Sponsored by W.W. Norton In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in the NYR Online, “but asks: What if the bad guys had already won?” The result is “a barrage of clever, hilarious visuals”—“a courtroom stenographer dutifully transcribing the Tasmanian Devil’s incoherent ravings”—alongside a surprisingly wistful treatment of longing and desire deferred. 
Lucas Adams Adams is the editor of New York Review Comics, which publishes lost classics and new translations of comics, manga, and graphic novels—including work by Saul Steinberg, Joe Brainard, and Glen Baxter—for our sister book imprint. His writing, cartoons, and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and for The New York Review he has written about, among other subjects, speculative fiction, William Wegman, and Edward Gorey. This week I wrote to Adams to ask him about the Looney Tunes, the comics industry, and growing up humorless. 
Advertisement Daniel Drake: What’s your history with the Looney Tunes? Did you grow up with them? Have you given them much critical thought in your adulthood? Most importantly, which ones do you plan to show to your young son first? Lucas Adams: Unfortunately for everyone around me, I was humorless as a child. My parents bought me joke books and showed me movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I cried at the end: they didn’t find the grail, and they were arrested for a crime they didn’t commit), but nothing seemed to amuse me much. So for a while I was pretty hostile to the unfairness of the world depicted in the Looney Tunes. But I softened, eventually. My real entry points were Nineties iterations of the Tunes like Steven Spielberg Presents: Tiny Toon Adventures and Space Jam (my elementary school’s music teacher made us perform a coordinated dance to “I Believe I Can Fly” for our parents). Once I started actually watching the original Merrie Melodies shorts, around age twelve or so, I loved how each was its own world, especially the care that the animators put into the backgrounds, in particular the abstract southwestern setting for Coyote and Road Runner. I connected it with the landscapes Bill Watterson drew for his Spaceman Spiff Sunday strips in Calvin and Hobbes, which looked like the same dreamlike desert. My son, Harold, is two and a half, and when he’s just a little bit older we’ll be on a strict regimen of the classics to get him started, like What’s Opera Doc? Your review makes a point of putting this latest Looney Tunes live action movie into a lineage running from Roger Rabbit through Space Jam. As a comics editor, how do you find the art style has changed or been adapted over time? They are still drawing the same characters in a rather circumscribed, branded fashion, but do you see any kind of evolution or variation over time? It’s hard not to feel the intrusion of digital slickness in the look of the characters in Coyote vs. Acme compared to the original animations. That said, one of my favorite details about Coyote vs. Acme was something Will Forte mentioned at the screening I attended at the Museum of the Moving Image. The filmmakers had brought in the legendary puppeteer Dave Barclay to work on the film. Barclay has worked on Jim Henson projects like Labyrinth and Fraggle Rock, and he was one of the puppeteers who operated Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. For Coyote vs. Acme, Barclay built a coyote puppet for the actors to perform with, so even when that digital sheen on some of the cartoons had me missing the texture of the original animation, it was exciting to know that the hands that helped moved Jabba contributed to the bodily humor and tragedy of the digital Coyote. How did you get started as a comics editor? What were you doing before that? My first real comics editing gig was at the online magazine The Rumpus, where I was an assistant comics editor under Paul Madonna. At first I mostly posted strips, but then I had the opportunity to conduct interviews and recruit cartoonists for the site. Paul was a good mentor, and I got a taste for curation from him and a model for thinking about how different comics best fit together. When I moved to New York in 2010, I was drawing my own comics and working at a lot of food trucks (at various times: dumplings, lobster rolls, ice cream sandwiches). In 2013 I landed an internship at New York Review Books (if memory serves, it was only supposed to last six weeks). I became friends with two of my colleagues, Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Evan Johnston. We’d get drinks after work and talk comics. In the fall of 2013 I pitched them on an idea I’d had since I first read McSweeney’s Quarterly issue 13 (the all-comics issue) in high school: What if NYRB published comics? I’d always been shocked that McSweeney’s or another small literary publisher hadn’t really pursued the market. In the 2000s comics publishers, much like NYRB Classics, had started putting out more exciting reprints and translations: rediscoveries like Fantagraphics’ Fletcher Hanks reissues in 2008 and Drawn and Quarterly’s English translations of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s excellent midcentury manga in 2006. My sense was that there was more out there. Gabe and Evan liked the idea too, and we took it to the NYRB Classics series founder Edwin Frank. He was intrigued, and after we put together a catalog of possible titles, we got started for real in September 2014. 
Advertisement Eighteen months later NYRC published our first title—Mark Beyer’s Agony, an acrid, funny bit of despair from the Eighties—which makes this year our tenth anniversary. I’m very grateful that we’ve gotten to keep on keeping on publishing comics since then. Our forty-eighth title, Dash Shaw’s Like Swimmers, just came out at the end of August, the day before Coyote vs. Acme premiered. The NYRC catalog is multifarious—running from single-panel gag comics to book-length epics, from pen or pencil line drawings to rich oils or watercolors, and every conceivable trim size. Before you started editing the imprint, where did your taste in comics tend? What first drew you in? I was a newspaper comics kid (Peanuts, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, even Doonesbury, eventually), but when I hit high school my reading picked up with David Boring by Daniel Clowes, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a very weird Nightmare Alley adaptation by Spain Rodriguez, and anything that Cody’s Books in Berkeley had on display, including, crucially, the McSweeney’s Quarterly Number 13, which was the portal to everything I’ve done since. Later, I went to Reed College, which has a student-run comics library. The stuff there filled in a lot of gaps in my reading, especially for collections that would have been out of my price range as a student. I can admit this now: I skipped a final presentation given by some classmates in fall 2007 so I could go finish reading the full-color Epic Comics edition of the Akira manga. One of the great reading experiences of my life. When we finally started NYRC, I was very conscious that my tastes and range were still limited. So I had to go ask for advice and get suggestions, which turned into one of the best parts of the job. I have found that there is real power in asking and finding out more. So much of what I know now came from people like Dan Nadel, Nicole Rudick, Sammy Harkham, and Ed Park taking the time to talk to me about comics and what they liked. A true gift. Are there any comics that NYRC has, for whatever reason, been unable to publish that you’d like to see brought back to the public anyway? What are some great lost classics? I really hope someone is able to print a new edition of Captain Goodvibes by Tony Edwards. It’s a comic about an irradiated pork chop that becomes a surfing pig. The strip was published in the Australian surf magazine Tracks, mostly in the 1970s. It’s just some of the most beautiful, intricate draftsmanship in comics paired with the most outrageous humor of the Seventies. There was an Australian edition that collected a selection of the strips more than ten years ago, and I was in touch with Edwards a couple times over the last decade, but nothing has ever come to pass. I might try again soon. What’s your all-time favorite Coyote and Road Runner gag? Road Runner running into a painting of a tunnel that he shouldn’t be able to, and Coyote attempting the same thing and crashing into the rock face. There was nothing more mind-boggling for overly serious young Lucas than seeing this play out. It suggested there were worlds beyond the ones I understood. Plus, it’s very funny. 
Advertisement More by Lucas Adams at nybooks.com
‘You’ll Never Catch Him!’Rising Lazarus-like from the Warner Brothers Discovery tomb, Coyote vs. Acme is an inventive, remarkably wistful movie that confronts the Looney Tunes with the grind of contemporary capitalism. 
Edward Gorey in the BasementHidden away in the Review’s archives were eleven panels of an unfinished serial comic, Les Mystères de Constantinople. 
Wegman’s WorldWilliam Wegman’s dry humor, evident in his iconic video art, also found expression in a private decades-long practice of absurdist text and images. 
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