I lived in Glen Cove first, and then in Great Neck when I was a little older. In this interview, Friedman talks engagingly and intelligently about his influences, obsessions, run-ins with the great and near-great, skirmishes with the unflattered subjects of his cartoon “tributes” and his painstaking cartoon technique, which gives his accounts of has-beens and never-weres a documentary realism that, in Robert Crumb’s words, captures “a certain flavor of sad old America.”ĭREW FRIEDMAN: I grew up on Long Island. Friedman has also anonymously reached impressionable youth via his projects for Topps Chewing Gum, including the already-infamous Toxic High card series, a revival of the seminal ’70s series, Wacky Packages (created by Art Spiegelman and other underground cartoonists) and gross-out novelties such as The Barfo Family. Originally consigned to the critically praised but obscure pages of RAW and Weirdo, Friedman’s work soon found its way into such mainstream venues as SPY, Details and the music-biz trade magazine Radio and Records, the latter finding Friedman’s brand of satire a little too corrosive for its clientele. Friedman’s comic sense embraces the pathetic, cast-off world inhabited by these so-called “stars.” His strips question the very existence of celebrities (without, let’s be thankful, doing the slightest bit of soul-searching or philosophizing in the process).
Beginning as a chronicler of forgotten and fading celebrities (such as Z-movie star Tor Johnson and I Love Lucy‘s “Fred Mertz,” William Frawley), Friedman’s world soon branched out to include contemporary non-entities such as crooner Wayne Newton and the litigious talk show host Joe Franklin. From the start, Friedman’s comics work has been provocative, assaultive and, most importantly, hysterically funny.
The Following Interview Appeared in The Comics Journal # 151, Which Came Out in July 1992.ĭrew Friedman’s work, much like that of his father, Bruce Jay Friedman (who authored the seminal black humor novels Stern and A Mother’s Kisses in the early ’60s), trades in the comedy of outrage and absurdity.
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