"I
am a great fan of Mark Newgarden's work and I'm happy to hear that it's about
to be collected in book form. His writings and drawings brilliantly question
the basic premise of cartooning. In his hands, the gag caption is raised to
literature and the cliches of "cartoon drawing" are transformed into art.
He has managed to find the kernel of poetry at the core of a long, and now
largely bankrupt, tradition."
- Ben Katchor
"Mark
Newgarden is where Ernie Bushmiller and Marcel Duchamp meet. Great stuff."
- Patrick McDonnell
"The
secret behind Mark Newgarden's big-nosed barfly comics is that they are sporting
world-class prose and advanced mental powers. And are funny as Hell!"
- Gary Panter
"I'm
a fan of Mark Newgarden."
- Matt Groening
"I've
been waiting for a book of Mark Newgarden's stuff most of my adult life. Somehow,
he managed to retool the basic external elements of cartooning - big noses,
panel gags, punch lines - into a sophisticated inner language of uncomfortably
familiar self-mocking existential despair. Most everybody knows that 'funny'
is really 'misery,' but his stuff gets as close to misery as it can without
quite ever touching off the chain reaction that'll make you want to cut your
head off - all the while staying hilarious. We 'youngsters' should be paying
him reparations for stealing from him for all these years."
- Chris Ware
"Newgarden
could well be the forgotten genius of pop culture's last quarter century."
- Tom Spurgeon, Res Magazine
Reviews:
The
melding of brows "low, middle, and high" may have been the most
important twentieth-century art trend, in which case Newgarden, whose 1983-91
work this plush (literally: stroke the cover), square volume showcases, may
be the last great twentieth-century artist. Writer- draftsman Newgarden chose
the gag cartoon, regarded as a type of both commercial, industrial art and
vernacular comedy, as his principal metier. For Newgarden, gag cartoons' verbal
and ideational content is as and sometimes more important than the visual
content, which sets him quite apart from comics-quoting pop artists, than
whom a less verbally adept crew is hard to find. One set of Newgarden's stuff
consists of one-panel drawings perched over often-scabrous captions so voluminous
that they amount to short stories. Another part of his work is all same-size
panel pieces, including the wordless Little Nun series as well as the excruciating
Pud + Spud episodes, in which two brothers yammer in square panels so small
that one's eyes give out long before the text does. The tenor of Newgarden's
humor ranges from cruel absurdity to nose-thumbing satire to cool faux-intellectualism
(the last, in particular, runs rampant in the Industrial Toilet Paper Wrapper
Design Of N.Y.C. series). If one warms to Newgarden at all, he is very, very,
very funny. As the concluding gallery of others' art that inspired him demonstrates,
even his taste is hilarious. -Ray
Olson
- Booklist (starred review)
Exploring the detritus of our consumer culture, Newgarden reworks comics cliches
to show the lighter side of despair. Back in the '80s, he created the Garbage
Pail Kids, satirizing the lovable cuteness of products manufactured for children.
Since then, in a variety of underground publications, he has subverted everyday
icons and parodied traditional "joke" merchandise. Most people would merely
glance at a trite cartoon showing two big-nosed guys in a bar, a man on a
desert island, a clown with a psychiatrist, etc.; Newgarden is fascinated
by why those images became the stock in trade for cheap, disposable humor
productions. He wonders if laughing at a stupid hillbilly, an alienated drunk
or a prisoner on death row lets us repress the pain of our own frustrations.
The drawings here work perfectly as quickie cartoons, but they also extend
themselves, turning into desperate, hysterical rants.. From an ad for the
Little Nun's stigmata gloves and edible rosary to an exhibition of real toilet
paper wrappers, Newgarden treats nothing as sacred. In fact, he suspects that
we cherish whatever distracts us from our problems. Beautifully produced-the
covers are black velvet-this book shows the results of his study aren't exactly
comforting, but they are fascinating and funny as hell.
-
Publisher's Weekly (starred
review)
"No cartoonist
needs a whole graphic novel when he can say all he needs to with one big panel
containing the following words: "Imagine A Drawing Of Dennis The Menace" and
"Imagine A Sentence Of Samuel Beckett's."
-
The Onion/A.V. Club
Read the rest
"We All Die Alone collects 20 years of Newgarden highlights
from underground mags like RAW and alt-weeklies like the New York Press, and
showcases an artist as playful as he is experimental. A self-described "graphic
alchemist," junk historian, and connoisseur of big noses, Newgarden repeatedly
deconstructs the gag cartoon form, confronting and confounding his audience's
expectations."
- The Village Voice
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the rest
"In the hands of
Mark Newgarden, the gag cartoon is taken to new heights, and new lows."
- The Vancouver Courier
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"We All Die Alone
showcases a decade of important art that might otherwise have slipped away."
- The
Phoenix
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"The sumptuously
designed, felt-embossed volume from Fantagraphics catches audiences up with
the fertile oeuvre of Newgarden, who has been plugging away at his literary
and nihilistic underground comics for over two decades."
- The Portland Mercury
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"Large
noses it seem that mark of Newgarden is already have and keep savage bring
together in a kloeke cord. Of everything a beetje eventually continues gnaw
the question: why this cord? What is the lying behind philosophy of this expenditure?"
- 8 Weekly (Amsterdam)
Read the rest
We All Die Alone is the first collection of work by cartoonist Mark Newgarden. It gathers over twenty years of his comics output, encompassing his tenure at the influential comics anthology RAW as well as his cult-classic syndicated comic, "Newgarden", and all points in between.