>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> My name is Michael Cavna. I'm with The Washington Post, the "Comic Riffs" blog and graphic novel reviewer. This is, you are witnessing history or part of history because this is the first ever graphic novel night for the National Book Festival. And if you like doing this in this venue instead of the Mall and having this at this cool event at night, feel free to make your voice heard. And my Twitter handle is @comicriffs, so you can go there. But I do want to say, if you are here this is being recorded, so you may, and if you're here you may end up on film. So our next, the person I want to bring up, his name is Warren Bernard. He is Executive Director of Small Press Expo, which is coming up next month, September 13 and 14, here in North Bethesda. It's the 20th year. It's an incredible expo. I strongly, strongly urge you: if you love comics, especially indie comics, go. It's a blast. And he also is key in how we put together this night. He's key with the Library of Congress and the Book Festival, and he was personally responsible for helping to bring Gene Luen Yang and Bryan Lee O'Malley and our next guest here. So he's just, he's a force as a comic scholar and as a connector of what's important in making sure they come to D.C. He's the guy, so let me bring up Mr. Warren Bernard. [ Applause ] >> God, that was embarrassing. Anyway, I'm very happy to be here to introduce Liza Donnelly. Liza has been a cartoonist for The New Yorker for many long years. She's part of a power couple. Her and Michael Maslin are the only known married New Yorker cartoonists that there are, and between them, they've done some volumes of mixing of both of their cartoons. Liza's done 12 or 13 books, I believe, of cartoon compendiums. She's done children's books. She's spoken at the United Nations. She's worked with the State Department, with comics, and interestingly enough, just a couple of days ago she was nominated for the Thurber Prize, which is the only prize in the United States for written humor. She's one of three finalists this year. So without any further ado, we, yeah, give her a big hand, Liza Donnelly. Oh, and by the way, her new book, Women on Men, okay, everyone should go and buy a copy. [Inaudible] >> Thank you, Warren and Michael. Two great cartoon supporters. These guys are great. We need to have these people, and it's wonderful. And I'm really honored to be here for this National Book Festival. The Library of Congress is something that I've looked up to for all my life, so it just kind of gives me chills that I'm here doing this and being in historic graphic novel section. It's great. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Let me see if I can figure out this clicker. Okay. So, I'm going to get the handheld, which is where? And move down because I can't see the screen, and I need to see the screen. So I'm -- I'll just start talking. Oh, there it is. [ Inaudible ] Is it? Okay, there we go. So I'm a cartoonist and a writer, and it feels kind of funny to be in the graphic novels section because I'm not a graphic novelist. I do cartoons and I write books, but I'm very happy to be here. So as Warren said, my main home for cartooning is The New Yorker magazine. I've been there since 1979 drawing single-panel cartoons. And I'll show you some examples of my work. Can you read it? "Ice cubes down your back, $1.50." So my humor can be kind of silly, at times, just, you know, meaningless and silly. I picked this out because we're in Washington and it was supposed to be really hot. I'm in Washington. Or also a very meaningless and stupid, like this one, "Cat, anyone?" I mean, it's just kind of silly and I don't even know how I came up with this. Or puns, I sometimes use puns. He's saying, "Who ordered the special prosecutor?" So this I did back in the '90s, I think, when Bill Clinton was being special prosecuted to death. Do you remember that, any of you? So I use, I find a word in the culture and I plug it into a cartoon sometimes. This is a classic example of that. And I sometimes do cavemen drawings, too. We have these tools cartoonists use and you can plug things into scenarios. He's saying, "How about we just go to a cave and paint his image on a wall?" So it's like making a slight little commentary about creativity, like we're, many of us artists are pacifists. We really don't want to confront reality. We just go to our little caves and paint. So these are some examples of my work. And then there's the cartoons that are visual, that need to have a visual, that rely on the artwork. And this one is an example. It says, she's saying, this woman is saying to her friends, "Okay, everybody. Let's eat before the food gets dirty." So you needed to have the setting there really to make the joke work. You know, if I'd just shown her and a little bit of the scene it wouldn't have worked as well. So my kind of cartoons is a real song and dance between the words and the image. Let's see, what's next? And then I do some commentary on things that are going on in the culture. The young woman saying to her friend, "For my junior year abroad, I'm going to learn how to party in a foreign country." So this was picking up on some news stories about kids in college, of course, who just go over to France and drink wine for three months and then get a few, a few credits for it. So cultural commentary. And then political commentary sometimes. This one is, the woman's saying to the other woman, "I didn't protest this war, but I'll try to protest the next one." And this cartoon I did during the Iraq War when, I don't know if you remember when it first started, there were a lot of protests against being involved in that war. And it seemed to become a fashionable thing to do. And I was commenting, making fun of these types of people that would only do that because their friends were doing it, not out of conviction. And so my cartoons are often making fun of this demographic. And then there are some times I have cartoons that are even more political or more serious. A little girl is saying to her father, "Daddy, can I stop being worried now?" And I did this following 9/11, about three months after 9/11, which is, I think we were all feeling that way, like when is it going to stop? And it hasn't stopped, sadly. But basically -- this woman is saying, "Fun can happen to adults, too." So basically I just do cartoons that are fun. The New Yorker has been known for its cartoons, was founded in 1925, and it started out as a humor magazine, and it's known, much to the chagrin of the fiction people, it's known for its cartoons. People read the cartoons before they read anything else, so they tell me. But let me tell you a little bit about how I got to do what I do. I grew up actually here in Washington, D.C. during the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the assassinations, Nixon's resignation. You know, all sorts of turmoil was going on when I grew up down here. And so I think that that affected me subtly, like I really wanted to do something about the world, you know. And also I felt like I was drawing to try to figure out, try to figure things out. I was really shy and quiet, and this was my way of expressing myself. And it all started, ironically because I'm nominated for this Thurber prize, with this book. This book changed my life. I was home sick from school one day and my mother gave me a book, this book, and a pad, a stack of paper and a pencil and I started tracing. I'd been drawing already, but I started tracing James Thurber's cartoons. Anybody know, do you guys know his work? He's sort of become, he's becoming forgotten a bit, but he was -- his work was -- you can see his drawings. They're very simple and childlike. So for a seven-year-old, they're ideal for tracing. So I traced them, and I developed my own style. And I found -- this is an early drawing of mine -- I found that I could make people happy by drawing these funny pictures. I could make my mother happy, my father happy, and then eventually my schoolmates; I could make everybody smile. And I didn't have to, I didn't have to do much. I didn't have to speak. I was shy, so I didn't really want to speak. It was my way of feeling like I could fit in. I know that I heard one of the last speakers talk about feeling like an outcast, not being able to fit into the culture. And I felt that way, too. And I began to draw and draw and draw and draw, and I never looked back. It became my world. And it also was, for me, I felt like an outcast or an outsider because I was shy, but also because I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't a girly girl. I didn't want to wear dresses. I didn't want to, you know, wear pink. And eventually I didn't want to wear high heels. But being an artist, I could be who I wanted to be and the culture sort of accepted me. "Oh, she's an artist, that's okay. She can dress like that." So, or she, you know, I was able to redeem myself with my drawings and feel like I was part of something. And these are my tools. I use an old-fashioned crow quill pen and an inkwell, but you'll see later in my talk that's shifting a little bit. So, you know, what's this? You're wondering, "What the heck is this?" This -- I went to college, I went to liberal arts college, and I was drawing all the time, and I, and when I was in college my grandmother knew somebody who worked at The New Yorker. And we had The New Yorker around the house and I started looking at the cartoons and thinking, "Well, maybe I could do this. Maybe there's something here for me." So I had some drawings and I wrote this woman who worked at The New Yorker. She was the city reporter. And I said, "Do you, would you mind showing them to the art editor?" And she said, "No, no, that's fine. I'll do that." She said, "I've been talking to Lee Lorenz and asking him why there aren't more women in this business, did he know why that was. And also," she said, "he's always looking for new talent." This was in 1974 or something like that. And he was a brand new editor there, cartoon editor. And when she said that to me it's like, it dawned on me, like a woman cartoonist. You know, I just thought it was a cartoonist. I didn't think of myself as any gendered cartoonist. But I think it piqued my curiosity that maybe, since there aren't many women in the business, maybe I had a chance, you know, maybe there was something there. So I started submitting -- you know, that submission didn't lead anywhere. I didn't sell anything, of course. But when I finished college and moved to New York, I got a job at the Natural History Museum. I started submitting cartoons to The New Yorker. And within two years I sold this cartoon, which is a really strange cartoon and I felt kind of embarrassed about it because most people didn't understand it. But I was really, really happy to have sold. It was a dream come true. What it is is a cone, and sphere, and a cylinder, which is, in art, I just finished, I got an art degree so I knew these things. It's Cezanne's three elements in art. So the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder, and a TV set. So, so that's the first one I sold. And then this was the next one I sold, and this is the first one they printed. And it's a multi-paneled one. The guy's walking down the street and then he stops and he thinks to himself, "Maybe I don't pet dogs enough." And then he turns back around and he pets the dog and he walks off. So it's a very subtle and simple and quiet cartoon. My early cartoons were very quiet and also had very few words. My cartoons starting out, I was suspicious of words. But then, this is the third cartoon I sold and it's, the guy's reading his fortune and it says, "You will find love and happiness and vote for Fritz Mondale." This is when Fritz was running for president and everybody was like, "Oh, okay, Fritz Mondale, okay." Actually the Mondales called The New Yorker to buy this cartoon, but they didn't end up buying it. And I was really excited about this because when I was growing up in D.C., as I told you, I really wanted to be a political cartoonist. You know, I looked at Herblock and I really wanted to change the world. I wanted to help the world. But I didn't think, I don't have enough opinions. That's one reason why I looked to The New Yorker. I thought eventually, I thought I couldn't do the kind of thing Herblock was doing, but I could do the kind of thing The New Yorker was doing, which was quiet pokes at politics. So when I sold this, I was on Cloud Nine. And then here's another example of an early cartoon. It's hard for you to read, but this woman gets on, it's a sequential, woman gets on a subway and she's knitting and by the time she gets off she's knit a sweater and she gets off it, so. The editor at the time, William Shawn, liked sequential cartoons and he liked captionless cartoons, so I was lucky. So let me talk about my books for a few minutes. These are my children's books. I don't know if some of you, maybe you've seen them. They were in print in the '80s and '90s. And, thank you, that's great. They were really fun to do. All about his little boy and his obsession with dinosaurs and his dog. My dog, by the way, his name is Bones, was heavily influenced by Snoopy. I grew up with Snoopy and I didn't think of that at the time, but I looked back and I said, "Oh, yeah, that's Snoopy." They're back, they're actually being republished on eBooks now, if anybody's interested, if you have grandchildren or kids you want to get the books for. And then I did a series of books. The first one, Mothers and Daughters, I'd just given birth to my first child, who was a girl, who is a girl, and I was terrified to have a daughter. I just thought, "What kind of complications are we going to run into here?" So I thought of this idea to have a book of cartoons about mothers and daughters by women cartoonists. So it's a collection of cartoons by women about their mothers or about being mothers. And then, Ballantine Books was the publisher at the time, they wanted to do Fathers and Sons. So I did that with my husband, and we had men cartoonists doing cartoons about fathers and sons. And then Michael and I said, "What the heck? Let's do one that we would just get the money." So we did Husbands and Wives, which was all about marriage, by Michael and myself. And then Michael and I, this was in the '90s, I guess, must have been. We did a book called Call Me When You Reach Nirvana, which is all about the New Age movement, if you guys remember when that became popular. It was all about people -- but now it's more commonplace, people doing yoga and burning incense and things like that. And Michael and I also did another book more recently called Cartoon Marriage. There's a reference, I don't know if some of you comic nerds out there will see the reference to Krazy Kat there, throwing the brick. That was fun to do. It didn't break up our marriage. It also, this is exciting, this got optioned for television for a sitcom for ABC, but it didn't get picked up, sadly. But here's an example of one of my cartoons in the book. "Remember the good old days when we faced in the same direction?" And then with each chapter, I wanted to show you this, Michael and I did graphic narratives. I think this was the first time I'd ever done a graphic narrative. I don't quite remember. But we worked on this together. We actually wrote it together and drew it together, so some of the drawings are mine and some of them are his. Our styles are pretty similar and our sense of humor is similar, too, although this one, I think, is, what's this about? Oh this, this graphic narrative is about fighting. And this is the one we had the most trouble with, writing about how we fight. So this next book called Funny Ladies was a big turning point for me, or at least what led up to it was a big turning point for me in my career. In 1999, I was invited to be on a panel of cartoonists at the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists' annual convention. I'm not a member, because I'm not, you know, I'm sort of not an editorial cartoonist, although I think I am. And the panel was all women. I was invited to be on there to talk about why there weren't more women. So I found myself confronted with this fact again and started thinking about why, "Why the heck is this? Why aren't more women doing this?" So I went to the panel and it was, in preparation for the panel I got to think more about it, but I also was on that panel with four or five other women. And I looked out into the room and the room was a bit smaller than this, but it was packed to the gills. And I looked and I saw that every single person in the room was a man. And it was a visual like, "Ugh. Oh yeah. This is really bizarre." So it got me to thinking more, and I decided to research more, and I started looking at The New Yorker. And I thought, "Well, why not look at The New Yorker and see what the situation with women there is?" And I went, they have archives at the New York Public Library, and I spent some time researching and I found that there were women cartoonists at the magazine in 1925 when the magazine was founded, at the very beginning. Helen Hokinson is one of them. She sang, I don't know if you can see it. It's kind of hard. It's very sketchy. "Evangeline, that is not the way to try on a coat." So Hokinson, as did a lot of the artists of the time, made fun of the older generation. That's what that's about. But there were women cartoonists there in 1925, and there were about eight of them that continued on for the next five to 10 years. And then the women who were drawing cartoons just sort of drifted off or died. And after the Depression and after World War II, during that time as well, they disappeared. So there were no women drawing cartoons at the magazine in the middle of the decade. And I wrote, I mean, I eventually wrote the book -- here's another cartoon by Barbara Shermund, who is one of my favorite cartoonists from the time. It's interesting, they put the caption up there. They were playing a lot with the layout of the magazine back then. She says, "I don't think he's abnormal. He's just versatile." And I think, this was probably published in 1926, I think she's making reference to homosexuality, which would be very interesting if that's the case. We'll never know for sure. But my theory in the book that I ended up writing, it's a history of the women who drew cartoons in the magazine from 1925 to 2000, my theory was that in the '20s, there was more creative freedom for women, there was more openness and women were moving to the city to become, to go into business, to go work in ways that they hadn't before, and also to become artists. So, and The New Yorker was open to the best artists in town and some of them were women, so they hired the women. And then with the war and the restrictions after the war and the conservativeness after the war and the conformity in the '50s, just didn't give the freedom for women to do that kind of thing. Didn't allow for women to do that kind of thing, to be funny, for one thing. And they dropped off, only to return in the '70s, during the second wave of feminism. So that's my theory is that the creativity allowed for, and the openness allowed for more women cartoonists. After that book I did this book called Sex and Sensibility because I wanted to do something that maybe was a little more mainstream. And this was a collection of women cartoonists, again, 10 of us, drawing and writing little essays about love and sex. So there was eight, eight of us were from The New Yorker and two editorial cartoonists. And that was fun to do. And then more recently this, I did this book, When Do They Serve the Wine?, which is going to be on sale out here, I think. After Sex and Sensibility, I began thinking about, I'm still thinking about women and cartooning and women in humor and I was teaching at Vassar at the time, teaching Women's Studies, and Hillary was running for president, I'm just thinking about feminism and women's issues and like why -- I'm teaching 20-year-olds, as I get older, why, you know, if we just communicated with each other, the generations, we could sort of change things, you know? Because when I was in my 20s and I became professional, I thought, "Well, you know, there's no need for feminism." I believed that in the 20s, in my 20s. I thought, "Everything's fine. Thank you, Gloria Steinem, we're going to be fine." And little did I know that that's not the case. So I think a lot of 20-year-olds think that. They just haven't, they just haven't had the experience. So if we communicate with each other and tell each other what's going on and why, you know, what I went through when I was 25, then things will get better. So I did this book about the decades of a woman's life from birth until 60s. This is the first cartoon, "Where it all begins," talking about genderization of everybody. And then this woman, "Mirror Talk." She's saying to herself, "If I wear this, will I have trouble in the street. Skirt too short? Am I showing too much? Why can't I get my legs thinner? Do I look young, fat, silly, hip? Shouldn't have eaten that bagel." So these are the things if, I'm sure men do the same, but women do it probably more than men. And then, so this cartoon, I just sold this recently to The New Yorker. She's saying to the clowns on the car, "Still not funny. Try jamming yourselves all together into the car." Women are funny. We are funny, and for some reason humor has been a male domain for forever. It's changing now. It's real exciting. It's changing a lot, but women are funny. So my next book I wanted to do about women making fun, being funny, and specifically women making fun of men. So this is what this book is about. And it all started with this cartoon, I think. She sang to him, "Some wine with your vest?" This is a cartoon I sold in the '90s to The New Yorker when Tina Brown was editor and this is, I didn't realize it, but this is when I began to have this snarky woman's voice. I wasn't aware that I was doing this, but Tina Brown was buying these cartoons. And I look back, I just, I look back on that and I say, "Oh, this is where it all started." This woman saying, "It would take more than your pleats to drive us apart, but not much more." See, you're laughing. The women. Men laughing, too, I hope. "I had a headache, too, but he went away." "You don't have to go to this party. It's men optional." So some of these cartoons are quiet and some are a little more aggressive. "Your chances of hailing a cab are better if you go to the curb." "I'm sorry. Was it your turn to lick the spoon?" "Is it painful?" "Can't you just scramble them?" Do you have, anybody married to somebody like this? I am, like, always the jokester. Can't just scramble the eggs. "If you plan to stay in this marriage, sign the pledge not to wear the tie." "That tie," sorry. This is actually related to something in the news. I forget what it was. Oh, pledges, signing pledges for some - it was not about ties, but. "It's too late in the summer and our marriage to toss a beach ball." That's kind of sad. Shouldn't, that's not true, that shouldn't be the case. "Now act like you like it." [ Laughter ] "I'll be in, honey, as soon as I rake the leaf." So this was me commenting on the man. This is not a woman speaking. Most of the cartoons in the book are women actually speaking. "I've dated 11 enigmas. I want an open book." So one of my favorite things to do is have women talk to each other. "I decided to marry Frank despite all the warning signs." Can you see he's got these things on his, like, "slacker," "petty," "lazy," "aloof," "drinker," "mean," "sad." "I never date," I'm sorry, "I never date. I'm too niche." This is really less about men and more about women. Niche was also a word being used in the news at the time. I forget what the actual event was. "I think I'd look better without you." There's one in here that's really kind of mean and I apologize ahead of time. It's not really, I'm not like that. "What wine do you recommend to throw in his face?" See, the thing with this book is I tried to really push myself to be a little bit more meaty and a little more - because I'm, I'm a nice person, but it's, sometimes it's more funny if you push it a little bit further. So I tried to push it further. And there's writing in this book, as well, and I tried - the writing is more autobiographical and talking about my experiences with humor and with men. "I love the idea of you, but not you." Oh, and this is the one, this is the one that's, I preface the one I'm going to show you is, I rarely use other people's ideas, but a friend of mine who's a professional writer had this idea that he, for a cartoon, and he gave it to me and said, "Do you want to use it?" I said, "Okay." And I'm not, I don't know, it's really, you'll see. "Some men aren't deceitful. Some men are dead." I did the cartoon and lo and behold, The New Yorker bought it and I'm like, "Oh, God. Oh, no." But there are women who talk like this, I'm sure there are. So it's not, I'm not, I'm not the woman speaking. It's, she's a cartoon character. "I hear men are out of fashion this fall." "Hey, you. Let's reduce the gender gap." So I'm trying to, you know, toward the end of the book I try to be a little bit more like let's all try to get along. "Okay, I'll let you win the battle if you let me win the war." So it's about communication. It's really not a battle. But I do want to say, this girl's saying, "Mommy, what did you do in the war on women?" Remember when that phrase was being bantered about? I don't see it as a battle between the sexes, but I do, I do see there is a war on women around the globe, around the globe and in certain states in this country. So I, as a woman and as a cartoonist, there's a part of me now that feels that I need to do this, I need to draw about this as much as I can just because I think humor is a great way to talk about issues that are difficult to talk about because you, you know, you can present the subject in a way people are drawn in by the cartoon and then they look at what's being said and they're like, "Oh, yeah." Maybe they'll think a little differently. I mean, I'm an idealist, so I hope that humor is a great way to start a dialog. I used it in my classes. It's a great way to get people to think about something they may not have thought about before. So I do cartoons on women's, women around the globe as much as I can, issues not just about the United States, but about other countries. Because also I think that the, for women, politics is a daily thing. It's a, it's a, we live a political reality, so if you do a cartoon like my kind of cartoons, it gets at the politics of an issue on a daily basis. It's not about wars, necessarily, it's not about leaders or battles or guns or, you know, those big issues. It's about a day to day life that needs to be changed. And I think humor's a great way to do that. This, you don't need to read this, but this is an example. I just want to show you that I'm doing a weekly political cartoon for Medium.com. They have a great new site. If you're cartoon junkies, it's called TheNib.com and it's all comic people and some political people and I do a weekly cartoon for them on politics and on women's rights. And it's, it's always sequential. So I'm doing something different now, a weekly sequential cartoon about politics. And I wanted to show you this also because my, my world is changing a little bit with the internet. I still do my cartoons for The New Yorker with pen and ink, scan it and send it in and they print it on paper. But I also do iPad drawings and these are examples of iPad drawings I did for The New Yorker during the Olympics. What I do is I react to what I'm seeing on the television and I just draw it quickly. Sometimes it's caricatures, sometimes it's these kind of things. They're three separate drawings that I put together in one page. And then I tweet them out. I tweet out these drawings and The New Yorker then collects them on their website. And that's really fun, and I'm doing that a lot. I did the final episode of Mad Men recently for The New Yorker. That's just an example. And I did, just the other day I did The Emmys. Sarah Silverman was there. So it's really fun, a new thing for me. I work on the iPad, but I'm also working on a Wacom tablet, as well. So things are changing in the cartoon world. And then I put this on the PowerPoint of me drawing. I'm also using videos on websites, showing people how I draw because I feel like cartooning is a, a very personal medium. It's a communication between me and you about, about what's going on in the world. And I love to use it with social media because it's a, it goes back to what I, how I started doing what I do. It's a way to make people happy. It's a way to talk to people. It's a way to communicate and I just love, I just feel so fortunate to be able to do what I do. So thank you. [ Applause ] Questions? [ Applause ] Two questions. We only have time for two questions. >> Okay. I was kind of interested. You did indicate, of course, that Thurber was your first influence, but when you were researching your book on funny ladies, did you go more than just New York or did you start looking at other issues of women and cartoons and such? >> Yes. >> Well, particularly I was interested because I noticed as you were showing the video I thought of Claire Bretecher. >> Oh yeah. Big influence on me. >> Well, that's what I was wondering. >> Claire Bretecher. Yes, I did, in researching the book I did look further afield, as well, and in the book there are some little sidebars on other, what was going on in comics, as well. But there's a woman who writes a lot about comics, Trina Robbins, she writes about women in comics. But, yeah, I mean, they sort of mirror each other, what was going on with comics and political - still not many women in political cartoons for some reason. Yes. >> Yes, there was something that happened to me once and I just always thought it would make a good cartoon and I never told it to anybody. I just thought I'd tell it quite quickly. I was walking together with a girlfriend and it was a very good time, very romantic time in our relationship. And I found a little baby shoe and I picked it up and put it in my pocket. And she said to me, "What are you doing?" And I said, "It's a nice shoe." And she said, "Put it down. There's only one of them." And I said, "No, I want to keep it." And she said, "Put it down. There's only one of them." So I put it down and I said, "If we have a baby with only one foot, then you'll be sorry." >> Yeah, that's funny. That sounds more like actually a comic strip with several episodes. >> Yeah, if you can make a cartoon about that, please feel free to, you know. >> Okay, well, I guess that's all the time we have unfortunately. Thank you very much. You guys were great. I appreciate it. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.