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Peter Kuper: Conversations:

From the Conversations with Comics Artists series by Kent Worchestor…

Along with two dozen images, this volume features ten lively, informative interviews with Kuper, including a career-spanning lengthy new interview. The book also includes a quartet of revealing interviews with underground comix legends Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bode, Mad magazine publisher William Gaines, and Jack Kirby, co-creator of mainstream superheroes from the Avengers to the Fantastic Four. These interviews were conducted by Kuper and fellow artist Seth Tobocman in the early 1970s, when they were teenagers. 

Peter Kuper's graphic novels have explored the medium from comics journalism and autobiography to fiction and literary adaptations. Among the works examined herein are his books The SystemSticks and StonesStop Forgetting to RememberDiario de Oaxaca, and adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Kuper also discusses his recently published opus, the 328-page Ruins, inspired by his experiences in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Most of the interviews collected in this book are either previously unpublished or long out of print, and they address such varied topics as the nuts and bolts of creating graphic novels, world travels, teaching at Harvard University, Hollywood deal-making, climate change, Spy vs. Spy, New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Mad magazine, and World War 3 Illustrated.”

 

University Press of Mississippi // September 2016 // ISBN 9781496818454

6 × 9 in / 240 pages

About the Author

Kent Worcester's most recent books are Peter Bagge: ConversationsThe Superhero Reader (coedited with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer); A Comics Studies Reader(coedited with Jeet Heer); and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (coedited with Jeet Heer), all published by University Press of Mississippi.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

"Here is your book-on-comics for the week - a 240-page University Press of Mississippi collection of interviews with the World War 3 Illustrated co-founder and alternative press mainstay, among the most instantly recognizable illustrators active in the United States. Edited by Journal contributor and comics studies expert Kent Worcester."

- Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal (tcj.com) 

"Edited by Kent Worcester, author of several key books on comics (all published with Mississippi), this collection of interviews - well illustrated and usefully complemented with some intriguing historical documents - is an example of what a good interview book should be: not a mechanical alignment of more or less self-promotional statements,but a series of in-depth dialogue disclosing not only the career and the personal stance of the author but the position of his work and person in the larger cultural, social, and political field."

- Jan Baetens, Image & Narrative