Customer Reviews

We All Die Alone

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A flocked collection of the great works and influences of the most important visual cultural satirist of our time. This is the book Newgarden fans have been waiting for (since most Newgarden fans have been personally contacted by Mark himself to tell them that this book was on it's way). And for those philistines who've never heard of Mark Newgarden, I can only say, run, don't walk to the "add to shopping cart" button, for this book will change your life. Or at least point out why Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy" was funny in a way it was never intended to be.
Designed to manic perfection by Helene Silverman and thoughtfully edited by some guy named Dan, it's an amazing collection of Newgarden's cartoons, Topp's work and personal detritus that paint a portrait of an artist whose work is impossible to classify, yet impossible to resist.
And did I mention that the book's cover is flocked?

Buy this book and get three books in one:

1. Collected works by Newgarden. Often plagiarized for his fresh perspective and unique voice, (to quote a pizza box lid:) the original is still the best!

2. Collected works of Newgarden.
His impeccable taste in the jetsam of popular culture is legendary. You will see cool stuff from this collection handsomely displayed by crackerjack designer, Helene Silverman.

3. Pillow.
If you don't mind waking up with little black flecks all over your face.

Actually, straight up brilliant. Better than you can imagine. I thought I liked Mark Newgarden but I realize now that I love him. The funny thing is this isn't a joke. Newgarden's stuff is strange and beautiful in a way that I find irresistible - he uses recursion and self-consciousness as an engine for travelling somewhere instead of an excuse for remaining still. The surprise for me in this book was how good much of the writing is: long, wonderful, clattering prose that works like a rimshot sampled and timesliced and looped into perfect little pocket symphonies for the kidders.

Here's the punchline: guys like Newgarden make this kind of stuff because they're scared of loneliness and scared of death. They think if they can open up the infinite machinery of language and pictures and jam a laff into the gears maybe they can gag time for one square second, and slip under, and through. And sometimes they can. And sometimes we can too. Heh.

This is a collection of cartoons, jokes, trivia, helpful tidbits and various other tidbits that date from about 1983 to the early 1990s. These include cartoons that he published for several years at the New York Press as well as material published elsewhere.

His work can't really be assigned to a little niche. unless you count the big noses that he often puts on his characters. Still I don't know that big nose humor is one of the standard classifications. Some of the work you will find here is fully, some shocking, some may offend, Mr. Newgarden's work ranges across a wide slice of our world.

This book is set to please his fans who see them rarely any more, and to introduce him to an entirely new set of friends.

Mark Newgarden, We All Die Alone (Fantagraphics, 2005)

I was in my late teens during the glory days of RAW, and many of my friends were huge fans of the magazine. I was always sort of ashamed to admit I never quite got it. But then Maus came out, and I could grok Art Spiegelman, who was one of the driving forces behind RAW, so I figured I'd just missed something.

Now comes We All Die Alone, a full-length from one of RAW's other seminal contributors, Mark Newgarden. And while there are some pieces in here that really hit me right, I have to say that a lot of the time I still just don't get it. This despite Dan Nadel's fantastic introduction, which demystifies the Newgarden canon, as it were. And really, some of this is great stuff. The Little Nun? Genius. Em is endearing, in an odd way. There's a great deal of it, however, that just doesn't strike me as funny. It's not that I don't get it; twenty years on, this stuff makes a lot more sense to me than it used to (and at the time, shamefully, I didn't recognize a lot of the archetypes and stereotypes against which Newgarden was working). It's just that, well, I don't find some of it funny. Your mileage may vary, of course. But there's no denying that when Mark Newgarden is in the zone, he hits them out of the park on a regular basis. ***