Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995

This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack’s Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim,” he claimed.) Like a crowded apartment building, the volume’s chock-full of stubborn individuality, and the joy and pathos of urban life. Mack’s signature scratchy lines and animated expressions make each page a microworld that reveals New York in a glimpse, with the whirling street theater of shoppers, art lovers, politicians, pigeons, muggers, strippers, and more. The pope visits Battery Park as hundreds stand in the rain kvetching (“C’mon Pope, shake a leg!”); commuters jostle for space on the Long Island Railroad (“Forget about it, I’m going back to my office with two cans of martinis!”); roaches skitter through Lower East Side apartments; the NYPD hassles a driver in Manhattan and accepts a $40 bribe. Mack admits that not all the dialogue was verbatim after all, but it certainly sounds like it, echoing the period in its frank—sometimes off-color—talk and attitudes. Nostalgic New Yorkers, who may have a clip from Mack’s strips already on their fridge, will eat this up, as will those who love the city from afar. Agent: Liz Nealon, Great Dog Literary. (June)