A couple years ago Ivan Brunetti published a comic in the Reader in which a weepy, scruff-jawed character recounts his attempt to off himself with 300 aspirin dissolved in whiskey and Coke. “That’s a true story,” he says. “I put it to my mouth many times, but I couldn’t do it in the end.” He finds it a little disconcerting to look at that strip now that “everything’s just hunky-dory.” Without a trace of the sarcasm you might expect from a guy who’s notorious for his bile-soaked outlook on life–and for cartoons about baby killing, raunchy sex, and homicidal pranks–he adds, “I’ve got nothing to complain about anymore.”
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Lately Brunetti, who’s paid the bills working as a Web designer and freelance illustrator over the years, has been busy curating an exhibit called “The Cartoonist’s Eye: Artists Use the Comics Medium to Tell Real Stories,” opening at Columbia College’s A + D Gallery this week. He says he thinks of the show, which features more than 50 cartoonists from Charles Schulz to R. Crumb to Daniel Clowes, as a “metaphor” for the book he’s almost finished editing, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, due in a year from Yale University Press. He also has a gig teaching graphic novel writing at the University of Chicago and a similar class at Columbia. And he’s getting married in November.
Brunetti practiced Buddhism for several years. He credits it with helping him more than any of the meds he’s tried–and he says he’s tried them all. But his friend Chris Ware gets the credit for keeping his cartooning career alive. Brunetti had admired Ware’s work but only felt comfortable calling him up to ask a technical question after signing on with Ware’s publisher, Fantagraphics, in the late 90s. Soon they were hanging out regularly. These days they gab on the phone a lot. “We’re like a couple of old ladies,” he says, “calling each other to commiserate about this thing we’ve devoted our lives to.”
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