Ken Krimstein

Ken Krimstein: A Bit about Me…

Just a few weeks ago, while researching some ideas for an upcoming book, I interviewed my 92 year-old first grade teacher Lois Gilot via Zoom. She said, “oh sure Kenny, I remember you. You used to come up to me and say, look I finished all my reading, can I do some drawing now!” When I figured out how to draw Santa Claus, my indifferent baseball skills were forgotten, I was a star.

I was born in Chicago, in the late middle of the last century of the previous millennium. My dad was an artist, and so was my uncle. We always had art supplies around the house. (When people ask me how to become a cartoonist, I just tell them to do what I did, “get some paper and a pencil and start drawing.”)

When I was three, we moved to the burbs, and not long after that, comic books infiltrated my mind. I couldn’t get enough. MAD Magazine with its parodies of films and its New York snark (not to mention its Don Martin) further warped me. I inherited a stack of battered “Classics Illustrated” comics from my dad’s cousin and when I read the non-fiction ones, especially about The Atomic Age, The Civil War, and Pirates, I was smitten. The next thermonuclear blast to my consciousness was when I flipped through my friend Scott’s father’s collection of — Charles Addams cartoons at age nine. So dark. So smart. So bleak. So wonderful. But it wasn’t until the fateful bus ride to Boy Scout Camp in the summer of 1972, when the copy of Zap Comix that was being passed around made it to me, that my fate was sealed. As I turned page after page of those completely insane (completely verboten) comics, I decided, a: to never pass them on and b: thinking to myself “you can do this for a job???,” I decided what I was going to do when I grew up. Words, pictures, humor, pathos, fear, joy, all between two covers!

Upon graduation with a History major from Grinnell, I was confronted with the conundrum, “do I go for a master’s degree in film at NYU or do I go for a master’s degree in journalism/advertising at Northwestern, and then move to NYC and get a job on Madison Ave?” I opted for the latter, and in 1982, as soon as I claimed my IBM Selectric and Webster’s Dictionary at my copywriter’s desk at Ogilvy & Mather, another obsession overcame me. Every Wednesday at lunchtime, I would scamper the two blocks to the offices of The New Yorker magazine where I dutifully slid ten brand new cartoons under the transom, and just as dutifully retrieved my small, yellow, form-lettered rejection slip.

The years rolled by, and although my collection of rejection slips from The New Yorker could have wallpapered a medium-sized Manhattan bathroom, I was selling my rejected cartoons all over town to other national publications like National Lampoon, Cosmopolitan, the Wall Street Journal. And my ads were winning awards; One Club, Art Director’s Club, Communication Arts Magazine. I started teaching writing at NYU night school.

Until, finally, in 2000, I got the two letters from the cartoon editor of the New Yorker that changed my life. O and K. I had done it.

Thus liberated, I found my way back to long-form storytelling with words and pictures. And now, my history degree paid dividends. I had a friend who was a philosopher, and whenever I asked him what his work was, he’d launch a diatribe which completely and utterly confused me. I figured that philosophy is kind of, sort of, supposed to “help” people to live, so I set out to humanize it. How? By treating philosophers and their work like any other creative person’s work — part of their lives. Their morning coffee. Their commute. Their marital problems. Their water-stained Hyde Park ceiling. And with this notion, as I started to draw and write, I came up with a guiding insight of all my future work, “geography is destiny.” What I mean by that is, where a person is in place and in time (and in weather, family, commute etc.) defines who they are and what they do. And by showing as well as telling stories, I launch a fuller, more meaningful understanding of how people happen.

With that in mind, I landed on a perfect character to draw/write, Hannah Arendt. Philosopher, thinker, gadfly, and smoker — I knew almost nothing about her, but when I learned more — for example, that she hung out with the cool filmmakers and poets everywhere from Berlin to Paris to The Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village, I dove in.

The result was a graphic biography of her, 230 pages of words and pictures (and the color green) that came out in 2018, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt - A Tyranny of Truth. So far, it’s in ten languages and in November of 2024, it is being mounted as a play by the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

It all came together, everything was leading to this; Graphic Biography — a combination of Charles Addams, MAD Magazine, Classics Illustrated, and Don Smith’s class at Grinnell on the classic E. P. Thompson tome, The Making of the British Working Class. In other words, my version of heaven. But with grit and reality and India ink.

For my next book, I turned a chance encounter with a New York Times article on recently uncovered archives in Vilnius into my second long-form graphic history, When I Grow Up — The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers, released (Jan. 2024) to much acclaim in France as “Vivre.”

Not long after that, another “Kismet-ish” encounter revealed to me the lost year in Prague when a young nothing named Albert Einstein met another young nobody named Franz Kafka and ended up changing the cosmos. The result, my third graphic biography, Einstein in Kafkaland — How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe is out August 20th, 2024, and has already been picked up in several countries.

On the strength of my burgeoning practice, in the spring of 2024 I was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a nice companion to the Berlin Hannah play, as well as my recent residencies at Yaddo and Ragdale.

Which pretty much takes me to today. Phew. I need another coffee.

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