Michael Maslin posted this on his Inkspill blog. It's an advertisement for "The New Yorker Cartoonists": A Traveling Exhibition Organized by the Foundry Gallery. The Foundry is listed at 641 Indiana Ave, NW and the exhibit started there from Dec 6, 1983-Jan 5, 1984
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Just another quick mention of the kickstarter for my documentary, WOMEN LAUGHING, all about New Yorker women cartoonists. We need your help, our goal is still seemingly so far away. Thanks to a great many of you who have pitched in! Here is the link. We have fun rewards for donations, like digital drawings, paper drawings of you and a loved one, and tomorrow a fun new reward drops.
It's a good time to be a comics fan in the area. Well, most places actually.
None of these have been edited yet.
Roz Chast at Politics and Prose
Uru-Chan book signing
Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars book talk
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
John Gallagher and Gale Galligan at Scrawl Books
Emily Bowen Cohen at Arlington Library
DC Zinefest at MLK Library.
Joke in a Box: A Book Talk with Cartoonist Emily Flake
by Mike Rhode
Since I first saw his cartoons about books and reading on the next-to-last page of the New York Times Book Review, Grant Snider has been one of my favorite cartoonists. His new book, The Art of Living: Reflections onMindfulness and the Overexamined Life (Abrams Comic Arts, $19) is full of his delightful single-page multi-panel cartoons that can make a reader pay attention and wonder about their lives and goals. I was very pleased to be offered the opportunity to talk with Dr. Snider (for he’s an orthodontist by trade, and a cartoonist by avocation.) Before getting into the interview, his new book is described by his publisher as follows:
Mike Rhode: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?
Grant Snider: I do primarily web comics that get collected in books, like The Art of Living, which is coming out soon. Basically, I draw a weekly comic strip, find broader themes in those, and gather them together in book form.
Mike Rhode: Why did you decide to start a web comic?
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Mike Rhode: How do you actually do your cartoons? Is it traditional pen and ink or a computer-aided combination? Some of your work definitely looks like collage work to me.
Grant Snider: Yeah, it's a hybrid. All of the lines are hand drawn and occasionally I'll use cut-up paper, or watercolor, or some other medium, to give it a different personality or feel, but typically it's drawn in ink and marker on tracing paper, which I'll then scan into Photoshop. Then I use Photoshop to edit and compile and add digital color in most cases. But I really like the traditional way of working. I'm a little bit too uptight to make my finished pieces an amazing piece of gallery work that I could put up on a wall. So it ends up in all these little scraps that then get thrown into the digital world and compounded into the finished composition.
Mike Rhode: You are not alone in doing it that way. With the lettering, do you do that by hand or is that on the computer?
Grant Snider: Yep. It's all hand lettering.
Mike Rhode: To go into a little bit of your background, I'm wondering when and where you were born?
Grant Snider: 1985 in San Diego, California, but I moved to Kansas when I was two and I grew up in the Wichita, Kansas area. And I've basically been in here my whole life, except for a foray into Kansas City and Denver as a young adult.
Grant Snider: Studying lots and lots of other cartoonist work and trying to do my best to imitate it. I don't have any formal art training, but I think like most people, you kind of learn by doing. Seeing an amazing comic strip, like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, wondering how the creator made it, and then doing my own version of it, was probably how I got started. And then eventually gathering enough influences together, I think I developed a bit of my own style, which is hopefully still developing. It's all been learning by publishing and by trying to make something new each week.
Mike Rhode: Who are your other influences? Is Mutts an influence on you? Reflecting the subject of your current book, The Art of Living, the inspirational thoughtfulness is something that Patrick McDonnell is known for.
Grant Snider: It wasn't in my local newspaper growing up, but I do remember seeing it when I'd go to the Denver area to visit family. But later on I found a Mutts collection of maybe a decade's worth of strips or more, and I just absolutely loved it. I don't know if it was as much of an overt influence, because I think what I was doing was fairly developed by the time I discovered it and really dove into it. But I really see it as like a companion strip. Patrick McDonnell's work, I feel, is of a similar mindset with a kind of warm feeling, and obviously he has a hugely high level of technical quality that I hope to get close to.
Mike Rhode: He's considerably older than you, so you have plenty of time. Is there anybody else you want to list as influences besides Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts?
Mike Rhode: Gauld still does those. I was going ask about Tom Gauld somewhere in this interview. That is an interesting group of influences. I don't know that I would've picked up on any of them but Gauld for you. Are you old enough to actually have seen Groening’s Life in Hell in newspapers?
Grant Snider: No. At least I never have seen it actually in newsprint form. Like any good kid, I was looking at my parents' bookshelves and I saw my dad had this comic book. I think it was The Big Book of Hell and I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” I read him, but I don't think I understood most of the jokes as a teen, or pre-teen, when I got ahold of it. But I did see kind of what he was doing, where he was going with things, and stole the book from my dad, and over the years, I kind of studied it. I really took a lot of the humor and his visual style and visual voice. I don't think you can see a ton of it in my work right now, but for my early comics, I was trying to be as witty and ironic as those and maybe failing. The same for Roz Chast. If you go back to some stuff I was doing for my college newspaper, you can see, “Oh, there's Grant trying to imitate Roz Chast.” I don't see them as overt influences right now, but I still do love to read their work and get a lot of joy from it.
Grant Snider: At first in The New Yorker. I didn’t live under a cultural rock, but certain things I was just never exposed to as a kid, so I never saw a New Yorker magazine, or never was never aware of it till midway through college. My brother brought home a stack of old New Yorker magazines from his architecture library. I looked through those and I was seeing the cartoons (while I maybe had a vague recollection of what a New Yorker cartoon could be.) I saw Roz Chast’s work and I was a little bit turned off by it. Like it just made me feel weird. I wasn't responding to it. I put it away, thinking “What's this strange drawing style and sense of humor?” And then maybe a week or two later, I picked the same magazines up again, went through them, and I was like, “Oh, she's a genius. I get it perfectly.” I love that just very idiosyncratic voice, the personal line quality, and everything she did.
Mike Rhode: I was the same way with The New Yorker and also never saw it until I was in college. Now she's an icon, but years ago in 1978, when Lee Lorenz brought her on, apparently there was quite a bit of a debate about her work.
Grant Snider: I love to see her old, very first comic strip collections. I've gotten from the library and they're just so amazingly weird. I love them.
Mike Rhode: Let's go back to your new book on mindfulness. Are you doing these cartoons partly for your own mental health? Does the mindfulness aspect of them help you in your own life? Are you coming from experience here?
Mike Rhode: That's exactly what I was trying to get at, because the feeling I got was that your cartoons were very personal. They weren't meant to be a self-help book. They were, like you said, self-help for yourself.
Grant Snider: There's also a bit of irony there, because I know like whatever amazing idea I have one day of how to change my life, and live differently, and improve myself, is probably going to fall flat or at least come up a bit short in practice. And I hope hopefully I have enough of that humor in it to make it something a little bit different than self-help.
Mike Rhode: Absolutely. You mentioned you were a student newspaper cartoonist. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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| His first online strip from March 2009 |
Mike Rhode: That was a big circulation newspaper at the time…
Grant Snider: I would imagine. The student body was probably 20 to 30,000. I don't know how many copies they printed every day, but you certainly saw them strewn all across campus in every corner.
Mike Rhode: How did you go from that to dental school and orthodontics?
Grant Snider: [laughs] It all happened together. I was actually an engineering student and I always had an artistic leaning, but never had a specific idea of how I wanted to incorporate it into my work life or my avocation. When I got to dental school, I started drawing for their student newspaper in Kansas City and started submitting to some local newspapers - the alt weekly and then the bigger paper, The Kansas City Star. I eventually got interest and did some strips there, and that's when I really started to realize, “Oh, this is maybe something I could do as a side career or, a fun hobby that pays 50 bucks a month,” with no expectations that would grow into anything bigger than that.
Mike Rhode: So you're in Kansas City and so is Andrews McMeel, the biggest comic strip syndicator. Did you ever approach them?
Mike Rhode: And how about the Hallmark greeting card people that are based out there? You didn't talk to them either, I take it?
Grant Snider: No, I was so involved in working on teeth and trying to keep a comic strip going that I never approached them. I was probably half a block from the Hallmark offices at dental school, but so I'd always walked by there. Yeah, greeting cards I think would've been an interesting challenge, but never something I had huge aspirations to do.
Mike Rhode: I can understand that. This is not an insult, because I think greeting card cartooning is a very important part of the field (although underrated), but I think you could have been an excellent greeting card cartoonist.
Grant Snider: I've talked to some children's book authors and illustrators and other people who've worked in that industry, and I think you would learn a ton of stuff and have a potential to get a lot of creative juices going that you could take into your personal work as well.
Mike Rhode: A lot of Mad Magazine illustrators were greeting card cartoonists like Peter Paul Porges and Jack Davis, but it's just something scholars of the history of the field are not paying attention to at the moment.
Grant Snider: That’s true. Yeah.
Grant Snider: I think early on, I just wanted everything to happen right away. I had my first comic strip published in the New York Times Book Review and I was like, “Okay, I've made it, this is it. I'm gonna get a big book deal. I'm going to get this huge audience.” And I think five to seven years later, I was still waiting for that to happen. Instead of more just kind of having fun with the creative aspect of it, and focusing less on where I'm getting my work published and who's reading it. I think a lot of those things happen naturally just by consistently working. If I could have told my old creative self, “Hey, don't worry about that stuff. It'll come naturally - just focus on making great work.” It would've saved me a lot of anxiety.
Mike Rhode: That type of self-knowledge is tough.
Grant Snider: You can't develop a cartooning voice and following and a body of work overnight. Maybe some people can be instantly good at cartooning or whatever art form they're trying, but it is really something that takes quite a long time to develop.
Mike Rhode: Web comics is kind of changing the world a little bit lately in that some people pop onto Webtoons, and they seem to come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden they've got a million followers, but that tends to be more for sequential type stories that are manga-influenced and meant to be read on a phone. You mentioned the New York Times Book Review, which was where I first starting seeing your book-based cartoons. How did how did you get into the Book Review? Did they approach you? Did you send submissions to them?
Mike Rhode: The traditional “over the transom.” Let's continue in that vein and ask how you got hooked up with The New Yorker. Are you working with the cartoon editor, Emma Allen?
Grant Snider: I've submitted a few things to her and they've published a couple things online. There was a time when I thought I wanted to try to draw single panel New Yorker cartoons like many of the amazing cartoonists have over the years. I tried my hand at that and realized it wasn't quite working, so I've occasionally submitted like a longer piece for their online version. But they're not right now a place I'm submitting to regularly, although I might in the future.
Mike Rhode: But it was the Emma Allen generation.
Grant Snider: No, I don't think I had any contact with Robert Mankoff when he was cartoon editor.
Grant Snider: They did The Shape of Ideas back in 2017. And then IWill Judge You by Your Bookshelf, which came out right around the time that everyone was locked inside their houses, in 2020. This is my third book with Charlie Kochman and Abrams Comic Arts, The Art of Living.
Mike Rhode: How did you get hooked up with Abrams? Do you propose a themed collection to Charlie or does he say to you, “What do you have now that we could work on?”
Mike Rhode: I was quite amused by the index at the back of the book, which sort the cartoons by a type of mindfulness: “I will pay attention to what's in front of me;” “I will make a blank space for each day.” Was that you, or was that somebody else who was suggesting indexing it that way?
Mike Rhode: Well, that's very clever. For this current book, are you hoping that it'll make it into the self-help realm? I know we talked about how you didn't intend it that way, but are you cross marketing it as both a mindfulness and a cartooning book?
Mike Rhode: I was just wondering if Abrams was trying to help you break into an under-served market. There’s not a lot of self-help cartoon books I think.
Grant Snider: To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing it in either place. I do think it maybe belongs a little bit more among graphic novels, but it's not a traditional graphic novel in that sense. I don't know if it's going to be more responded to by people who are used to reading comics and graphic novels, or by somebody who has never picked one up before. I’d like it to have an audience in both groups.
Mike Rhode: That's an interesting point. And I honestly do not know what the answer to that is either. It would be interesting to know who you're appealing to with this book.
Grant Snider: If people knew how to sell books, every book would be a best seller, right?
Mike Rhode: Yes, exactly. So are you a great reader?
Grant Snider: I go through phases. Right now I'm in a pretty good reading cycle. But I I'll also go through times where I read less or feel like I don't have the attention or patience to read. So it really depends, but I do try to read most nights whether it's picture books, comics, poetry, novels, non-fiction, et cetera. I know my reading list or books I've read, pales in comparison to some of my friends, but I would say I'm above average.
Grant Snider: Inadvertently. Absolutely, yes. From the hundreds of books, my family gets from the library, both for me, my wife and our kids. We have a bunch that we don't technically own, but are strewn all about the house. I tend to accumulate mainly books with more pictures, just because I feel like I can return to those from visual reference or visual inspiration. I'm not as quite attached to a really good novel; I don't have the need to own it or keep it on my shelf, even though some, I just end up accumulating, just because. I would say I love collecting books with drawings and pictures of all kinds.
Mike Rhode: I think you mentioned in passing reading comic books -- do you actually read comic books or comic strip collections?
Grant Snider: I've never, and not out of any distaste or dislike, but I've never read like comic books in the superhero genre. I do have quite a few graphic novels on my shelves, but it's not something I have to read every single one that I can. I do think a lot of my favorite books are like old collections of Jules Feiffer’s comics or old New Yorker cartoon anthologies, which I don't think most people think of when they say the term comic books.
Mike Rhode: No, no. Certainly for many years, people made the point of insisting that those were not comic books.
Grant Snider: But it's all words and pictures and drawings and panels. There's certainly different styles and genres of those, but it's all comics. [laughs] I don't, I don't discriminate against any type of comics.
Mike Rhode: Yeah. Jules Feiffer did graphic novels in the sixties, and now Roz Chast, possibly towards the tail end of her career presumably, is doing them. It's all comics, but I think Will Eisner liked the term ‘sequential art.’
Grant Snider: Sequential art? Yeah. It would've been interesting. I've really gotten into the Peanuts collections of the decades of strips from Fantagraphics, because I never read Peanuts that much as a kid. It just seemed boring. Now, I think it's amazing. I would be curious if Charles Schulz were alive today, would he have been coerced into doing a graphic novel and what might that have looked like? That's an interesting question.
Grant Snider: Yes.
Mike Rhode: It says on the press release that Abrams sent me that you've done several other children's books, which somehow I missed. Can you talk a little bit about why you do children's books, how you do children's books, and who you do children's books with?
Grant Snider: Let's see, the start of it was being just a lifelong reader of picture books. I was always the guy, before I had kids, before I had a family, who would still be in that section of the library, looking for amazing illustrations and stories, and just getting excited about the ideas in there. So it's something I've followed throughout my life. And I still have a lot of picture books that I had as a kid that really still inspire me, like the book Tuesday by David Wiesner with frogs flying through the air and just great drawings. Once I was a little bit more established with my cartooning style and felt like I had figured a few things out with that, I was like, “Okay, what's a new creative challenge? I'd like to make a picture book.”
It was a lot more frustrating than my ascent into comics, in that I thought I had had all these skills from making comics and it turns out it's a completely different art form. Some of the things that I was used to falling back on just didn't translate or didn't help me and almost hindered me in making picture books. So I tried a bunch of drafts using my same book agent, sent them to some editors, but nothing was working until finally it was. The first book I had published was called WhatColor Is Night? and it came out with Chronicle Books. I've worked with them for five or six books now. It's been a very interesting challenge. I still don't feel like I have mastered the formula, but maybe that's not the point. It gives me another way to tell stories and try new things in my art.
Mike Rhode: Your first three children's books were done solo and the past two have been with other writers?
Grant Snider: I did What Color Is Night? (2019), What Sound Is Morning? (2020), My Words (2020), all of which I wrote and illustrated. About the time I was finishing up the last couple of those, I got to collaborate with Travis Jonker, who I had corresponded with online a little bit. He had an idea for a story I liked, so I came up with the art for Blue Floats Away. And then the same editor I worked with at Chronicle had a proposal from Theresa Trinder for There Is A Rainbow. I thought it was a nice story and would be a cool challenge, so I did that. I don't consider myself primarily an illustrator. I'm used to having both my words and my drawings to obsess over, but those were both fun because they got me out of my normal routine.
Grant Snider: Actually the collaboration with Travis on the book, Blue Floats Away, we had approached our mutual book agents who approached the editors together. That one was more collaborative, I think, than the traditional picture book process.
Mike Rhode: In children's books, will you be returning to being the solo author of them again?
Grant Snider: Yeah. I still keep my door open to illustration projects, but it's not something I'm actively pursuing. I think if the right thing comes across my desk, I'd love to try that again. But I do have another children's book called One Boy Watching that's out this summer and it's in colored pencil again. It's my autobiographical experiences riding a bus through the Kansas countryside as a kid. And then another one called Nothing Ever Happens on a Grey Day that I'm finishing up the art for now.
Mike Rhode: Is there anybody else you want to recommend in the children's book field as people you look up to or as influences?
Grant Snider: There's a bunch. [laughs] I'd be saying some to the exclusion of others… Another person I list is a cartooning influence who has one or two fantastic picture books is J.J. Sempé, who does covers for The New Yorker in his eighties. He's somebody whose work I just completely admire and try to imitate at times.
Mike Rhode: I can see some of his influences, especially his multi-panel stuff that was done in France and then moved over here. In your list of books, it looks like Quiet Power, the first book you did, was illustrating for somebody else.
Grant Snider: Yep. Susan Cain, the author, had a bestseller for adults called Quiet, and this was the version of that for young readers. I got to sneak in some comics. I got to do some spot illustrations as well as the cover. That was exciting because that was the first book that was widely published that had my work in it.
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Mike Rhode: Were those new pieces for that book?
Grant Snider: Yeah, they were all inspired by the text. I got to read the manuscript and do a bunch of sketches, and drink a lot of coffee, and take it in a bunch of different ways.
Mike Rhode: How do you work this stuff in around a family of five and an orthodontic practice?
Grant Snider: I work on Tuesdays and Thursdays at home in a little corner of my kindergartner's room. It has a door that locks, it has nice windows, and it has a good workspace. I really protect my drawing time. I try to be at the drawing table from eight to two or nine to three on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm always doing kind of some of the ancillary tasks throughout the week, but those are my two big chunks of creative time. You really just need to string together some consistent chunks of creativity to get a lot done. You don't need 24 hours, seven days a week. That's a recipe for insanity. [laughs] The times I've had that freedom makes me think the constraint of having a day job and having a big family is maybe in some ways helpful to my creative process.
Grant Snider: Oh yeah. It's spaces of quiet solitude are hard to come by, but even more valued.
Mike Rhode: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your dental practice.
Grant Snider: I work at a satellite office of a larger group practice.
Mike Rhode: Do the people in the practice and your patients have any awareness that you have this second career?
Grant Snider: I know the people I work with do; as far as the patients, maybe a handful of them do, but it's not something I advertise. I keep try to keep those parts of my life somewhat separate. But I always think it's nice when someone says, “Oh, hey, I read your book,” or “I like your comics.” That's always a, a cool connection to make.
Mike Rhode: So the office is not decorated in posters from your website? [laughs]
Mike Rhode: Also from the medical point of view, graphic medicine is obviously a hot thing these days. Have you had any thoughts about doing any type of graphic medicine, explanatory text, or autobiographical, or just a series of PSAs, or anything like that?
Grant Snider: No, but I've read some that are really good. I know the book Smile by Raina Telgemeier was a mega huge hit and for good reason. I think she's covered the orthodontic basis pretty well. [both laugh] I don't want to try to match that. I do love reading some physician authors, like Atul Gawande and the late Oliver Sacks. Some of that's fascinating to me, but I've never had the spark or the creative necessity to tackle that. I did do a lot of sketching of teeth and different things when I was in dental school, just as ways to aid my studying, but never for a wider audience. I think it's interesting; it's just the right spark of inspiration has not yet arrived.
Mike Rhode: What work are you most proud of is one of my standard questions.
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| Nature of Ambition part 1 |
Mike Rhode: What would you like to do or work on in the future? You said you have a couple more children's books in hand now.
Grant Snider: I'm always interested to try and learn new things in the children's picture book world. And every book is quite a bit different in that. I do want to continue my regular comics strip Incidental Comics, and just keep being excited about new ideas there. One other project I'm tackling in the coming year is going to be a book of poetry comics for kids. I grew up reading Shel Silverstein and thought, and still think, those poems are amazing as are his illustrations. And he was a great cartoonist for grownups in his own. As well as every other art form possible, he was a Renaissance man. But I want to make a version of poetry comics that could rival a Shel Silverstein book. I’m not going to try to make direct references there, but, but I always think of how valuable those books were to me as a kid, and now as a grownup. I'd love to do a form of comics that are poems that could be that special.
Grant Snider: I think some of them will appear there, but I do think a lot of them will be published without having appeared on my blog. Which is kind of a little bit, not harrowing, but makes me a little nervous because I'm used to that instant feedback and knowing right away, “Okay. Does my audience respond to it? Is it a dud? Is it good?” And having to trust my own instinct plus that of my editor and my first readers will be kind of a new thing.
Mike Rhode: How do you get feedback? Do people post on your various social media sites?
Grant Snider: Yeah, mainly people commenting on like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. You can see this is something people respond to, or maybe they didn't get it, or maybe there's something that made people mad that I didn't anticipate. That doesn't happen too often. I try not to take a whole bunch of stock into comments, but I do appreciate when something resonates and sometimes I'll get emails from readers. The people whose opinions I value the most probably are my first readers, my wife, Kayla, and my brother, Gavin. They're the ones I show my strips to before I publish them. I know if both of them thinks something's pretty good or working well, then chances are other people outside the family will think so too.
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| part 1 of the comic |
Grant Snider: You know, invariably that happens at least once a week. [laughs] I always have my old sketchbooks on hand, so I don't necessarily have the pressure to create something fully formed from nothing. I have a bunch of strips I've kind of jotted down or have the ideas for. It's more just a matter of settling on which one to pursue. So I don't get writer's block in the sense that like “I'm not going to make anything ever again,” it's more like, “Hey, this, this comic's not coming as easy as I thought it would; let me change course and find something different that's working and maybe come back to it a little bit later.” I posted a strip today “Still Life” (March 11, 2022) that I had almost thrown away and luckily just saved the scraps of it. Reworked a month or so later, it turned out just fine.
Mike Rhode: You work in traditional sketchbooks then?
Mike Rhode: Yes, be paralyzed. Have you ever visited DC? This is my local question.
Grant Snider: Yes, but not since dental school. I went there when I won the college cartoonist award. I got to go to the National Press Club and give a little five minute speech and I got to meet Snoopy. Mine was a Charles M. Schulz award. None of the other serious journalists there got to meet Snoopy, but it was a really cool experience. And I think that was the last time I visited DC.
Mike Rhode: Was there anything else that struck you about the city that you would like to come back and revisit?
Grant Snider: Just the huge amount of visual inspiration, the architecture, the museums, all the history. It's a great place. It would be a great place to go and spend a week with a sketchbook. And my mom’s family's from there originally, but I rarely ever get out of the state.
Mike Rhode: Wrapping up, how has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you personally and professionally?
Mike Rhode: Would you say that the fact that you were able to have enough material to do a mindfulness book now is an outgrowth of part of the pandemic's cartoon?
Grant Snider: Yes, I think that definitely informed it. Now, when I had pitched the book and had the book signed up, I believe it was pre-pandemic. So it was more inspired by an experience of going on a writer's retreat and then giving up a lot of things for Lent one year. But the pandemic did really make about half the book into what it is today.
Mike Rhode: Were all the cartoons in it published already, or is there new material just for the book?
Mike Rhode: I much prefer the permanence of a book.
Grant Snider: I initially had hang-ups about it, but then I realized, “Okay, there's maybe four or five readers out there who have every single strip I post online memorized and, and taken to heart,” but most people have either not encountered my work online before, or saw I quickly on their phone, liked it and forgot about it. If you can get it in a more permanent form in a book, that's an amazing thing.
Mike Rhode: Any closing thoughts? Is there anything I missed that you'd like to get on the record?
Grant Snider: I think that the biggest joy of any cartoonist is when somebody sees their drawings or their art and says, “Oh, man, I want to put pen to paper and draw, or write something on my own.” If my drawings can inspire younger readers, or even older readers, to pick up a pen and start cartooning, I think that'd be the biggest compliment of all.
