Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

I've been a fan of comic books since I first started reading the Mad Magazines that my brothers collected and read until some of them were falling apart. One of my brothers loved to draw - he was a musician too, and I know now that I can call him an artist, but back then before I began to understand the creative impulses that some of us need to work out, I just used to say he loved to draw. All of my brothers were much older than I am, and I used to idolize everything they loved. They were the coolest of the cool, and so anything that they had or liked was something that I admired and wanted to be and do. I used to sit on my brother's lap while he was drawing in his room, and I loved to watch him create images out of the white space on a page. His drawings were often cartoons or comic book images, based on the R. Crumbs of the day or things he'd seen in Mad Magazine or some other comic books, but though he was an excellent copyist, they were his own also, images of things he had in his head that took place on a page. Sunday mornings in my family's home growing up were for the Sunday funnies in the Boston Globe. My brothers and my father taught me very early that the only things really worth reading were Doonesbury and that anything else was just fluff. But I did like the fluff, and I read each cartoon cover to cover, week after week, leading me up through high school and into college with Garfield and Matt Groening and of course there were the "Nine Types of Boyfriends" and did I forget to mention? The New Yorker that came every week that I tried to read to act grown up but all I really ever wanted were the cartoons. I learned years later that lots of adults loved to read the New Yorker for the cartoons, but back then I thought there was something childish in me that went to them first, and I wondered when I would ever grow up enough to enjoy reading the magazine for the articles. I did eventually get to that place, but it's the cartoons that still keep me reading, and any time I see a comic book or a cartoon or a graphic novel, that's the thing that will keep me interested.

Mana Contemporary in Jersey City is a contemporary art center full of so much creativity that it's a joy to go there on any given day. Twice a year there are open houses, when many studios are open to the public and it's an incredibly inspiring experience to walk from floor to floor and room to room and discover people creating in so many different ways. On a visit a little over a year ago I wandered into a studio that was filled with comic book art. They were having an opening in conjunction with the open house, and there was a definite feeling of a party in the air. Scott Eder and his wife Marcia are the co-owners, and they had opened this location of their gallery a few months before. I wandered in because I saw comic book art, and I've kept going back ever since. Scott has such a wealth of knowledge and he is happy to share it, even with someone like me who doesn't know anything except that I like the way comics look. He has some of the highest quality artists showing in his studio, some who have written books, and he is also a collector for more than twenty years with insights and experience that are truly awesome. If you're looking for a place to go to share your love of comics, whatever your own knowledge base is, stop by for a visit and introduce yourself, you'll be glad you did.

Last summer I went to an opening for Serpieri, an Italian artist whose work is collected widely. He was there for the opening and I have a wonderful video clip of him sketching as he signs one of his books. As he speaks in Italian, a friend who is translating says that he is talking about the fact that Bob Dylan is playing in the background and that he remembers every drawing he's done by the music he was listening to, and that "he always draws better when Bob is playing." These are moments that are precious for any art lover, and for someone like me who loves comics in a way that stems straight back to my oldest and dearest memories of my cherished and revered brothers, to be able to share time with someone as knowledgeable as Scott and to see the artwork and meet the artists who have created it is priceless.

Scott has been in this business for too many years to count - though he is still very young, he's been a collector as long as he can remember. As a paraphrase of the old saying goes, it's not the years in your knowledge but the knowledge in your years that makes all the difference. For Scott, it's a passion that he has fed with research and study and conversation with the people who make and create their vision into reality, and he's created a space for those artists and the people who love to collect and to meet them to find themselves right at home.

Scott Eder Gallery

Mana Contemporary

888 Newark Avenue

Jersey City, New Jersey
https://www.scottedergallery.com/