When I picked up The Village Voice during the 70s and 80s, it was mainly to read James Wolcott (now an Air Mail colleague), see who was playing at CBGB and the Bottom Line, and check out “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies,” the quintessentially New York comic strip that ran from 1974 to 1995 and is collected in an entertaining new time capsule of a book called, appropriately, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies.
The premise and the promise—“100% overheard” and “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim”—were true, or true enough, anyway. Mack did his share of casual eavesdropping and stumbling-upon, but he also went out and reported.
