It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition: The Guest List! I reached out to 2019’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they’re hoping to read in 2020! More than two dozen responded with a dizzying array of books. (I participated, too!) The Virtual Memories Show offers up a huge list of books that you’re going to want to read in the new year! Give it a listen, and get ready to update your wish lists!
This year’s Guest List episode features selections from 25 of our recent guests (and one upcoming guest)! So go give it a listen, and then visit our special Guest List page where you can find links to the books and the guests who responded.
Also, check out the 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 editions of The Guest List for more great book ideas!
Chris Reynolds’ question included a couple of links, so here’s what he wrote: I’ve been carrying on with “Comics as Radio”, influenced by the KCRW Organist podcast. My friend Alan Jackson did a performance of my Comics as Radio story “Sexton Blake and the 64th Floor” at the Train of Thought Gallery in Worthing, and we discuss it here with John Parke, whose idea it was. So my question is: What do you think of ‘Comics as Radio’?
Pre-order Dean Haspiel’s forthcoming collection of The Red Hook: WAR CRY, from Image Comics (comes out Oct. 9)
BONUS: I’ve got a belated answer to Maria Alexander’s question, “What’s the spookiest thing that’s ever happened to you?” In high school, my English teacher was driving me and another classmate to a creative writing conference in New Brunswick. Somehow, the topic of birthdays came up and — swear to the Unifactor — it turned out that all three of us had the same birthday. I know that’s not ghost-possessed ventriloquist spooky, but it’s still spooky, so I’m going with that one.
SECOND BONUS: When I talked about the movie Magic during the episode, I meant Anthony Hopkins, not Anthony Perkins. If that’s the only mistake I made during the show, I’ll be amazed.
Gil Roth is the host of The Virtual Memories Show, a weekly literary-cultural conversation podcast. He’s also the founder and president of the Pharma & Biopharma Outsourcing Association, a nonprofit trade group representing contract manufacturing organizations and other service providers in the bio/pharma sector. His wife is a photographer, he runs for recreation and reads a lot, and their greyhound is named after the prince’s hunting dog in The Leopard.
“In my mind, I thought, ‘Maybe if I can get my comic strip to Uruguay, my father will believe this is a real job.’ I’d be an international success. Montevideo was as far as my imagination could go.”
In a rollicking conversation at the Society of Illustrators 128 Bar & Bistro, Argentine comics star Liniers talks about making the jump from Buenos Aires to Vermont to teach at the Center for Cartoon Studies, the amazing US syndication launch of his comic strip Macanudo last year (and the origin of that strip in Argentina), the difference between drawing well and drawing funny, the mix of comic and comedic influences that melted his brain as a kid, the time he almost met Bill Watterson, and what it means to be a Latin American cartoonist. We also get into how he learned English from Mad Magazine, when he caught the live performance bug, why he eschews a regular set of characters in favor of a schizophrenic style of humor in Macanudo, how he felt the first time he saw a tattoo his work on a fan, why seeing his work pirated helped balance out his karma from downloading all those mp3s, and how his kids books help him press Pause on perfect moments from his children’s lives. Give it a listen!(conversation begins around 7:00) And go buy some of Liniers’ Macanudo collections and his TOON books!
“Every cartoonist, this life is their second choice. My first choice, I wanted to be Lou Reed, but that didn’t work out for some reason.”
“My job is not being very good at drawing. It’s making little doodles and somehow infusing them with soul.”
“Every cartoonist, this life is their second choice. My first choice, I wanted to be Lou Reed, but that didn’t work out for some reason.”
“The most difficult things for people to draw are horses and bikes, so I bet the most impossible drawing of all would be a horse riding a bike.”
Born in Argentina in 1973, Liniers began his artistic career when he realized he wasn’t cut out for law school and started making fanzines for friends. Since 2002, when his daily comic strip Macanudo began appearing in La Nación, Argentina’s most widely read newspaper, Liniers has become an international comics star, with many New Yorker covers to his name, among other accolades. Macanudo is published throughout the world, and Liniers’ social media reaches nearly a million followers. In the US, he is also the creator of wonderful children’s books, two of which are about one of the greatest characters in Macanudo: the wry, philosophical girl, Henrietta. Liniers also tours Latin America and Spain with musician Kevin Johansen, drawing on stage while Kevin’s band performs. Liniers currently lives in Vermont with his wife and three daughters.
(NOTE: I’m wearing my Argentina national basketball team jersey, in honor of Liniers’ pal Manu Ginobili.)
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