You expect to find witty artwork in a book titled Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist, especially if the publisher is Fantagraphics, the gold standard when it comes to anthologizing classic comic strips. (The house is also a patron saint of contemporary graphic novels.) But as someone unfamiliar with Carew—like most everyone else alive today, I’d wager—I was not expecting a turn-of-the-past century Nora Ephron.
It turns out Carew was also a writer of breezy profiles, tart theater criticism, and eccentric first-person rambles about town, and if you think that novelistic, pointedly subjective newspaper and magazine reportage was invented in the 1960s by “new journalists” such as Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, excellent as they were, or that Spy magazine invented snark in the 1980s, this book is an entertaining corrective. (Disclosure: I worked at Spy and never claimed to have invented snark.)
