RiYL

In March, a comic by Eli Valley landed him on the radar of Meghan McCain. There was nothing extraordinaire about the piece from a cartoonist who has long wading into the divisive world of U.S.-Israeli relations, but the commentary about the American right’s relationship with the country caused The View cohost to lash out on Twitter. That, in term, put a relatively unknown cartoonist in the nationa...

On a day in late October 195, Kate Slaugherback singlehandedly killed 140 rattlesnakes to protect herself and her young son. When she ran out of ammunition, she grabbed a nearby sign to bludgeon the venomous reptiles. Legend has it, the sign read “No Hunting.” It’s clear why Neyla Pekarek found the ideal subject matter in Rattlesnake Kate. She also found something of a kindred spirit. Playing cell...

The K Chronicles has been an alternative weekly staple since the 90s. The strip, which mixes the personal with the political, has weathered the bumbling of George W. Bush, the hopefulness of Obama and the existential dread of Trump. All through it, cartoonist Keith Knight has balanced family with a multimedia career including comics, music (most notably the five-piece hip-hop group, the Marginal P...

A veteran of the New Oreans slam poetry scene, Tarriona “Tank” Ball’s career only really caught  fire when she embraced her musical impulses. She became a member of collective stylized on the success of The Roots, backed by a handful of local musicians. But as members fell away to embrace family and other life obligations, Tank and a core group of Bangas held on. In 2017, the band won NPR’s Tiny D...

In 2017’s The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, Ben Lindbergh and co-author Sam Miller detailed the season they spent running an independent baseball team with strict adherence to sabermetrics, analytic-based analysis that has come to define the past decade of management. This year, Lindbergh and fellow baseball writer Travis Sawchik take on the majors with The MVP Machine. The recently released book d...

In Cannonball, Kelsey Wroten tells the story of a a young writer dealing with the successes of her first novel. After her debut graphic novel became a hit in its own right, Wroten has seen some of the book’s events come to life first hand. Of course, the cartoonist isn’t her character. The Kansas City transplant had already made a name for herself as an illustrator, her work appearing in such publ...

Seeing Freaks at 19 was a formative experience. A small public viewing of the film in a Greenwich Village loft left Bill Griffith feeling baffled and fascinating, with the overwhelming desire to express the experience through art. This was well before he became another convert of the underground comics movement, eight years later, his best known and longest lived creation bore the clear influence...

Released last year on Secret Acres, Little Stranger presented a much welcome retrospective of Edie Fake’s more recent comics work. The book collects an assortment of pieces published in various zines and anthologies since his seminal series, Gaylord Phoenix. After stints in Chicago and Los Angeles, Fake currently resides in the California desert of Joshua Tree. Here they largely focuses paintings...

2010 to 2012 was a busy time for Bad Books. By the end of its first two years, the band had two LPs and a tour under its belt. It was easy enough to hit the ground running, of course. Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull and Robert McDowell met Kevin Devine on tour, an opening act slowly ingratiating himself into the band’s live set. The fit was so perfect the trio began a new group with a new name. B...

Law school didn’t work out for Rachel Kramer Bussel. After failing to complete her studies as NYU, she began writing erotic on the side, while working as a paralegal. Twenty years later, she continues to write and edit works in the genre, even after moving to a far more suburban life in New Jersey. In the intervening years, she’s edited dozens of collections, including the Best Sex Writing series....

Like many of his fellow Pittsburgher cartoonists, Jim Rugg’s work lives at a fascinating cross section of mainstream and indie comics culture. It’s a phenomenon Rugg and cohost Ed Piskor happily explore in their YouTube series, Cartoonist Kayfabe, which breaks down the earlier days of Wizard Magazine, issue by issue. His work, too, is the product of a confluence of distinct influences, from the sk...

In Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention’s eponymous essay, Joseph Flatley visits a convention of therapists dedicated to uncovering repressed memory, a fascinating artifact from the Satanic Panic that gripped the U.S. in the 1980s. His upcoming followup, Finders, is set to explore similar territory, this time focusing on a rumored kidnapping ring with CIA ties. Since leaving the world of tech...

When she arrives for the interview, Cara Beth Satalino has her luggage in tow. She’s gearing up for a handful of shows ahead ahead of the release of Outer Spaces’ sophomore release, Gazing Globe. It’s a nice spot ahead of a second record, having honed their chops in Baltimore, the trio has held its own alongside indie vets like Ted Leo, Waxahatchee and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Though the musician...

The way he tells it, The Hard Times was a hit right out of the gate. Some perfect combination of zeitgeist and internet algorithms had the satirical site racking up a million page views via social media sites like Facebook almost instantly. It’s a far cry from the sort of hard luck grinding stories one usually hears about the punk scene — but when it’s right, it’s right. Initially focused on the p...

  Launched in summer 2018, the Awkward Sex and the City podcast maintain the magic the has made the stage show of the same name a hit with New York City audience. Founder and host Natalie Wall is joined by fellow comedians who explore their own uncomfortable sex stories, celebrating the…less sexy elements of intimacy. Wall joins us to discuss her comedy career, getting personal on stage and the im...

Released in February, Mort Gerberg on the Scene is a loving celebration of the long time New Yorker cartoonist. For half a century, the artist has taken on contemporary city life and politics, capturing everything from basketball games to the Nixon administration.  It was the latter topic that found him guesting on The Today Show, live drawing the controversial president alongside Barbara Walters....

From the sound of it, Lou Doillon was surprised as anyone by her own musical successes. Her 2012 debut put her new career on the map, earning her a French Grammy for Artist of the Year, only to be catapulted to global fame with her 2016 followup. Fame as a singer-songwriter, at least. As an actress, model and the daughter of two famous parents, Doillon has never not been a known quantity, but maki...

We get the chance to talk to a lot of great seasoned artists, but there’s a wonderful change of pace to interviewing one who’s just getting started. London born and raised, Jnr. Williams released his debut EP Where We Start earlier this year on Arista. The singer-songwriter creates stripped-down, jazz-influenced R&B that taps into earnest and emotional subject matter. In this bonus episode, we dis...

It’s been a long day of press, but Bruce Hornsby is firing on all cylinders when he arrives for one final interview. Absolute Zero is the artist’s most-hyped record in years, courtesy of collaborations with the next generation of artists, including Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Hornsby, it seems, is just hyped up himself, speaking in pilot lingo, as he passes through reception. I jury rig a microphone...

Live from Book Are are Magic in Brooklyn, we sat down with Julian Glander to celebrate the launch of his new Fantagraphics title, 3D Sweeties. The book collects a series of short strips the cartoonist has been compiling over the years through freelancing for various outlets. It features Glander’s signature computer generated characters in vignettes that are sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful an...

When Before We Forgot How to Dream arrived, most of the coverage understandably centered on the songwriter’s age. At 19, Bridie Monds-Watson has released a remarkably worldly and mature record for Rough Trade. It’s been four years, the woman behind Soak having taken some well-deserved time off from recording and touring. She moved from Derry, North Ireland, to the perennial musical hot spot of Man...

I first met Shunsuke Aoki on a trip to Tokyo last year. The roboticist’s work fascinated me. From its brain-controlled cat ears and a robotic pillow with a tail that wags as you pet it, to more serious devices for older family members, Aoki’s Yukai Engineer has created some utterly fascinating products. On a recent trip to New York, Aoki and I sat down at Brooklyn cafe to discuss Aoki and Yukai’s...

In 2015 Carriers became Lauren Weinstein’s most critically acclaimed work to date. The five-part webcomic series found the cartoonist winning widespread recognition and a number of awards, including The The Society of Illustrators’ Gold Medal.  Weinstein’s work has never shied away from the personal, but motherhood has found her examining her own life even more intently than earlier work. The seri...

The band calls it “dog.” It’s an ever present quest to get heavier, and with each subsequent record, Health’s members demand more of it. Other groups that have been doing this for nearly 15 years might have slowed down or mellowed out, but for Health, there’s always a need for more dog. These days, John Famiglietti finds himself spending more time behind a computer screen than an electric bass. In...

Beulah hit like a tidal wave, marking a swift end to John Paul White’s music hiatus. It was a well-deserved break after the dissolution of the Grammy Award winning duo, the Civil Wars, but real life could only key the music at bay for so long. With his latest album due out this week, White reflects on Beulah as kind of an anomaly, an album that came almost effortlessly. The Hurting Kind, on the ot...