and to a vernacular Socialist Realism strangely similar to WPA post office fare, much of value remained.
Stan Mack. “Call it human ashcan art.”
The return of the sketch, an art form inherently given to popular use, offered artists yet another and very popular mode. Not that sketches in magazines had ever vanished, but they seemed to grow closer to life in the better and more interesting publications, including those leaning toward left-wing causes.
Jules Feiffer, drawing for the Village Voice starting in the middle 1950s, offered something as new as the Voice itself, at once bohemian, literate and truly popular. Feiffer looked at New Yorkers, especially but not only self-styled bohemians, with a jaundiced eye. He saw through their pretenses. But not without fondness. They were, in a sense, the Voice itself, the idealized reader. They wanted to live in a different way if not in a different society (it was as easy then as now to give up on reform causes). And they were silly.
Panel excerpt.
Stan Mack might object to being described as a successor to Feiffer, but a family resemblance cannot quite be missed. Mack took on the task of cinema verite plus more than a little sly humor, within the Voice of the middle 1970s and continued until the editor dropped the strip in 1995. It happens that this reviewer appeared in the same pages, or rather my book reviews did, during the 1980s mostly, and this personal detail kept me looking with special, probably egotisical, interest at the paper and at Mack’s entertaining strips. Like many future readers of this book, I have unknowingly kept memories of particular strips in my head. I liked them a lot.
Real Life Funnies deserves a full biographical essay and I wish I had written it (but the artist might possibly object). Here is a shorter version, which is not easy. Raised in Providence, RI, son of shoe store owners whose nearby Jewish relatives included a bookie or two, Stan attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He spent time in the Army, was mustered out, and became an art director at the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s. When the paper closed, he moved over to the New York Times. Perhaps most notably, at least for him, the task was to discover illustrators for the “new journalism” of the 1960s. Here may well have been born the kernel of an idea.
He knew that he wanted to do something different. He went to well known designer/illustrator/editor Milton Glaser, then working for the Voice, and pitched an idea based on his newspaper background. Glaser liked that, and encouraged him. Here Mack found his voice, so to speak. He became an oral historian without degree or evident training. He roamed the city, listening to New Yorkers, adventuring to places outside his comfort zone. He would take notes, go back to his studio, and draw furiously, seeking to capture their sensibility.
Panel excerpt.
The result is like nothing else in popular or for that matter, scholarly (as in oral history-scholarly) literature. It is miles away from what Feiffer had done, although old-time Voice readers will surely see a kind of relation. Mack is more than adequate as an artist, but he does not rely upon the motions of the protagonists to tell the story. Far from it. This is, properly understood, illustrated oral history.
What he has in mind (this reviewer admits to having been a much-traveled oral history fieldworker, archivist and prof-coach) is the intimacy of the personal revelation. Not the kind of revelation that could be considered scandalous (these happen, if rarely) but the more-or-less unconscious bursting out of personality.
That is, the inescapably unique personalities, however anonymous, of New Yorkers during the 1970s-1980s and early 1990s. He offers them up for the reader, showing himself to be variously ironic, open-minded, detached and empathetic or perhaps not so empathetic.The psychic crises of the materially comfortable middle classes wishing for more satisfying or less stressful experiences prompt mostly now-forgotten cures, like “Rolfing,” or some sexual version of psychic restoration. By the 1980s, as the gaps between social classes grew wider, the squatters are more often seen more in evidence along with druggies, new immigrants, nonwhites and….yuppies.
Many of Mack’s subjects happen to think of themselves somehow as artists, would-be movie makers with hand-held camera, seeking street personalities or a convenient woodsy park where a porn scene can be managed. This is not unnatural: New York is a creative center in every sense, with more successful (and mostly unsuccessful) artists, actors, directors and every other category imaginable, per square mile, than anywhere else including Los Angeles. For a lot of these working people, at any level of fame, obscurity, high life or low life, “entertainment” is a job. Mack offers us more varied glimpses than any novelist has provided. Call it human ashcan art.
I am inordinately fond of seeing the craven businessmen, who Mack delightfully skewers for their arrogance and blatant criminality. But equally hard to miss are the try-anything avante-gardists, the fashion-craving and silly-looking people of every variety, the sex workers, the gender-benders and the simply confused.
The variety is so great in these pages that further description fails. Sometimes, Stan, who drew himself as diminutive and with a brush-like mustache (most readers thought he actually looked like that), makes an appearance. His chapter introductions provide some overviews of how things change and yet remain remarkably almost the same, with all the passage of decades and fashions.
Panel excerpt.
It is definitely not a love letter to New York. And yet, somehow, it is. Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies calls to memory those 1920s-40s hits, from Broadway or not, that made Manhattan a unique place, a centralizing place for shared experiences. A thousand films and some memorable television dramas of the 1950s, before TV moved to Los Angeles, carried the same sense.
No, no, I am making things sound “nice,” when Stan Mack does not mean that at all. There’s so much human potential on hand, but people who should know better go around ruining it with their insecurities, their egos and their cravings.
And I realize that I want to say something more about Stan’s art work. It pushes out of the page toward the reader. His characters are in the reader’s collective face, and the reader has chosen Stan’s strip by choice. Accept it! His friend Harvey Kurtzman, founder of Mad, described himself not as a humorist but a truth-teller. That’s Stan, too.
Paul Buhle
