• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 12, 2024

Stan Mack has been chronicling real people and their real voices in the New York streets and the offices of media for decades. A veteran cartoonist of both AdWeek and our own MediaPost, Stan is best known for his pioneering project in observational cartooning  – “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies”. But in interviewing Stan for my own site, we covered so much history about the New York Times, New York Magazine and the Village Voice I thought our conversation would be a great Summer respite for Brand Insider listeners.

Running from 1974 to 1995 in The Village Voice, Real Life Funnies depicted genuine conversations that Stan encountered in everyday city life as well as on assignment at major events. A new massive Fantagraphics collection of his best work describes this act of illustrated journalism and history as “The Collected Conceits, Delusions and Hijinks of New Yorkers”. 

But Real Life Funnies is one piece of an artistic life that developed towards that great work and reverberated long after in his later work. I interviewed Stan principally for my comic strip history site PanelsandProse.com. But Stan’s career also bore witness to an important moment in American media and marketing – when both fields mattered in ways they simply don’t anymore. His memories of the design turns at The New York Times, New York Magazine and the innovations of the Village Voice are unique. This was a time when reimagining illustration and graphic narrative carried real cultural weight.

Real Life Funnies drew on a long history of illustrated journalism that goes back to the 19th century. And Real Life helped open the doors for much more realistic uses of comic strip forms to engage in autobiography and history. Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home all follow in a path Stan redrew for us. You can listen to the entire podcast at this link.