GET TO KNOW A CARTOONIST: LIZ PRINCE

March 26, 2008 on 11:14 pm | In Cartoonists

It’s hard not to love the endearingly funny, sketchbook journal-style autobiographical comics of Liz Prince. Holding a shameless magnifying glass up to her personal life, Prince highlights the sweet along with the uncomfortable with an added dash of quirky and nerdy (her cat’s name is SCIENCE!). Like asking her boyfriend to smell her armpit or obsessing over Saucony running shoes and Zelda on the Nintendo DS.

She made her first autobio comic, about meeting Evan Dorkin (Dork, Milk & Cheese), when she was 16 and later got her big break after sending Top Shelf a mini-comic of what they would go on to publish as Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?—which won the Ignatz Award at SPX for “Best Debut” in 2005. Since then, Liz has become an anthology Viking with most of the critically acclaimed volumes like Papercutter, Project: Romantic, You Ain’t No Dancer and even VICE Magazine’s Comics Issue.

Her upcoming Top Shelf collection, Delayed Replays, will print online material from her Livejournal. Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? gets a new printing from Top Shelf next week after being out of print for a while. She’s also continuing to work on a longer form autobiographical work called Two Headed Boy, so that’s something to look forward to in the future.

For some instant gratification go check out her Livejournal, which she updates pretty regularly. She’s currently in the middle of a “100 Themes” posting frenzy, which will eventually end in 100 strips, each focusing on a single theme. Fun!
If you don’t feel good about life (or comics) after reading Liz’s stuff your heart is a black hole weirdness.

Quotable:
“I do still have a certain level of personal embarrassment. Usually if I find something really mortifying it will take me a couple months to come to terms with it and be able to use it in a comic. As far as stuff that just involves me goes I tend to find a lot of humor in either the terrible things that happen to me or the terrible things that I do to other people. But when there’s someone else involved I try and give them a say on whether or not I divulge their personal secrets.”

-DP