Virtual Memories Show 307:
Mort Gerberg
“People submitting comics to the New Yorker could expect a 98% rejection rate. What kind of a sane person would go into that field?! You have to have some sort of personality aberration to do this!”
On the eve of his exhibition at the New-York Historical Society (Feb. 15 to May 5, 2019), legendary cartoonist Mort Gerberg reflects on more than five decades of cartooning and art. We talk about his new collection, Mort Gerberg On The Scene: A 50-Year Cartoon Chronicle
“When I would see something that looked like an injustice, I had to do something.”
“The first day I walked into the Saturday Evening Post, they told me the cartooning business was dying. That was 1962, and it’s been dying ever since.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Mort Gerberg is an award-winning, multi-genre cartoonist and author best known for his cartoons in The New Yorker, Playboy and many other magazines, and for Cartooning: The Art and the Business
He has drawn three nationally-syndicated newspaper comic strips and has written, edited and/or illustrated 43 books for adults and children, including the best-selling More Spaghetti, I Say!
Mort has been a content provider for television and online sites, posted daily topical cartoons, and performed a weekly on-camera-drawing feature. He also wrote and drew animated fables and did live cartoon election coverage. He has done on-the-scene sketch reportage for magazines and newspapers, covering national and international politics, sports and travel.
He taught cartooning for 15 years at Parsons School of Design, was a founder and president of the Cartoonists Guild, and is a member of the National Cartoonists Society. He was voted as Best Magazine Cartoonist of 2007 and 2008 by the National Cartoonists Society, and was a CCNY Commuications Hall of Fame Honoree in 2010.
Mort lives in New York Cit with his wife, Judith. He pitches for the New Yorker softball team, plays tennis and the piano, and sings in a choir.
He’s on Twitter and Instagram as mortgerberg.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mort’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
(Harper Voyager), and the redemptive possibilities of dystopian fiction. We get into his SF pedigree, living in Austin and its influence on his ecological themes, the multivalence of Texas, his attempt at subverting the post-9/11 technothriller toward emancipatory ends, his background in business law and politics (and the role of power in both those milieux), his affinity for 
. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review’s “Twelve Tomorrows,” The Baffler, and 
. He lives in Austin, Texas. 
(Other Press) and how he explained it to passport control on his visit to the US. We talk about how his fiction-writing career both integrates and rejects his past lives in advertising and psychology, explore the Robin Hood model of the creative writing school, and get into the background PTSD of daily life in Israel. Then comics scholar 
that accompanies it (here’s a 
, which was included in The Independent‘s list of Books of the Year in Translation; 
; 
, a finalist for the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; and 
(2004), and co-author, with Peter Stanbury, of 
(2005), 
(2006) and 
(2008). He is also the editor of 
(2008) and 
(2011).
, published by Tate Publishing (2013) and Yale University Press (2014), and 
(2014) with John Harris Dunning, published by The British Library. This accompanied the exhibition of the same name which Gravett and Dunning co-curated at The British Library, the largest exhibition of British comics ever held in the UK, which attracted some 60,000 visitors, almost half of them first-time visitors.
(Saga Press). We talk about the sense of his various endings, writing a talking animal book that’s actually about an old man dying, the challenges of reaching a broader audience and why he returned to fantastika, his retirement from teaching at Yale and his thoughts on how students have changed, his Catholic upbringing and how it informed his writing, the pressure of new rules and norms on writers, the radical challenge of sympathy, and more. But first, I call 
(Bloomsbury). We get into what Americans really need to know about China, how the country has changed in the 20+ years that he’s been working and living there (on and off), and why Pittsburgh is the Beijing of the US. 
and 
, Meyer teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. His new book is 
, in 2009. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.
!
, was published by Pomegranate Press and the Library of Congress in 2004. A collection of Vice President Cheney cartoons, 
, was self-published by Telnaes and Sara Thaves in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Jerusalem, and Lisbon.
