Peter Kuper

Peter Kuper‘s illustrations and comics have appeared in magazines around the world including Time, The New York Times and MAD where he has written and illustrated SPY vs. SPY every issue since 1997.

He is the co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated a political comix magazine and has remained on its editorial board since 1979.

He has produced over two dozen books including The System, Stop Forgetting To Remember, Speechless and Sticks and Stones, which won The Society of Illustrators’ gold medal.

Peter has also adapted Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and many of Franz Kafka’s works into comics including  The Metamorphosis, which is used in high school and college curriculums in the US and abroad.

Peter lived in Oaxaca, Mexico from July 2006-2008 during a major teachers’ strike and his work from that time can be seen in can be seen in his book Diario de Oaxaca, published by PM Press along with DrawnTo New York an illustrated chronicle of his three decades in New York City.

He has been teaching comics courses at The School of Visual Arts for 25 years and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.

More of his work can be seen at www.peterkuper.com

Peter Kuper: The Wall predicts Trumps plans in 90s cartoon

• Book events
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Praise

“Kuper is a colossus; I have been in awe of him for over twenty years. Teachers and students everywhere, take heart: Kuper has in these pages borne witness to our seemingly endless struggle to educate and to be educated in the face of institutions that really don’t give a damn. In this ruined age we need Kuper’s unsparing compassionate visionary artistry like we need hope.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Peter Kuper is undoubtedly the modern master whose work has refined the socially relevant comic to the highest point yet achieved.”
—Newsarama.com

“Kuper has long been among the most politically engaged and stylistically distinctive artists working in comics, and both qualities take center stage here.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Kuper’s] attempt to escape the last years of the Bush Administration led him to relocate to a town that turned out to be under martial law, in an area plagued by riptides, ecotourists, and stray dogs, all faithfully—and hilariously—documented here.”
—New Yorker

“In the hands of an illustrator with such creative gifts, Oaxaca is a brilliant dreamscape whose bugs and vegetation are as visually appealing as its protest graffiti and wild dogs.”
—World Literature in Review

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Praise

“Cartooning is an art that can be universally recognized and appreciated. The purest of this form is the wordless comic, where the cartoonist creates a strictly visual language. If done properly, it is capable of displaying a range of ideas and emotions that people all over the world are able to understand. It is comparable to the early days of silent films when actors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton only had gestures and facial expressions to tell their stories and convey complex feelings. Pantomime cartooning shares this limitation, yet the challenges are even greater. Not only are there no words to lean on, but there is also no movement. Every action and emotion in the story has to be conveyed through static images alone. Over the years there have been a few geniuses in this specialized art form. One of them is Peter Kuper. Long may his pencil, pen and brush silently flow.”
–Al Jaffee, legendary Mad cartoonist

“Though it has no word balloons or thought bubbles, The System is filled with so much urban clatter, you’ll want to seal your windows shut. Kuper uses his trademark spray-paint/stencil art to send us careening through a kinetic New York landscape, jump-cutting from a crooked cop to a stripper, panning from a homeless guy to a cell-phone yuppie. The star of the story is the dark city itself, and the point is how money ties all its occupants—whether they know it or not—together.“
—Gavin Edwards, Details

“Like a slow-motion footage of a .45 slug drifting through a gun barrel, Peter Kuper’s The System gives urban tragedy an almost graceful inevitability. The System intertwines the lives of several instantly identifiable New York City archetypes (drunken subway motormen and drug-dealing beat cops) into a dreamily suspenseful tale of corruption and ambition. Somehow Kuper orchestrates this Robert Altman-esque black comedy without any dialogue, utilizing his signature color-stencil-art style to depict a class-conscious saga superior in depth and emotion to a year’s stockpile of the New York Post.“
—Robert Morales, Vibe

“This is our world, folks, as it exists right now, teetering on the brink of something we can’t quite imagine, laid out by Peter Kuper as a flow chart of parallels and coincidences and connecting fibers so powerful and occult that a pin dropped in a back street creates shock waves that make skyscrapers tremble. The System is a silent epic in the tradition of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse and Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man—paranoid, yes, and with good reason.
—Luc Sante, author, Low Life

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Praise

“World War 3 Illustrated is the real thing. . . . As always it mixes newcomers and veterans, emphasizes content over style (but has plenty of style), keeps that content accessible and critical, and pays its printers and distributors but no one else. If it had nothing more than that kind of dedication to recommend it, it would be invaluable. But it has much, much more.“
—New York Times

“Reading WW3 is both a cleansing and an enraging experience. The graphics remind us how very serious the problems and how vile the institutions that cause them really are.“
—Utne Reader

“Powerful graphic art and comic strips from the engaged and enraged pens of urban artists. The subjects include poverty, war, homelessness and drugs; it’s a poke in the eye from the dark side of America, tempered by what the artists describe as their ’oppositional optimism.’“
—Whole Earth Review

“This is art—not marketing—on the newsstand. It represents the sort of creativity too rarely given an outlet in comics. It’s the best and longest running alternative comics anthology around.“
—Comics Journal

“The artists of World War 3 have forged a space by turns harsh and exciting, honest and rowdy, boisterous and straight-forward, always powered by the wild and unruly harmonies of love. It’s a space where hope and history rhyme, where joy and justice meet. Their voices provoke and soothe and energize. I want to hear more.“

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Praise

“Kuper is extraordinary, a one-of-a-kind talent, and like the city it chronicles, Drawn to New York is beautiful, mutinous, kaleidoscopic, and essential.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Drawn to New York is Peter Kuper’s New York, and anybody who’s spent any time here, physically or otherwise, will recognize the energy and architecture, the grime and crowds, the beautiful humanity, the foods, odors, and sights. Love it or not, there’s no place on Earth quite like New York City, and few people have captured it as effectively as Kuper.” —Newsarama

“One of the strongest and truest radical voices to emerge from contemporary America.” —Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

“As a cartoonist and graphic novelist, Kuper’s art reflects the sequential grid that is Manhattan. Each window tells a story, and the rows of squares and infinite right angles form a map of one man’s journey through the modern labyrinth. When viewed as a whole, Kuper’s concrete visions of New York amount to an epic love poem.” —Eric Drooker

“The island of skyscrapers, the Mecca of cities, and well-known capital of the world, is the backdrop of this colorful odyssey of Peter Kuper and marks a triumph in his already successful career. Drawn to New York is a perfect choice while listening to ‘New York, New York,’ though not played by Sinatra.” —Rolling Stone (Mexico)

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Book Events

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Reviews

• World War 3 Illustrated: prescient outrage from the dawn of the Piketty apocalypse
• World War 3 Illustrated: 1979-2014 — The Best Collection of Radical Comics You May Ever Read
• World War 3 Illustrated, A Review in Publishers Weekly
• World War 3 Illustrated on Jewish Currents
• World War 3 Illustrated on Brodner’s Bicycle
• World War 3 Illustrated 1979-2014 review on Comics Grinder
• World War 3 Has Raged for 35 Years
• World War 3 – It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I don’t feel fine
• Truth in Beauty and Beauty in Truth: Graphic Memoir ‘Diario de Oaxaca’
• Tools of the Trade: Drawn to New York
• Thirty-Five Years of Bashing Stereotypes, Tearing Down Walls, Smashing Icons and Visionary Cartooning
• The System: A review on Vermicious
• The System on High-Low
• Peter Kuper’s The System: A Work of Art in Publishing
• Peter Kuper’s The System in Library Journal
• Peter Kuper’s Oaxaca Diary
• Peter Kuper’s The System in Now Read This!
• Peter Kuper’s Diario
• Peter Kuper, The System on DART
• Peter Kuper Reviewed by the Daily Crosshatch
• New York According to the Artist behind ‘Spy vs. Spy’
• Kuper Returns To Oaxaca With “Ruins”
• Illustrator to City: It’s Personal
• Humanity, Glorious and Vile
• Horror than Hope: The Comic Art of World War 3 Illustrated
• Green And Red: Diario De Oaxaca
• Foreword Magazine on Diario de Oaxaca
• Drawn to New York: A Review in Publishers Weekly
• Drawn to New York: A Review
• Drawn to New York reviewed in The New York Journal of Books
• Drawn to New York Review on Ad Astra
• Drawn to New York in The North Adams Transcript
• Drawn to New York in Illustration Voice
• Drawn to New York in Brain Pickings
• Drawn to New York in Boing Boing
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico by Peter Kuper
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Review in World Literature in Review
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Review in Publishers Weekly
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Review in PMR
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Review in Library Journal
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Newsarama “Best Of”
• Diario de Oaxaca: A Fiction Book Review
• Diario de Oaxaca in Comics Grinder
• Changing the world with comics in the Bangalore Mirror
• ‘Rama Rating: 8 of 10 for Kuper’s Drawn to New York

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Interviews

• Seth Tobocman Speaks Out against Injustice through His Works
• Peter Kuper’s Diario de Oaxaca in DART
• Politics, Art and Activism in Oaxaca
• Drawn to Action: Peter Kuper speaks about his work
• Peter Kuper: Drawn to an International Comic Art Career
• World War 3 Illustrated, An ‘Open Platform For Protest’ Celebrates 35 Years At MoCCA Fest
• Kuper & Tobocman Celebrate “World War 3 Illustrated”
• More to Come 94: Peter Kuper Interview Special
• Interview: Peter Kuper and The System and World War 3 Illustrated 1979-2014
• Peter Kuper, cartoonist, interviewed on RiYL podcast

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Mentions

• Drawn to New York on The Rumpus
• World War 3 Illustrated in The New York Times Gift Guide
• World War 3 Illustrated mention

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Blog

• Peter Kuper: INterSECTS at NYPL
• Peter Kuper’s eerily prescient comic from 27 years ago