Norman Pettingill: Backwoods Humorist - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606993194 ISBN 13: 9781606993194

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2010

Synopsis

A true outsider great, collected for the first time.

Norman Pettingill is a true underground cartoonist, known and admired by a small coterie of cartooning connoisseurs, but completely unknown in the wider world.

Norman Pettingill was an avid trapper and fisherman from Northern Wisconsin, and a self-taught artist. In 1947, at the age of 51, he created hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings and marketed many of them as postcards, printing and distributing them himself. His cartoon drawings were relatively huge and his postcards, therefore, had to be uniquely over-sized at 7” x 10”. He combined a gift for the fine detail and verisimilitude of illustration with the visual exaggeration and outrageous wit of cartooning.

By merging his fascination with nature and backwoods culture with his wild sense of humor, he depicted an out-of¬control hillbilly wonderland of talking grizzlies, dancing morons, nightclubs, giant mosquitoes, tumble-down shacks, pipe smoking grannies, flying skunk fur, google-eyed drunks, hilarious hunting mishaps and moonshine soaked fishermen! Pettingill’s world is reminiscent of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, but Pettingill’s hillbilly heaven is made grittier and more tangible by his obsessive penwork and the attention he gives to each teetering outhouse, every overflowing spittoon and each wiry hair growing out of a mountain man’s warty face. He reveled in exposing the commercialization of outdoor activities, debunking the romance of a woodsman’s life, and de-mythologizing the expertise of the outdoors-man. His landscapes and drawings of wild animals could be breathtakingly wondrous, and even his most grotesque depictions of hillbillies were fused with a love and respect for the rituals of a primitive life in the boondocks.

This book is the first published retrospective of Pettingill’s work, containing over a hundred of the artist’s best and rarely seen drawings, printed in an oversized format. 144 color illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Gary Groth is the co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. He lives in Seattle.

Johnny Ryan was born in Boston, MA, and lives in Los Angeles, CA.  He is the co-creator and co-executive producer of the Nickelodeon TV series Pig Boat Banana Cricket.

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb is the author of numerous comic works and one of the pioneers of underground comics and arguably one of the most famous cartoonists in history. His books include The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, and many more. He lives in the south of France with his wife, the artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1606993194
• ISBN 13: 9781606993194
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136
• Editor: Groth Gary