DMA#53: Rich Sparks!

Tune in at 12:30pm EDT Today

Cartoon by Rich Sparks

I am, by my own admission, a fanboy.

The quiet kind, who reads someone’s work for years and builds a whole imaginary friendship in his head, full of inside jokes the other person has never heard. Today that friendship gets a terrifying upgrade to a real one…

Rich Sparks is my guest on Draw Me Anything today, Wednesday, 12:30pm EDT. Set an alarm. Wedge it into your calendar between lunch and your nap.

His cartoons turn up in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Air Mail, Barron’s, Weekly Humorist, The American Bystander, Narrative, and roughly everywhere else with the sense to print funny drawings. But he got there by a gloriously crooked road. Back in 1982, working the produce department of a grocery store in Lincoln Park, he was handed a “Ring Bell for Service” sign to keep updated, and quietly turned it into a weekly single-panel cartoon that built a following among the customers. He’s since said it was his own little comic panel, and not unlike what he’s doing now, which is either a lovely full circle or proof that none of us ever really change.

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Then he gave up drawing altogether for years to play in bands. He picked the pen back up around 2015 and took aim at the New Yorker, which for cartoonists is roughly, oh, the Olympics?

He’s still a founding member of the indie band The Last Afternoons, because being brilliant at one thing was apparently insufficiently humbling for the rest of us.

Here’s what I love about Rich. With most cartoonists, you can see the shape of the joke before you arrive. With Rich, you never know what the fuck you’re going to get. His work’s been called whimsical, oddball, raunchy, and dark, and you will laugh, and you might cringe, sometimes in the same panel.

Barry Blitt, New Yorker cover artist: “Rich Sparks’ stuff is much funnier than anything by Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates. And you can tell them I said so. Wait, don’t. Please don’t say anything.”

We’ll be talking about his new book, Horseshoes and Tardigrades, out from The Weekly Humorist. The blurbs alone are worth the price of admission.

David Yow, frontman of the Jesus Lizard, marshalled the full weight of his critical faculties: “Rich Sparks’s books are better than other books.” You cannot argue with it. I’ve tried.

And Gary Taxali, who got closest to the truth, said the best art makes you want to reach in and touch it. He added that Rich didn’t pay him to say this, though he’s fairly sure he can get a beer out of him. A man should always have a clear deliverable.

I read his other book, Love & Other Weird Things, several years ago and was doubled-over laughing on nearly every page. It was ugly stuff, looking at me guffawing and chortling like a lunatic. My dog left the room and never looked at me the same way again.

So: Wednesday, 12:30pm EDT. Rich is in Chicago, I’m in Hell’s Kitchen, and a man who started out drawing on a produce sign is about to meet a man who, frankly, peaked at greasing pizza pans in high school. Bring your questions. Bring your tardigrades. Just turn up.

‘til then!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.