The Virtual Memories Show

Indie animation legend Bill Plympton joins the show to talk about his first short (the Oscar-nominated Your Face ), his latest feature ( Revengeance ), and everything in between! We talk about his indie ethos, the economics of animation and the benefits of Kickstarter , collaborating for the first time, launching the Trump Bites series of animated shorts and how they dovetail with his early career...

UK comics legend David Lloyd joins the show to talk about his storied career, and how he made the shift from artist to publisher with the online comics anthology magazine Aces Weekly ! We get into his roots as a cartoonist and noir storyteller, the co-creation of V for Vendetta with Alan Moore and what he thinks of the Guy Fawkes mask he designed for V being used by Occupy and Anonymous (and Trivi...

Illustrator-painter-cartoonist-musician Hal Mayforth joins the show to talk about making art out of the everyday. We get into his daily sketchbook practice (along with transcendental meditation), the shelf-life of illustrators' styles, the music he makes out of found vocals, and how he balances personal art alongside his professional work. We also talk about his explorations into AbEx and how he m...

After our pre-opening tour of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation museum , artist Dmitry Samarov and I repaired to a cafe where we recorded a noisy conversation while Dmitry sketched me. This ridiculously casual episode gets into artists and suicide, the process and revelations of assembling 20 years' worth of work for a mid-career retrospective (as well as his new exhibition of his CTA...

For a guy who calls himself a master of nothing, Nathaniel Popkin does an awfully good job for himself as a novelist, literary editor, critic, journalist, and urban historian. Nathaniel joins the show to talk about his new novel, Everything Is Borrowed (New Door Books), as well as the new literary anthology he co-edited, Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press). We get into the fertil...

His art has graced the cover of The New Yorker 60 times (!), and now award-winning artist/illustrator Mark Ulriksen joins The Virtual Memories Show ! We talk about how he got his start in illustration at 37 (and compare mid-life crises) and how his previous career as an art director affected him, get intowhy he likes painting dogs more than people, and issue our judgement on Barry Bonds' MLB Hall...

Artist & illustrator Dave Calver joins the show to talk about Limbo Lounge , his first graphic novel! We discuss the ups and downs of his 40+-year career in illustration, his gorgeously pop-surrealism-lowbrow vibe, life in a vintage trailer park, and how he manages to draw macabre without being gross. We also get into his '70s/'80s NYC experience (including witnessing collateral damage at a women'...

The New World: Comics from Mauretania collects what artist Chris Reynolds describes as "Strange Adventure Stories About Dreams". We get into Chris' amazing body of comics work, the roles of intuition and reason in his storytelling, his panic when another artist ( Seth ) identified themes and threads throughout his work, and his sense of letting go of his stories now that they've been collected by...

Author, editor, translator, and (most crucially) reader Alberto Manguel joins the show to talk about his new book, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (Yale University Press). We discuss the lifelong act of building a library and how he deals with having no access to it, now that he's had to pack up ~35,000 books (but he also tells us about the 3 books he took with him on his travels)...

Arthur Szyk was once one of the most popular artists in America, but after his untimely death his art vanished from public discourse. How did Szyk achieve and lose such renown? Irvin Ungar has spent the last 25 years championing Szyk's work, most recently publishing the National Jewish Book Award-winning Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art . We talk about his introduction to Szyk, the impact of Szyk's wor...

Science fiction author Christopher Brown joins the show to talk about his first novel, Tropic of Kansas (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 busines...

On the occasions of Philip Roth 's death and Sandy McClatchy 's memorial service, I ruminate on opportunities missed and taken in this bonus episode. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Fresh from her book tour, Ilana C. Myer joins the show to talk about her new novel, Fire Dance (Tor). We get into the jump she made for her second book, the process of crossing Celtic poets with troubadours and Mediterranean aesthetics and mythology as part of her world-building, the challenge of seducing the reader, why she writes fantasy instead of history, and her fixation on "books with magic...

Michael Kupperman rejoins the show to talk about his new book, All The Answers ! We talk about his father Joel Kupperman's experience on the Quiz Kids radio and TV shows and how it led to a multigenerational chain of trauma, the shifting of gears from absurdist humor to heartfelt family memoir, the airing of family secrets, the five-plus years of work this book required, and more. We also get into...

Live from MoCCA 2018, Roz Chast rejoins the show to talk about her 40-year+ career as the "different-different-different" cartoonist at The New Yorker , what her workday is like, why she avoids topical and political cartooning, the joy of drawing on an iPad and the fun of Instagram , and more! We get into her new book, Going Into Town: A Love Letter To New York (Bloomsbury USA), and her issues wit...

Director/Producer JJ Sedelmaier has been in and around animation for nearly 40 years. We sat down to talk about the false choice of art and commerce, how the advertising and animation businesses have changed over the years he's been working in them, using animation for good instead of evil, how working in a Greek restaurant as a teen prepared him to run his own animation studio, the insane process...

Design scholar Steven Heller joins the show to talk about writing and editing more than 182 books on design and its history (and lamenting the books he still wants to do). We get into his evolution from cartooning to graphic design, how he became a scholar of satiric magazines, what went into building the MFA entrepreneurial design program at School of Visual Arts , and the maybe too-encompassing...

He's been on my list of dream-guests since I launched the podcast, and now Love & Rockets cartoonist Jaime Hernandez joins the show! We talk about his new book of Latin American folktales, The Dragon Slayer (TOON Graphic), the family-centric folktales of his own youth in Oxnard, CA, the fun of drawing for kids, and the times he's felt Maggie Chascarillo had nothing left to say. We get into the ori...

Cartoonist and playwright Dean Haspiel joins the show to talk about his new play, The Last Bar At The End Of The World (running April 10-15, 2018!) and how he looks at his life & career after turning 50. We get into his New Brooklyn series of webcomics, our mutual upbringing on superhero comics, the inherent lie of being a freelancer, his father's friendship with Marilyn Monroe, writing for theate...

On the eve of the premiere of You Were Never Really Here , writer Jonathan Ames returns to his stomping grounds of northern NJ to talk about crime novels, the literary pilgrimages of his youth, getting laughs at AA meetings, and more. We get into the process of seeing his novella adapted into film, his decade-long fascination with Richard Stark's Parker novels, the catharses and paradoxes of his c...

Paintoonist (painter + cartoonist) Jerry Moriarty joins the show to talk about playing the Art Card for 80 years and counting. We get into the genesis of his Jack Survives comics and his recent book "whatsa paintoonist?" , his 50 years teaching at SVA, his move back to his childhood home in upstate NY in his 70s, the role of memory in art, his evolution from AbEx to Pop Art to representational to...

Liveright Publishing editor-in-chief Robert Weil joins the show on the eve of this year's Festival Neue Literatur to talk about editing translations, why great translators are heroes (and ought to get credited on book covers), and his admiration/adoration for Barbara Perlmutter , winner of this year's Friedich Ulfers Prize . Along the way, we talk about the nuts-and-bolts of editing writers and wh...

Time for a books & booze break! Lexicographer/bartender Jesse Sheidlower returns to the show to talk about bartending at The Threesome Tollbooth , a very intimate cocktail experience in Brooklyn (as in, there's only space for two patrons and a bartender). We get into the origin of the Tollbooth and why it's neither a "speakeasy" nor immersive theater, the confession-booth aspect of the space and t...

Science fiction author Lavie Tidhar joins the show to talk about the five topics that Israeli novelists are allowed to write about, his affinity for pulp fiction tropes, when it's okay to make fun of Hitler (which he does at great length in A Man Lies Dreaming ), why he finds utopias sinister (hint: he was raised on a kibbutz), how to build a career on ambitious failure, the eye-opening experience...

Critic and essayist Willard Spiegelman returns to the show to talk about his new book, If You See Something, Say Something (SMU Press), collecting his art reviews from the Wall Street Journal . We get into the notion of legacy after his retirement from 45 years of teaching, then tackle the process of learning to look at paintings, his favorite museums, the question of whether David Hockney's happi...