All the Presidents

Drew Friedman

Sep 2019 · Fantagraphics Books

About this ebook

All the Presidents is the latest book of portraits by the artist BoingBoing hails as “the greatest portrait artist of our time.” All the Presidents is indeed what the title indicates, portraits of all 44 United States Presidents, from George Washington to Donald Trump and everyone in between, all rendered in Friedman’s celebrated in-your-face style of portraiture. The portraits will be accompanied by vital statistics on each subject (political affiliation as well as height and weight, etc.), as well as fascinating presidential factoids. Friedman’s two page comic strip introduction “Drawn to Presidents” opens the book, specifically detailing his fasciation with drawing many US presidents throughout his life, from childhood scrawlings of Richard Nixon to illustrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton for Spy and eventually creating the famed Barack Obama/George Washington mashup inauguration cover for The New Yorker in 2009. The book also features a foreword by NPR’s Studio 360 host, Kurt Andersen.

Ratings and reviews

With ALL THE PRESIDENTS, Drew Friedman took up an audacious challenge. He set out to depict these figures in a new way. These include some whom we become familiar with as children and see practically every day of our lives. The result is some of the strangest and fantastic portraits he’s ever produced. These aren’t works of political satire. His agenda is set by what he sees, and as an artist, he’s a die-hard independent. At first glance, there’s something weird and shocking about his George Washington. Taking another look, you realize there is nothing grotesque about it..In every school book, on our money, carved into mountains Washington’s face is smooth.And it’s so ubiquitous, it barely registers. He’s our pasty-faced irritated Mona Lisa, Friedman adds just a few wrinkles. and this infusion of reality is radical enough to be disorienting. He takes genuine delight in his subjects’ otherness, His James Buchanan is like some creature that lumbered in from Oz. Martin Van Buren is a goblin pulled from the deep. He subverts viewers’ expectations of not only what they look like, but how they expect he’d draw them. The Nixon portrait is especially rich—weirdly perched atop hands clasped as if in prayer, his countenance is a godhead of smug avarice. But it eschews the cliched grotesqueries; he’s not a monster made of jowls, nose and glower. Making him appear relatively normal is a more interesting choice, and it takes a moment for the sinister aspect to come to the forefront. Friedman’s technical ability is absolutely astonishing here. ALL THE PRESIDENTS IS enthralling, eerie and completely entertaining.

About the author

Drew Friedman 's work has appeared in The New York Times, Mad, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines. He is the author of several collections of comics and cartooning, including All the Presidents, Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix, Old Jewish Comedians, and Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental. He resides in Pennsylvania with his wife and collaborator, Kathy Bidus, and their beagles. Kurt Anderson is an American author, born in Nebraska in 1954. He is a graduate of Harvard College and was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon. He is the host and co-creator of the radio show and podcast, Studio 360 for which he won a Peabody Award. He is a co-founder of Spy Magazine. He has also worked as editor-in-chief for New York, and a cultural columnist and critic for Time magazine and New Yorker. He writes for television, film and stage. His most recent book is entitled, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.