Peter Kuper
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In 1979 Peter Kuper co-founded the political graphics magazine World War 3 Illustrated and remains on its editorial board to this day. He has taught at New York's School of Visual Arts since 1986 and Parsons school of design and is also an art director of INX a political illustration group syndicated through the web at inxart.com.
Peter has done covers for Time and Newsweek and his illustrations and comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, Harpers, Virginia Quarterly Review as well as MAD where he he has been writing and drawing SPY vs. SPY every month since 1997.
He has written and illustrated dozens of books including Comics Trips an illustrated journal of an eight- month trip through Africa and Southeast Asia. Other works include Mind's Eye, The System, Theo and the Blue Note, a children's book and SPEECHLESS, a coffee table art book covering his career up to 2000.
He has done adaptations of Franz Kafka's work including The Metamorphosis and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. His wordless graphic novel Sticks and Stones, won the New York Society of Illustrators gold medal and his autobiography Stop Forgetting To Remember will be translated into Spanish and French this year.
Peter lived in Oaxaca, Mexico with his wife and daughter from 2006-2008, Diario De Oaxaca is a compilation of his sketchbooks and writing about the experience. More of his work can be seen at www.peterkuper.com.
For an interview with Peter Kuper from GRITtv, please play the video below:
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Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico
By Peter Kuper
Publisher: PM Press and Sexto Piso Editorial
ISBN: 978-1-60486-071-9
Published Sept. 2009
Format: Hardcover
Page Count: 208 Pages
Size: 9.25 by 6.5
Language(s): English and Spanish
Subjects: Art, Politics
$29.95
Painting a vivid, personal portrait of social and political upheaval in Oaxaca, Mexico, this unique memoir employs comics, bilingual essays, photos, and sketches to chronicle the events that unfolded around a teachers’ strike and led to a seven-month siege.
When award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper and his wife and daughter moved to the beautiful 16th century colonial town of Oaxaca in 2006, they planned to spend a quiet year or two enjoying a different culture and taking a break from the U.S. political climate under the Bush administration. What they hadn’t counted on was landing in the epicenter of Mexico’s biggest political struggle in recent years. Timely and compelling, this extraordinary firsthand account presents a distinct artistic vision of Oaxacan life, from explorations of the beauty of the environment to graphic portrayals of the fight between strikers and government troops that left more than 20 people dead, including American journalist Brad Will.
Praise
“Kuper is a colossus; I have been in awe of him for over 20 years. Teachers and students everywhere take heart: Kuper has in these pages borne witness to our seemingly endless struggle to educate and to be educated in the face of institutions that really don’t give a damn. In this ruined age we need Kuper’s unsparing compassionate visionary artistry like we need hope.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“An artist at the top of his form.” —Publisher’s Weekly
"Kuper shows drawings from the sketchbook he kept during a two-year stint in Oaxaca. His attempt to escape the last years of the Bush Administration led him to relocate to a town that turned out to be under martial law, in an area plagued by riptides, ecotourists, and stray dogs, all faithfully—and hilariously—documented here." —New Yorker
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Peter Kuper's Diario de OaxacaBy Brian Heater
The Daily Crosshatch
A sketchbook is a secret thing, a collection of unfinished and often times abandoned ideas never intended for public consumption—at least not in their current state. It’s a private space for honing one’s craft and workshopping, separating good ideas from those best left unexplored...
Even when Kuper’s experiments prove less successful, however, the book is a downright stunning—and thoroughly engaging—read. Proper sketchbook or no, Diario de Oaxaca is one of the strongest travelogues this medium has produced in recent memory.
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Politics, Art and Activism in Oaxaca
By Sasha Watson
Publishers Weekly
Peter Kuper left the United States in 2006 in search of some peace and quiet. Instead, the award-winning cartoonist found a strike, a government crackdown, and a political storm in Oaxaca. True to the form that led him to co-found the political graphics magazine World War 3, Kuper soon started drawing and writing about what he was seeing around him. The result is Diario de Oaxaca, A Sketchbook of Two Years in Mexico. With text in both English and Spanish, the book is a chronicle in sketches, writing, and photographs, of Kuper’s time in Oaxaca and what he saw during the political turmoil of those two years.
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Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca By Peggy Roalf
DART: Design Arts Online
When Peter Kuper, the cartoonist widely known for his Spy Vs. Spy strip in MAD magazine, told me that he was moving his family to Oaxaca City, Mexico three years ago, I asked if he would be interested in posting stories for DART. Without hesitation, he agreed, and his first article appeared on November 10, 2006. The last story, Oaxaca Journal V. 14, was published in June 2008.
Next week, Peter will celebrate the publication of Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. Here’s a report on the chat we had by email this week about his experience.
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Humanity, Glorious and VileBy Carlo Wolff
The Boston Globe
January 3, 2010
The origins of life, humans bent on logic, political strife, the little disturbances that make us itch, and family dysfunction preoccupy the best recent graphic novels. Despite great differences in style and attitude, all delight in presenting fresh ways of seeing the world.
Diario de OaxacaBy Bruce Jensen
Library Journal
In 2006, illustrator Kuper moved from New York to the impoverished but ethnically and historically rich southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, bringing his wife and pre-teen daughter. The region was wracked by a massive teachers’ strike that made headlines worldwide, by the corruption of the state’s notorious governor, and by conflicts in the streets involving tens of thousands of protesters and troops—an interesting place for a politically minded artist to be. Kuper has done covers and other illustrations for a host of major topical publications including TIME, Newsweek, the Progressive, and the New York Times, and has for more than a decade drawn the “Spy vs. Spy” comic series for MAD Magazine. This is the appealing product of his two years in Mexico. Kuper’s diary entries, paired with a side-by-side translation into Spanish, help set the context for the 150-odd pages of paintings, sketches, cartoons, and collages that are the highlight of this book. Kuper’s offbeat eye and his MAD sensibility make for some striking images—comical ones, too, such as his Day of the Dead tribute to the Peanuts gang, which shows the skeletal dog Znupé digging through a boneyard while his Charlie Brown ruminates about death. Fans of comics and art lovers will appreciate Kuper’s unusual take on a remarkable place. Recommended for libraries, particularly those with graphic art and design collections, as well as general bookstores.—Bruce Jensen, Rohrbach Lib., Kutztown, PA
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Diario de OaxacaBy Michael C Lorah
A warning: this book missed Diamond's cutoff numbers, so you may have a hard time finding it in your local comics shop. But it's worth the extra effort to track down a copy. Peter Kuper, co-founder and co-editor of "World War 3 Illustrated" and current author of "Mad"'s "Spy vs. Spy", spent two years living in the southern Mexican state Oaxaca, arriving just in time for an annual teachers' strike in the cause of increased wages to turn violent, leaving dozens of people dead.
Kuper has long been among the most politically engaged and stylistically distinctive artists working in comics, and both qualities take center stage here. This dazzling annotated sketchbook recounts two years Kuper and his family spent living in Oaxaca, Mexico. Anticipating a sojourn from American politics, Kuper instead found himself in a city roiled by a teachers' strike that was violently suppressed by the regional government. He recorded his observations in his sketchbook and in illustrated letters home, crisply reproduced in this bilingual (English and Spanish) book. Kuper's facility with diverse art media shines in early pages covering political action, as colorfully penciled protestors stand against rigidly inked military barricades set against the lush backdrops of Oaxaca. As the populist forces are rapidly suppressed, Kuper records a panoply of further visual impressions: beaches, stores, dogs, vendors, ancient ruins, street art and many, many insects. Throughout, Kuper's letters, rooted in personal observation but clearly intended as eyewitness reports for public consumption, provide helpful context. And if his increasingly profuse style mixing suggests a departure from earlier visual in the book, the final observations about a beautiful, merciless natural order obliquely ratify the political convictions that open the book. (Sept.)
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Diario De Oaxaca: a Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico
ForeWord Magazine
Kuper’s hardcover opus Diario de Oaxaca, excerpted briefly in Wordless Worlds, is not as distant as it might appear at first glance. Peter Kuper is probably stuck with his best known credit, “Spy vs Spy” in Mad magazine, at least until this publication (in its second half-century and now reduced to quarterly appearance) goes out of business. Kuper inherited the spy piece from another era of Mad, and it has been noticeably wordless all these decades (Kuper took over it over in 1997). The author of arguably the only pantomime strip in widely-distributed comic art, Kuper explored the wordless form throughout his career in graphic novels like The System and Sticks and Stones. With Diario, his sketchbook journal from two years of living in Mexico, he is the observer removed not by silence so much as a keen awareness of his personal status: as visitor.
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