Eric Drooker

Eric Drooker is an American painter, graphic novelist, and frequent cover artist for The New Yorker. He conceived and designed the animation for the film Howl (2010).

Biography

Drooker grew up in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, adjacent to the Lower East Side, which was then a working-class immigrant neighborhood with a tradition of left-wing political activism. He attended the Downtown Community School in Manhattan's East Village. Drooker developed an early interest in graphic arts and cartoons, particularly the woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward and the underground comics of Robert Crumb.

After studying sculpture at Cooper Union, Drooker turned to poster art, creating flyers on local political issues while working as a tenant organizer. His images, done in a striking black-and-white style reminiscent of Masereel and other 1930s expressionist illustrators, were widely copied and reused by others—sometimes for unrelated purposes such as advertising concerts—and were popular enough that he could make a small income selling artwork on the street. During the 1980s, Drooker was further radicalized by his experiences with the police, due to their actions against squatters in the rapidly gentrifying Tompkins Square Park area and their increasing intolerance of unlicensed street artists and musicians.

His first published work appeared in leftist magazines such as The Nation, The Progressive, and various underground publications such as Screw. His work would later be seen in such mainstream publications as The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal; and his paintings would appear on dozens of covers of The New Yorker.