Note: To see this same review with samples of the cartoons themselves, please go to https://medium.com/the-straight-dope/a-time-capsule-from-1970s-new-york-is-unear...

We are so wrapped up in the misery of the present, we have forgotten how much (and little) things have changed in just the last 50 years. So it was genuine culture shock to read Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies, about the life and times of New York City from the 1970s to the 90s, written and drawn as it happened.

It began with New York as the center of the universe. There was sex, drugs, rock, goth, hippies, grunge, jazz and singles bars. There were public telephones and long lines for the IRS. There was informed politics, informed ideology, squatters, homelessness, sex clubs, gay clubs, police brutality, police corruption, muggers, wise guys, hustlers, and everyone trying to live a life, whether theirs, or someone else’s.

What Mack did was go out there, and write down what he heard. Then he came back and drew eight or ten panels to go with what he had overheard. The results are funny and real snapshots of life and fashion. This collection of those cartoons from The Village Voice is a revelation. It’s a long lost civilization of visceral humanity, with some peculiar traits surviving to this day.

The fashions have clearly changed. No more flamboyant hats and coats, no bell bottoms or outrageously patterned pants. In a lot of ways, New York, despite the roaches, rats, mentally ill, protesters and the squatters of the 1970s, was far more alive and colorful than it is today. People still can’t afford to live there, but everything seems so serious and downbeat today compared to the 70s, when people lived life harder, it seems.

Stan Mack simply listened and observed. He then presented it all with his trademark exaggerated characters in their outrageous fashions, so that his readers could laugh at seeing themselves in the third person. The panels are enormously wordy, and the backgrounds match the words with their busy-ness. Nothing is simple or easy in Stan Mack’s New York. But somehow, it works.

My favorite cartoons are from the singles bars. What people said to each other in all seriousness is so absurd it has to be true. You can’t make this stuff up.

He didn’t just go to bars, he went looking for trouble. He visited squats in the East Village, theater auditions off-off-off Broadway, and happenings wherever they happened, from downtown to Columbia to The Met. He literally stumbled over a performance artist (The Rug Man), followed an activist as he escaped the cops, carrying his baby daughter in a sling, the filming of commercials, the recording of songs, and the moving of the Voice offices into modern, rigid and uncomfortable new digs. There’s a lecture (or not) with R. Crumb and Harvey Kurtzman, whose own cartoons share elements of Mack’s. (I also see plenty of Gahan Wilson in them, but that’s just me.) There’s EST, The Strand Bookstore, anti-nuke protests, the car impound bureau, get rich quick seminars, the pet ER, muggers, and the circus. He even attended Thanksgiving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. New York provided endless diversions called life.

As the decades rolled on, Real Life Funnies changed. Mack grew. His own experience gathering this intelligence led him to delve deeper. The cartoons changed from collections of individual if not independent panels, to single stories and profiles ten panels long. He began actually interviewing people, and recording their stories as much as transmitting their contexts. It got deeper and more personal. And in many ways, far less funny. Nearly all of the cartoons in the late 80s and 90s feature Mack meeting up with some character and walking along, indoors or out, getting the story: of their lives, of their plans, of their troubles. It was arranged, not spontaneous any more. He became by far the most regular character in his cartoons.

After 20 years, it got cancelled by a new Voice editor who presumably had the distance and perspective to see it wasn’t like the 70s any more. But thanks to this gem of an archeological dig, readers can relive it, or even just wonder at it. (There’s even a lovely appendix where Mack writes up a paragraph on each of the institutions or clubs he visited, so you can tell Oh Calcutta! from Plato’s Retreat or Charlie Brown’s). You just have to know it was all very real. It’s exactly the way it was in a very different era.

One thing I will tell you is that after such an intense read of these cartoons, I now look at everybody differently. Anyone I see on the street or at the gym, I look at them as if they were a Stan Mack cartoon. And they all fit. It has definitely changed me. And I’m sure I’m one of them.

David Wineberg ( )