New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is hosting a book release party for Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt‘s Scarlett Takes Manhattan on Tuesday 21 July at 7PM. The reading and slide show are free to the public, but they request mature audiences only. There will also be a screening of Randy Gentle’s new documentary The Art of Molly Crabapple.
The book follows the rise of Scarlett O’Herring—dancer, fire-breather, courtesan—from “tragedy (her mother crushed by copulating circus elephants) through her grand entrance on the stage (accidental and sans costume) to her triumph as the fire-breathing queen of burlesque. It’s a sexy, decadent romp through the slums and palaces of New York’s Gilded Age.” Scarlett is “a character from Molly and John’s long-running web comic Backstage from the collective Act-i-vate.”
As Crabapple says, “It has Tammany Hall and bad politics and early-lesbian culture in it. And it’s very dirty.”
Crabapple, the illustrator, is an award-winning artist, author, and the founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a globe-spamming chain of alternative drawing salons. She learned to draw in a Parisian bookstore, and once sketched her way into a Turkish jail. Her art has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Marvel Comics, and on theatrical curtains, parade installations, and flyers littering the city of New York. In her free time, she likes coffee.
Leavitt, the writer, is a cartoonist, writer, illustrator, and Libra. His cartoons and illustrations have appeared in: The New Yorker, The Chronicle Review, The New York Press, and many other really, really impressive places. He lives in New York City.
Publisher Fugu Press was founded in 2008, and publishes books and comics for grown-ups. Scarlett Takes Manhattan is their first graphic novel.