As an artist in the second half of the twentieth century, Jerry Moriarty did everything you weren’t supposed to do: he painted people, he painted places, and, perhaps worst of all, he told stories with pictures. It’s important to note how not-accepted this was between the 1950s and 1970s, in the messy aftermath of abstract expressionism, when many artists had disowned figuration and family in favor of non-objective paint-spattered flats. But Jerry drew pictures of America as Americans remembered it, if not even still lived it: childhood, parents, home. Like many of his peers, he spent much of his career alone in a small Manhattan studio but, upon retirement, he moved back to his childhood home.

Like many people, I was first introduced to Jerry’s work in the pages of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine via his strip Jack Survives, in which the eponymous character, both Jerry’s dad yet also not his dad, passed quick, quiet moments of the everyday. Jerry’s bold, solid, black-and-white strips seemed to have been pencilled by Ernie Bushmiller and inked by Edward Hopper, proffering a loud-but-soft view of middle-class midcentury America. Like so much in RAW, it felt strange, but unlike so much in RAW, it also felt strangely familiar. Jerry’s strips somehow caught the scent of sun-warmed houses and 1940s sofas and made the time when men wore hats and women wore housedresses feel real. A window into what I’d imagined my grandparents’ early lives might’ve been like, his work chided the squareness of that generation but with a gentle empathy for their difficulties (war, economic scrimping), without the dismissiveness that some baby-boomer writers and artists seemed to have for their parents. His bold, sturdily composed panels and solid sense of objects and people lent it an eternal quality, seemingly in conflict with the ineffability of its domestic situations and the dissipating half-life of conversations, thoughts,
and the words one says only when talking to oneself, the whole adding up to not exactly a comic strip, but something like a picture-poem with a punchline.

The first collection of Jack Survives, published in 1984 by RAW Books and Graphics, was designed by Spiegelman and Mouly, its cover separating Jerry’s eight-crayon-box colors and his bold black brush drawing into two layers, the ink lines printed on an acetate jacket which under one’s fingers slipped in and out of alignment with the bright hues below. It reminded me of the anatomy overlays in my grandparents’ encyclopedias, and offered a lesson in not only how comics were printed but also the basic cognitive distinction between drawing and painting (to say nothing of the difference between remembering something and actually seeing it). His original comics pages are strange palimpsests, in which penciled memory-details disappear under acrylic white or emerge as emphasized ink, the approach more evident in the 2008 reprint of Jack Survives, in which Jerry chose to highlight his pages’ simultaneous boldness and delicacy in full-color scans instead of the contrasting black-and-white of the first edition. In a way, this echoed his overall artistic method: Jerry’s assertive, Hopper-esque drawings—see Hopper’s etchings, especially—mellowed once they made it into his paintings, softening into full-color acrylic studies on paper before ending with his almost diaphanous oils on canvas. These paintings, generally composed of three, sometimes four brightly colored panels, were meant to be not just looked at, but read.

Jerry wanted to be accessible and eschewed pretension, later labeling himself a “paintoonist” as a sort of self-effacing and disarming pre-strike against anyone who might consider denigrating his efforts, for which he was always on high alert. In his early life he’d tried abstraction and also working as an illustrator, but found he was comfortable with neither, disappearing into a private life subsidized by working as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Over a period of several decades he produced a considerable oeuvre that basically no one ever saw unless they visited his Manhattan studio/loft.

As I tried to become a thoughtful cartoonist myself, Jack Survives was never far from my mind, frequently open on my drawing table at moments of desperation, where I’d reread his strips several dozen times while avoiding my own. Eventually, I got to meet Jerry in person, the first time at a 2004 exhibit of his paintings in Manhattan which Spiegelman had organized. I’d thoroughly expected to shake the hand of a dour, literary Thornton Wilder in a houndstooth jacket and trim tie, but instead was met by a spritely, energetic marionette in bright orange pants who seemed to leap between his canvases, weightless long white hair trailing a beat behind him as he narrated the backstory to each one, the paintings’ fictional characters melding with his experience of making them.

At that point in his career he’d been drawing and painting “Sally,” a character who was a sort of authorial stand-in (again, partly him yet really not him) and about whom he spoke from the inside (“Sally wanted to climb the tree”) and the outside (“I felt so wrong painting that”)—and, most importantly, with real affection. None of the paintings were for sale. He made his work only for himself, amassing it slowly and, as he later described it to me, working in the “art protection business” to make sure that nothing ever escaped, except the very few pieces he offered as gifts. Neither a gallery-affiliated fine artist nor a job-hungry commercial artist, he had more or less committed career suicide, leaving such possible-life husks behind so he could float above them, living purely through, and for, his work.

The second time I met Jerry was at a party in 2007 at Spiegelman and Mouly’s apartment, with other RAW cartoonists in attendance, Kim Deitch and Charles Burns and Gary Panter among many more. I ended up talking to Jerry alone for what must’ve been almost an hour, he at one point going into great detail about how he lived off a whole pre-cooked grocery store chicken and six chocolate chip cookies per week, carefully apportioning them over seven days to keep himself and his cat alive. He offered this not as a look-at-me-I’m-crazy detail but as what we’d now call a “life hack.” During this hour in his presence a very tangible sense of aloneness enveloped me. I mention this not to embarrass his memory, but to clarify: as Jerry said in an interview I did with him for The Believer in 2009, “I am a loner, and I fully understand why that makes me strange to society … but I am not lonely. Being alone is total freedom for me.” 

Put another way, his memories were his company. This is indeed just the sort of person who would discover his childhood home was for sale, buy it, and move back in. There, he set up his studio in the very basement where he’d made art as a kid and where his dad would arrive home from work to sit and talk with him as he drew and painted. Now in his seventies, Jerry started drawing and painting images of his father and his mother at the ages they were when he was a child, but with himself pictured as the old man he had become. In one painting, Jerry’s head peeps through a rip in the paper ceiling above his father, who sits in an easy chair below; in another, old Jerry sits at the kitchen table talking to his young mother, easily half his age. (My stepfather, now living alone following the death of my mother in May, told me that every night he sits in his armchair and tells her what’s happened over the course of the day.) These were the people and memories that meant the most to Jerry—his parents, his siblings, his childhood dog. (When he was a kid, his dog had been taken away by the humane society, a loss for which Jerry offers a painted corrective: the dog returns to the front door, where a child-sized old-man Jerry lets him in, then spends the night on the floor, cradling him.) 

These are not the traditional tropes of comics, but of literature and poetry. My favorites of Jerry’s works get at those moments when we completely surrender, when we’re at our most vulnerable—exactly the opposite of what comics’ brash denigration and guffaws generally paper over. His tenderness, when it’s the focus, is without precedent in cartooning—or, for that matter, in much contemporary art. And that Jerry managed it all within such a “loud,” disreputable language as comics is especially remarkable. He was the first cartoonist to realize that by leaning into the loud, like his cartoonist hero Bushmiller, one might be able to more closely approach the quiet of real life. It’s one of the mysteries of comics, hiding somewhere between the giant/infinitesimal horror of a childhood fever and the lyrical dissonance of the bebop jazz that Jerry loved (and played).^*

Jerry thought and drew (though what’s the difference?) a lot about death. It is the implicit theme in his late work Whatsa Paintoonist?—which is also one of the weirdest titles for one of the greatest graphic novels ever. This is the book that collects his imagined revisitations with his parents, painted in the home where they all once lived, and in which, through his drawings, Jerry says his goodbyes to them. It is also the home where, in March of this year, Jerry’s nephew found him dead. The book resuscitates the childhood feeling that most of us spend our lives tamping down and dismissing, if not completely extinguishing. It’s a magical, alchemical experience of reading and seeing, somehow mixing Jerry’s own memories of childhood and parents with one’s own, on the page and in the mind’s eye. It reawakens some sleeping small self within us, completely disarmingly and without pretension. It captures the feeling of life, but most especially, of love.