In the late 1970s, comedian Art Spiegelman and his wife, editor Francois MoulyHe began dreaming up a new magazine that he hoped would elevate cartooning into the realm of high art.
A coworker suggested they talk to Jerry Moriarty, a painter who lived in Manhattan, a little uptown from their SoHo loft.
Arriving at Mr. Moriarty’s studio, Mr. Spiegelman was stunned by what he saw: comics that had been painted.
“It was completely astonishing,” Mr. Spiegelman, whose graphic memoir “Maus” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, said in an interview. “It was exactly what we were looking for, which was a space that was no longer underground comics, nor was this art underground.”
Raw, his magazine, began in 1980 with “Jack Survives”, the first in a series of comics drawn by Mr. Moriarty about an apathetic everyman who grapples with the indignities of life in a hat and tie, refusing to surrender.
Comedian Chris Ware wrote, “It’s as if Edward Hopper has started writing songs.” the believer magazine in 2009. “For lack of a better word, it is poetry – I believe the first time comics have been seen – and the poetry is still as fresh and affecting as it was when it was first drawn.”
Mr. Moriarty died on March 25 at his home in Binghamton, NY, where his nephew Kevin Moriarty was caring for him in his final years. He was 88 years old. His death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by his brother, Fred Moriarty, who survives him.
Mr. Moriarty, who described himself as a loner, refused to sell his paintings and supported himself by teaching at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In many ways, his average life was embodied by his Everyman character, Jack, who resembled Mr. Moriarty’s father in appearance (and only in appearance).
“Jack is an average guy who wants to be average,” he wrote in “The Complete Jack Survives”, a 2009 collection of his Jack comics. “I’m an average guy who doesn’t want to be average, and art allows me to express that frustration.”
Jack’s spare dialogue – often spoken out loud to himself – reminded fans of Mr. Moriarty of the minimalist, existentialist plays of Samuel Beckett.
In the second panel Jack is in his office. He opens his lunch and discovers that his wife has packed a cat-shaped cookie for him.
“I can’t eat a cat cookie,” he says out loud before taking a bite, seemingly to no avail. “You have to start with the head or it’ll be looking at you until the end.”
To describe his art, Mr. Moriarty created a caricature: a mixture of pantoonist, painter and cartoonist. The word hasn’t appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, but it certainly defines it.
“There’s a kind of peace in his work,” Hillary Chute, a Northeastern University professor and scholar of graphic narratives, said in an interview. “So you enter it as a story, and it has psychological depth, but also the kind of composition you would see in paintings.”
Jerome Brian Moriarty was born in Binghamton on January 15, 1938, the third of four children. His father, John Moriarty, was an expert in Morse code, telegraphing play-by-play details of sporting events for the Associated Press. His mother, Esther (Turner) Moriarty, sold magazine subscriptions and worked as a sales clerk in a department store.
Growing up, Jerry loved cowboy movies and radio shows. He also read and collected comics.
“At age 8, I crossed the ‘fantasy barrier’ and became an ‘art kid’ because I could imitate Superman or Bugs Bunny better than my classmates,” he wrote in the catalog for the 2007 exhibition “Uninked: Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Works by Five Cartoonists” at the Phoenix Art Museum.
His father bought him a drafting table and encouraged him to pursue a career in art by setting up a studio in the basement.
Mr. Moriarty said in The Believer, “It was dank, low and funky, but I loved the basement because no one came down there unless they needed to.” “Sometimes my dad would come over after dinner and find me painting, still wearing a shirt and tie, while working.”
After graduating from high school, he moved to Brooklyn to study at Pratt Institute and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1960.
He lived in New York City, working as a freelance illustrator and contributing illustrations to Esquire, GQ, Seventeen, The New Yorker, and Pinup magazines. In 1963, he began teaching at the School of Visual Arts and painted in his studio at night.
Jack came to be in the late 1970s when a student gave Mr. Moriarty a copy of the war comic “Frontline Combat”, which he had read as a teenager.
“I took it home and I fell on the floor,” he said in 2009 Interview The Daily Cross Hatch, with an online comics journal. “It was not only better than I remembered, but also inspiring. I thought, ‘How many other things haven’t I seen since that period?’ So I started going to Comic Con and that’s where the collector in me started awakening.
For Mr. Moriarty, Jack was not just a character on canvas; It was a way for him to reconnect with his father, who died when he was 14.
“‘Jack Survives’ is a crazy, one-sided conversation with my father that’s 99 percent me,” he told The Believer. “Dad looms as a calming presence in Jack who handles Jack’s frustrations far better than I do.”
Mr. Moriarty moved on from Jack in the late 1980s and continued to paint, although in a completely new way – as panels, like a comic book artist. In one painting, Mr. Moriarty is looking down from the roof at his father, who is reading a newspaper. In another, he is an old man painting in his basement.
“There was no conscious effort to be poetic or subtle,” he said. “I’m not a fan of spaciousness or theatrics. I prefer string quartets to symphonies, jazz trios to big bands.”
He also tasted solitude.
“Loneliness and loneliness are not the same,” he said. “Everyone is alone, but not everyone is alone. Jack is alone, but he is not alone. I am alone, and I completely understand why it makes me strange to society. I am not alone. Being alone is complete freedom for me.”
He would usually start painting after midnight, finish by 3 a.m., eat dinner, watch movies, go to bed at 7 a.m., wake up at 2 a.m., have breakfast, and watch “Jeopardy!” Used to watch. He had no use for the high-end art world.
Mr. Spiegelman said, “It was as pure an experience of being an artist as I have ever seen.” “It was, in some ways, without ambition and without consideration for future generations.”
