Episode 614 – Caitlin McGurk

Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 614:
Caitlin McGurk

“I thought of myself as someone who really knew a lot about cartooning and had heard of everybody, but the fact that I’d never heard of Barbara Shermund at all was embarrassing and panic-inducing, but also inspiring.”

Comics librarian and curator Caitlin McGurk returns to the show to celebrate her amazing new book, TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics). We talk about Caitlin’s shock at her 2012 discovery of Barbara Shermund’s incredible gag-comics and illustrations in the archive of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, how her interest in Barbara evolved from blog posts to a museum exhibit to a book, the challenge of writing about someone who did no interviews or press and had no close relatives, and how easily women get erased from history. We get into the gestalt of Barbara’s fantastic linework and washes and her wry sense of humor, why Caitlin wound up writing an academic press version of the book before rewriting it for a trade publisher, the challenges & rewards of designing a book to showcase so much art, how Barbara helped create the look of The New Yorker in its early years, why Caitlin speculated (but not too much) about Barbara’s sexuality. We also discuss the malleability of history, how the Billy Ireland has changed in the 10 years since Caitlin & I last recorded, the pep talk she wished she could have gotten from our late friend Tom Spurgeon, time Al Capp (!!) advocated for allowing women into the National Cartoonists Society, the incredible story of tracking down Barbara’s remains and giving her a proper funeral 35 years after her death, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS!

“Let’s rewrite history, change the canon, and try to get people like Barbara to be part of the conversation, where they should have been all along.”

“I would not advise anyone to write a book about an artist with whom there are no interviews, almost no photographs, no surviving relatives or real documentation about them whatsoever.”

“Living in Ohio has added years back to my life that New York had scraped off of it.”

“I read the first version of the book that I’d written for an academic press, for that specific audience, and realized that this was not at all what I actually wanted to write, this was not the way I wanted to showcase her work. I wanted a coffee table book that would highlight her artwork, not my writing.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Caitlin McGurk is the Curator of Comics and Cartoon Art at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. Her scholarship and exhibitions center around the work of women in comics, alternative and underground comics, and early American comic strips. She lives in an old house in Columbus, Ohio.

Follow Caitlin on Instagram and the Billy Ireland blog and go listen to our 2014 conversation!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Caitlin by Brooke LaValley. It’s on my instagram.