Notes from the Nemenator

Check out The New Press’s latest, a graphic novel adaptation of Stud’s seminal oral history project documenting people talking “about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.”

Why?

Studs, the Chicago-based daddy of oral history, and the New Press, an awesome NYC nonprofit publisher,  have been working together for years. Studs died last fall, at the ripe old age of 96; this is a great tribute.

Harvey Pekar, the comic genius of “American Splendor” fame, scripted many of the chapters.

Paul Buhle, the editor of the volume, has been promoting oral history for decades and trained a legion of historians himself; he’s retiring from 35 years in the American Civilizations department at Brown University this spring.

The chapter about Beryl Simpson, Airline reservationist, was illustrated by the Nemenator herself. It was an honor to work Pekar’s blue-ballpoint stick figures and scrawls into a something a little more “polished.”

More info here.

UPDATE: May 1, International Worker’s Day, marks, appropriately enough, the official launch of “Working.” See some more coverage in the LA Times and The Boston Globe