Peter Kuper (b. 1958) is one of the country's leading cartoonists. His
artwork has graced the pages and covers of numerous newspapers and
magazines, including Time, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and the
New York Times. He is a longtime contributor to Mad magazine, where
he has been writing and drawing Spy vs. Spy for two decades, and the
cofounder and coeditor of World War 3 Illustrated, the cutting-edge
magazine devoted to political graphic art.
Most of the interviews collected here are either previously unpublished
or long out of print. They address such varied topics as world travels,
teaching at Harvard, Hollywood deal-making, climate change, Spy vs.
Spy, New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and World War 3
Illustrated. Among the works examined are his books The System,
Sticks and Stones, Stop Forgetting to Remember, Diario de Oaxaca,
and adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle. Kuper also discusses his graphic novel Ruins,
which received the Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel in 2016.
Along with two dozen images, this volume features ten lively,
informative interviews as well as a quartet of revealing conversations,
conducted in collaboration with Kuper's fellow artist Seth Tobocman,
with underground comix legends Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé, Mad
magazine publisher William Gaines, and Jack Kirby.
