A Surreal, Sexy, and Very Trippy Autobiographical Comic Like No Other
Craig Yoe is an author, a publisher, a comics historian, an animator, a graphic and toy designer, and a multiple Eisner Award-winner — and now he’s teaming up with Clover Press for his next project as a cartoonist: the first-ever publication of WOMAN & MAN+, a wildly surreal autobiographical comic which will be crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The graphic novel depicts the artist losing his love, his home country, and (some say) his sanity—and tells the story of his struggle to reinvent himself. The project is now live on Kickstarter.
Craig Yoe’s debut comic Sammy Saved and Al Most, published in the 1970’s, featured a cover colored by Yoe’s pal, Zap Comix’s Rick Griffin. Sammy Saved and Al Most was a spiritually infused contribution to the underground comix movement, one which garnered the young cartoonist some attention. But Yoe’s passion for drawing comics was sidetracked for over a half a century by his career as a creative director for Jim Henson and the Muppets, Disney, Nickelodeon, and MTV and producing books about comics history with the award-winning Yoe Books.
Yoe’s passionate cult of fans have called his visual diary/underground comix “bizarre,” “beautiful,” “transgressive,” “‘like nothing else,” “subversive,” “beyond weird” and “degenerate—in a good way!” Now, more than fifty years after Sammy Saved and Al Most was found at hippy headshops, Yoe’s eagerly awaited second comic WOMAN & MAN+ dives deep into sex, horror, and drama, with a hint of humor and a whiff of hope.
“The book has been with me for a long time and in the countries I’ve lived. Its secret origin was in NYC, pages were first drawn in Berlin, it continued in Spain’s Canary Islands, and was consummated here in the Philippines,” said Yoe. “It’s the culmination of a lifetime of studying cartooning history and my deeply personal look at comics, art–and life’s lunacy.”
“WOMAN & MAN+ has a revolutionary approach that breaks all the rules of conventional comic storytelling—think Steranko meets Hieronymus Bosch by way of R. Crumb and Dali,” said Clover Press Publisher Hank Kanalz. “You can’t look away — and we can’t wait for readers to get a taste of the unique art style that’s been deemed ‘Yoe-Brow.’”
Here’s what your favorite people and places have to say about Craig Yoe, his work, and his imagination:
“Like Dr. Seuss on acid!’ —Animation Magazine
“Valuable creativity!” —Jim Henson
“Wacky, bizarre!” —MTV
“The comics version of huffing paint!” –Vice Magazine
“Craig Yoe is the Turner Classic Movies of Comics historians!” -–USA TODAY
America’s foremost comics historian!” —ABC TV
“A great artist—Yoe is no pretender!” —Chrissie Hynde
“Craig Yoe is among those talented artists, like Salvador Dali and Jim Woodring, whose work is incomprehensible but mesmerizing. But only in Yoe’s incomprehensible work can one find Nancy cameos, Swiss cheese pencils, and walking fish, so a new comic book by him is a must-have item.” —Denis Kitchen
“A typical hippie!” —Washington Post
“Buy Yoe!” —Stan Lee
To support the project, visit the Kickstarter here. For updates, follow Clover Press on Instagram, X and Facebook. You can subscribe to the Clover Press newsletter here.
About Craig Yoe
Publisher Weekly says he’s the “archivist of the ridiculous and the sublime” and calls his work “brilliant.” The Onion calls him “the celebrated designer,” The Library Journal, “a comics guru.” BoingBoing hails him “a fine cartoonist and a comic book historian of the first water,” Vice Magazine opined, “Craig Yoe Is an Indiana Jones for perv-nerd artifacts!“ Yoe was Creative Director/Vice President/General Manager of Jim Henson’s Muppets, and a Creative Director at Nickelodeon and Disney. Yoe has six patents for his toy inventions. Craig has won multiple Eisner Awards, A Mobius, and the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.