Cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein, 27, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the illustrator of the graphic novel Camp Midnight. He graduated from Wesleyan University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he plays in the band Wet Leather.

You grew up in the Los Angeles area. What’s your favorite fictional representation of your hometown?

Bojack Horseman’s been pretty great. I consider it to be one of the more realistic interpretations of LA that I’ve seen, just because LA feels like a surreal animal land.

I think E.T. takes place in Encino, which is where I grew up. There’s that shot where he first lands, and you see the city, which is a view that I sometimes would have driving to school.

Was it always your dream to be a cartoonist?

It was almost always my dream to be a cartoonist. I wanted to be an astronaut— I don’t know how I reconciled that with my fear of flying. But I guess I just thought that space was different. Then I saw the play Taps with my family, and I wanted to be a professional tap dancer. Then I wanted to be in the NBA.

Then I started drawing basketball players and drawing everything, and I was not very athletic or tall. And so my backup dream was to be a comic book artist.

A lot of dreams had to be crushed for you to be a cartoonist!

Yeah. My NBA dream was deferred, but pretty much from nine or 10 onward, I was reading MAD Magazine and Spider-man and dreaming of being a cartoonist.

I was bar mitzvahed, and my theme was superheroes. So that’s how long I’ve wanted to do this.

What was the Torah portion at your bar mitzvah?

It was Sukkot. I went to Jewish day school, so I learned Hebrew… I read seven times from the Torah. I had all this energy and ambition when I was 12, and that’s where I put it.

There were giant inflatable crayons at the party. And I don’t really like sweets, so there was a fake cake. It was a cake you couldn’t eat, with superheroes on it, that I just kept. It was at my family friend’s restaurant, so there was a lot of food. But in retrospect, yeah, I was kind of a jerk to have this fake cake in front of people.

You’ve contributed to both The New Yorker and MAD Magazine. Which had the greater influence on you growing up?

I didn’t read The New Yorker until my senior year of high school. Laurie Lew, our A.P. Language professor, had us get a subscription.

MAD was pretty formative early on. I actually recognized some of the New Yorker cartoonists because they also contributed to MAD… And then I worked for MAD when I was in college, but I was also reading The New Yorker.

They occupy two different places in my life, and I think that MAD really warped my sensibility early on, and really informs the work that I do for The New Yorker.

Shortly after graduating from Wesleyan, you illustrated the graphic novel Camp Midnight. How did you and author Steven Seagle connect?

We had a mutual friend, a guy named Daryl Sabara. He’s an actor; he was the little boy in the Spy Kids movies… He does voices on Steve’s television show, and Steve has a weekly spa day with all the writers, in LA, where they do the pools in the morning and then in the afternoon they write scripts. And Daryl invited me one time.

What was it like networking in a spa?

Well, it was… intimidating. Steve is very established in the comics world, and he leads this group, and everybody seemed to know each other, and I was shy. And I met Steve. He said, “You make comics. Are you good?” And I said, “Yes!” And then he saw my work, and he said, “Let’s do a book together.”

As I remember, you came up with your first New Yorker cartoon at a Passover seder.

I think it was Rosh Hashanah. It definitely was, because it was in September.

What led you to draw a cartoon at that particular Rosh Hashanah?

It was more that Rosh Hashanah was beginning, and I needed to finish my batch [for The New Yorker]. And so that was one of the last cartoons I was doing in the batch. And I didn’t have any time, so I didn’t have time to stress about what a New Yorker cartoon should be about or what it should look like. So I just did something quickly, kind of stream-of-consciousness.

Jews have a long history with comics, from the Superman creators to New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. What makes cartooning the Chosen medium?

For Jews in general, I think, it’s a long and meandering answer that I couldn’t touch on as well as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay… That book has a lot to say about comics and Judaism and Superman as a Moses allegory. [Superman], who was created by Jews: Stan Lee was Stanley Lieber, Jack Kirby was Jacob Kurtzberg. All these Jewish creators making these superheroes with names like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, but these were all their secret identities, these very goyish names. But Superman was Kal-El, which is “All That Is God.”

[For me], I think there was something about the Jewish comedy sensibility that I recognized in MAD Magazine. I mean, they would use a lot of Yiddish terms. I went to Jewish day school; I heard all the old Jewish jokes. So there was something very familiar in MAD.

Something about the Spider-man story, too, about that particular brand of guilt that he always felt, felt familiar to me. There’s a kind of Jewish je ne sais quoi about a lot of the comics I grew up with.

You’ve drawn a number of comics about anxiety and OCD. At this point, would you say mental illness is more of a demon or a muse for you?

I don’t know that those two are mutually exclusive, that it’s a muse and a demon. All of the work that I make is about what I’m preoccupied with, so when I’m trying to find a joke—and I do feel like I’m finding these things, not creating them out of thin air—I sort of go through what’s on my mind. And this is what’s on my mind… It’s an intrusive thought, but it’s a thought nonetheless, and that becomes the foundation of what I’m working on.

Bob Mankoff has a great section in one of his books on cartooning about where different artists get their ideas. Where do yours come from?

When I was a little kid, I had a bunk bed, and I would look up at the wood above my head and all the patterns, and they would turn into these pictures. So I try and stimulate that for myself now. So I’ll take a blank page and make marks across the page until they look like images and turn into jokes.

Now that you’re a freelance cartoonist, what does a typical day look like? How often do you leave the house?

Not as often as I should. I went on a jog today, patted myself on the back. What did I do today? I draw for Amazon’s lit journal called Day One, so I did their cover this morning. And I did two Camp Midnight pages for the sequel. Now I’m working on a render of a New Yorker cartoon I sold. And tonight I will see my friend’s band play.

The New Yorker has published a few themed collections of cartoons, such as The Big New Yorker Book of Cats. If they made a book of your work, what would it be called?

I’ve always wanted to make something that I called a “neuromcomic.”

Neuroses plus romantic comedy? That sounds good.

Thanks, I’ve thought about it too much… There are a lot of breakup cartoons. I think breakups are funny. There are a lot of anxiety cartoons.

My first [New Yorker] cartoon is about somebody in a relationship revealing that they’ve been deceptive about who they really are. So I’d say that from cartoon number one the “neuromcom” theme was established.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Photo courtesy of Jason Adam Katzenstein. Comics by Katzenstein.

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Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

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Death, then deluge: I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading cartoonist Roz Chast‘s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? An intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis, it closely documents the decline and eventual deaths of Chast’s elderly parents—and it’s not pretty. As any dutiful daughter knows, you are definitely not allowed to write about your parents until they are no longer of this world. And if you have siblings, probably not even then. Chast, however, is an only child, and she here she presents a loving but unsparing examination of her parents, and herself.

The story is told through a combination of comics, handwritten pages, photos, and sketches. Chast’s style is harried, and drawings rarely seem drafted, perfectly channeling both the anxiety of living the events described, and the urgency of wanting to record all of it. The photos show up unexpectedly, and to great effect. Pages describing her hoarding parents’ apartment are followed by stark images of rooms filled with piles of browning and greying stuff, the decrepitude highlighted by the flash-photograph.

Visually, comics can get you to a place that feels, somehow, closer to the truth. People who draw their experiences are attempting to document everything as precisely as possible: this is what was said; this is what everyone was wearing; this is what the weather was like on that day. Chast is deeply observant, and a natural storyteller, and the flood of emotion and memory has a remarkable flow. Several comics (and some truly amazing photos of a young, grumpy, cat-eye bespectacled Chast), serve as flashbacks to her childhood, and these stories aren’t merely anecdotal. With the author now caring for her parents, every incident mentioned takes on a new layer of meaning.

Chast has made her name writing jokes on the themes of worry and disappointment, so it’s no surprise that even the funny parts are quite dark. Bizarre Alzheimer’s moments make for amusing stories, as do strange and horrifying incidents at the aged care facility her parents move to. When her mother insists that her (long-deceased) mother-in-law is trying to poison her, or another resident falls off her chair during mealtime, nobody is dismayed. Laughing is coping, because what else can you do? It’s an informative insight into the origin of Chast’s style, and her general philosophy.

Examined more than anything is the author’s relationship with her mother, a stubborn and often unfriendly woman whose New York home ran on fear–of the outside world, money, death, and disease. Mrs. Chast is equally stubborn in dying; she exists suspended between life and death for an extended period of time, and here, more than anywhere else, the trauma of Chast’s unhappy childhood revisits her. She seeks closure and answers, but rarely looks to her mother for comfort; alas, she has never been its source. The painful resolve in wanting to be a better mother than her own is evident here. She worked hard to leave and change, but here she is, back where it all started. These are the things you cannot escape, and this is what they look like.

Waiting with her newly-deceased mother, Chast writes “I didn’t know what do, so I drew her.” A sketch follows. Pages of similar sketches follow; simple pen drawings of her mother’s comatose, slack-jawed face, drawn in the days leading up to her passing. These are not comics. They are dated drawings documenting precisely what the author was looking at: a dying, elderly woman. Death, as usual, demands to be looked at in the eye. Chast tells us that her parents’ “cremains” live in her closet. They are together, they are quiet, and finally, she can contain them. So: death, then deluge, but then maybe peace.

Esther C. Werdiger writes, makes comics, illustrates, podcasts, and lives in New York. You can read her “League of Ordinary Ladies” series here.

The post In Cartoonist Roz Chast’s Memoir of Aging Parents, Laughing is Coping appeared first on Jewcy.

Forget David Letterman’s boring interviews (yeah, I said it) and Jimmy Fallon’s cutesy lip-synching shtick. If you like your late-night TV a little more cerebral, check out these live re-enactments of New Yorker cartoons on Late Night with Seth Meyers. They are fun and clever and just generally delightful! And New Yorker editor David Remnick (my Dream Seder Guest) is charming as Meyers’ over-explanatory straight-man:

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