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Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010

Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010

by Michael Kupperman

Hardcover, 148 pages | purchase

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We've attempted to push cartoonist Michael Kupperman on you several times before. His ongoing Tales Designed to Thrizzle series produced one of the best - and for my money the funniest - comic book of 2010; I also pimped that book on an early episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.

In his just-published Mark Twain's Autobiography: 1910-2010, Kupperman recounts a recent encounter with a very-much-not-dead Samuel Clemens, Bard of Hannibal, who thrust a manuscript into his hand ("Publish this ... under your name, [so] people will be free not to believe a word of it! ... You should decorate it with your silly drawings, to further undermine the credibility. Perhaps a few comical strips as well.")

Kupperman duly obliged. The result, as a physical object, is a book that most resembles those Biographies of Great Americans books that collected dust on the shelves of your third-grade classroom, the ones that only the nerdiest kids (hi!) ever perused, featuring short chapters and frequent full-page illustrations (though Kupperman does present two chapters in comics form).

Any resemblance to those books vanishes quickly, let's note, once you actually start reading the thing.

"About those reports of my death..." Art from Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1910-2010
Enlarge Fantagraphics Books

"About those reports of my death..." Art from Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1910-2010
Fantagraphics Books

According to Twain, he never died, "but those same old rumors got exaggerated and then a bunch of other stuff happened...." Other stuff such as being kept alive by a wizard's spell, for example.

Twain says he passed the years immediately following his not-death aimlessly. For a while he pretended to be a ghost: "... I began to enjoy my supposed supernatural status. I was absolved of most of the traditional duties of life, and I delighted in chasing people around the house while moaning, 'whoooooooooooo.'"

A life of two-fisted adventure as an astronaut, adult movie star, spy-smasher and ... really just a LOT of other things, after the jump.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Stephen Tobolowsky is the star of a fine podcast that's produced 50 episodes so far.
Enlarge Toby Canham/Getty Images

Stephen Tobolowsky is the star of a fine podcast that's produced 50 episodes so far.

Stephen Tobolowsky is the star of a fine podcast that's produced 50 episodes so far.
Toby Canham/Getty Images

Stephen Tobolowsky is the star of a fine podcast that's produced 50 episodes so far.

Telling stories seems like such an easy thing to do. Everybody has them, after all, and everybody can open up and start talking. We tell each other stories every day — someone sees you with a Band-Aid on your finger and you say, "I cut myself slicing a potato."

That might be why people who are Storytellers, deserving of a capital S even if it's technically improper to supply one, are not as celebrated as people who write novels or play the violin.

But a truly great storyteller is the farthest thing from mundane; that person is a profound pleasure. And Stephen Tobolowsky is a truly great storyteller.

You may know Tobolowsky as an actor from Groundhog Day or Glee or Deadwood — he's become famous for not being famous, in that he has literally hundreds of credits at the Internet Movie Database and he's the star of very, very few of them. But for 50 episodes now, he's been the star of an exceptional podcast called The Tobolowsky Files.

Where to find them and why you need this show, after the jump.

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