Eric Drooker

Eric Drooker is an American painter, graphic novelist and illustrator, best known for his black-and-white images and his frequent covers for The New Yorker. His work draws on the expressionist woodcut tradition of the 1930s and carries a strong political commitment.

He grew up in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, next to the Lower East Side, then a working-class immigrant neighbourhood with a long history of left-wing activism. Early on he was drawn to the woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward and to Robert Crumb's underground comics. After studying sculpture at Cooper Union, he turned to political posters and worked as a tenant organizer. His images were widely copied and reused, sometimes for unrelated purposes such as concert advertising.

His first published illustrations appeared in leftist magazines such as The Nation and The Progressive. When World War 3 Illustrated was founded by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, he became one of its co-editors and a frequent contributor. His short story "L" appeared in Heavy Metal and became part of Flood! A Novel in Pictures (1992), a wordless narrative that won an American Book Award. In the 1990s he expanded into painting and published Illuminated Poems, illustrating poems by Allen Ginsberg. His animation design for the 2010 film Howl led to the graphic novel Howl: A Graphic Novel.