Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Arlington-born Sharon Rudahl on A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson

Sharon Rudahl on Ballad of an American – A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson

291; Dec 16, 2020
 
The 291st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020 at 7pm ET. Intro: Ben Katchor

Veteran graphic storyteller Sharon Rudahl discusses her checkered career, her hot-off-the-press graphic biography of black athlete performer and activist Paul Robeson, and political action in time of plague. Sharon Rudahl was born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1947. As a teenager, she marched with Martin Luther King. She studied art at the Cooper Union in New York City, living in the East Village in its heyday. Proceeds from her feminist erotic novel Acid Temple Ball paid for her art supplies and rent. After college, she helped start the anti-Vietnam War underground newspaper Take Over. She worked on underground newspapers in San Francisco in the early 1970s and began drawing comics in the first Wimmen's Comix. Her major works include A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, The Adventures of Crystal Night – reprinted in Abrams' Art in Time, Lincoln For Beginners, and large portions of the graphic version of Studs Terkel's Working, Harvey Pekar's Yiddishkeit, and Bohemians with Paul Buhle. She is married to a professional chessplayer and has two adult sons and two lynx point cats. They live in a 110-year old Hollywood bungalow so overgrown by foliage it cannot be seen on Google Earth, threatened on all sides by developers.

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