Stacey Brook is a Writer, Blogger, Author

When Bob Fingerman envisions the future, he sees a planet with mutants and a healthy supply of Slim Jims. As From the Ashes, his latest graphic novel, begins, Fingerman and wife Michele stand amidst the rubble. In this sharp social satire, the author of Beg the Question populates the world with neighborly zombies who live peacefully with three-headed dogs while “foodies” feast on the flesh of nuclear-charred celebrity chefs.

Like Dante in The Inferno or Lewis Carroll, Fingerman casts his favorite political villains as players. In the post-nuclear fallout, “Rile O’Biley” leads an underground cult of survivors with “Ma Rove” as his sidekick. Zombies insist upon being called “Reanimated-Americans,” yet the author insists the story’s not intended to be polemical.

“It was more about a mindset and not about blame,” he says. “I didn’t really want to blame anything specific, other then a general feeling about the state of the world and the state of humanity.”

Not knowing if Heeb would survive this fictional apocalypse, we decided to sit down with the cynical cartoonist to talk about everything from his obsession with the end of the world to how he was almost tricked into a Bar Mitzvah.

A speculative memoir could have taken many directions. Why the end of days?

Well, it’s not the first time I’ve dabbled with the apocalypse. That is a theme I could come back to, and probably will come back to again and again. Partly because, to me, it’s just a fun scenario to play with. And I wanted to do something kind of silly. I’ve got a novel coming out in August about the apocalypse, Pariah, and that’s much more serious. What can I say? The End of Humanity is just something I never stopped enjoying thinking about.

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Do you think there’s anything Jewish about your work? Are you a born Jew?

Well, I’m a born atheist. Both my parents are atheists, so I’m Jewish in name, but not in practice. I guess since my mother wasn’t Jewish at all and I did not come from a Jewish uterus, I committed the sin right from the get-go. But it’s definitely in there, culturally. I think it’s in the DNA, whether you want it in there or not. I probably use more Yiddish in my work than I have any right to. There are so many things you can express in Yiddish that you can’t express any other way. I’ve got Irish-American friends who insist on using words like ‘kvetch’ and ‘oy.’ They just don’t have their own words for them.

That’s true. We’ve invented many ways to complain.

When I was twelve, my father’s mother, who was Orthodox, attempted to bully me into preparing for a Bar Mitzvah. I got kind of bushwacked. My dad hates religion with a passion, but he drove me out to my grandmother’s apartment in Co-op City in the Bronx, and his sister and her husband were there along with my grandmother and I thought, ‘What’s happening?’ And my father sat in the kitchen because he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and the three of them just kind of ganged up on me and were like, ‘You should have a bar mitzvah.’ It was a really weird moment. My grandmother was Orthodox by her own rules. People who are that fervent about things, they kind of always make up their own shit to some degree.

Well, this book skewers lots of people with fervent beliefs. What makes the God Hates Fags clan and foodies so ripe for parody?

I think you kind of say it in the names. I mean, “God Hates Fags”? Not to undermine myself, but they’re almost self-satirizing. I’ve been aware of Pastor Fred Phelps and his idiotic brood for a long time. I really wanted to work with those guys. It sounds like I wanted to jam with a band: ‘This finally felt like the right project.’

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Okay, but why the foodies?

I actually think things like the Food Network are part of the downfall of this country . . . it’s just about consume, consume, consume. But now it’s consume, but with this patina of, ‘Oh, you’re eating something fancy now, so eat a lot of it!’ And I don’t know how affordable they’re trying to make things, because you’ll hear them say things like, ‘Just use your imported truffle oil.’ Like, ‘Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t I?’

Why did you cast Rove and O’Reilly?

Well, in a way, O’Reilly’s easier. ‘Cause he’s a figure of just nauseous fascination for me. He’s such a horrible person, but at the same time, he does have kind of a snake oil salesman charm. A little twinkle in his eye. He can, sometimes, be appealing. Which, of course, makes him even worse. I think I kind of let myself down in not making Glenn Beck a figure in the book – but Beck only appeals to lunatics and idiots. He’s just another sign of the apocalypse. At least the apocalypse of American discourse. He has brought it down to the level of toddlers. It wouldn’t surprise me if he just whipped it out one day and pissed on a photo of someone he hated, just because he couldn’t find the words anymore.

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Sex is the first thing your character thinks of after it all hits. Is that realistic?

Oh, absolutely. That’s the glue. That’s kind of what holds me together in a way. It’s like, ‘Well, there’s always that.’ That’s like the one happy thing that I can always rely on.

Let’s say there is no apocalypse in your time. Like, do you and Michele have a million babies? Do you become a Republican?

As much as I love horror stories . . .

Blogger Rick Juzwiak’s brain is a black hole of pop culture references. His pool of knowledge runs as long as Quentin Tarantino’s Netflix queue, as wide as the spread of autotune, and as deep as a four year-old pageant girl’s cosmetic bag. He describes his brain as “a YouTube K-Hole,” in which anything and everything can trigger the activation of a cultural tag or nostalgic playback. Like when he compares an unfortunately made-up contestant on “America’s Next Top Model” to Chester the puppet from 90s MTV show “Sifl and Olly.” Or contrasts “Up,” the loveable animated Pixar film with “Up!,” Russ Meyer’s decidedly less kid-friendly softcore romp. Or connects an utterance from Jersey Shore’s Mike “The Situation” to a line from the trailer for “Cool As Ice.” (That’s Vanilla Ice’s 1991 “musical romance.”)

“When you expose yourself to all this crap, it’s gonna hang around and manifest itself in bizarre ways,” he says.

For the last four years, this Williamsburg resident has spent a minimum of ten hours a day in front of television and computer, consuming and dissecting popular culture using the quick-wit of a Judge Judy worshipper (“I watch her every day”), the hard-boiled clarity of a music journalism major, and the originality of an acute, perverse, and achingly honest entertainment devotee. He is a distinct and refreshing voice in a sea of muddled cultural commentary.

As one of VH1’s full-time TV bloggers, Juzwiak has made a trade out of the reality show recap, a mixed media collage of screenshots, sound bytes, moving gifs, hilariously photoshopped still frames, and biting commentary that isolates all the most ridiculous moments of the network’s chaotic life-behind-glass experiments. He spends Monday through Friday reviewing clips, reading celebrity “news” (“I use that term loosely”) and interviewing the uninhibited stars of VH1 shows like “Rock of Love,” “Celebrity Rehab,” and the new “Frank the Entertainer … In a Basement Affair.” His strength lies in deftly summarizing the lunacy of the events that transpire from week to week, and in highlighting the indelible personalities of each series, be they lovable, flighty, or antagonistic. And of course, he imbues all of his coverage with the signature Juzwiakian cultural cross-pollination.

“The first episode of the first season of ‘Rock of Love’ is just ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ written in 2006,” he says. “Except they couldn’t show full nudity.”

When he’s not at VH1 headquarters in Times Square, “a place I’d never go if I didn’t have to go there every day,” Juzwiak is buckled down in his apartment off the Graham Avenue stop, with his oft-blogged about cat Winston, culling material for his personal pop culture blog, the fourfour (www.fourfour.typepad.com). The carefully cultivated mélange, named for the four-on-the-floor beats of disco and house music, was started by Juzwiak as a mode of expression for his entertainment encyclopedia of a brain, and has come to house one of the most eclectic, elevated collections of pop culture musings on the web.

Juzwiak’s obsessions are easily identifiable (pageants, house music, and horror flicks just to name a few), but anything wild, wacky or off-putting that crosses his path is game for exploration. Like the surprising pervasiveness of confederate flag-decorated merchandise on the Wildwood boardwalk. (“Wildwood is a body louse clinging to a sweaty shaft of hair in the Armpit of America that is New Jersey,” he writes in one post.) Or the nostalgia-ridden documentary “The Rocka-fire Explosion,” about a fanclub’s longtime obsession with an animatronic band. Or the dramatic declines and desperate pseudo-comebacks of R&B’s greatest divas, Whitney and Mariah.

Juzwiak also has a knack for collating and summarizing content for his audience via a variety of creative, web-friendly presentations, like his “I’m Not Here To Make Friends” montage (eventually adapted for a segment on “This American Life”), a video compilation of the endless times reality stars have verbally expressed what, since season one of “Survivor,” no one has really needed to say. He even created a video mash-up of the best moments from Celine Dion’s 2007 2-DVD set, not because he particularly likes Dion’s music, but because he simply finds her to be a compelling character. Juzwiak has admitted to being susceptible to the so-bad-it’s-good category of entertainment, seeking out honesty, and judging things on pure entertainment value versus critical expectations.

“It’s all about taste,” Juzwiak says. “I believe taste is not so much about what you like, but why you like it. And for critics, it’s about how you like it.”

Juzwiak is especially skilled in conveying this “how” via his fourfour reality show recaps, which allow him to tackle non-VH1 programs in the format he so loves. In the past, Juzwiak has covered shows from “Project Runway” to MTV’s brilliant if short-lived reality series, “The Paper,” and fans of the blog now petition him to cover new programs that may appeal to his varied sensibilities. Ultimately Juzwiak only has enough time to give a few shows the full treatment, like “America’s Next Top Model,” the recaps of which earned The fourfour its devoted audience, and Juzwiak his VH1 job; and which often take over ten hours to produce.

“Jersey Shore” is another series that was pretty much guaranteed coverage by Juzwiak, on account of the extreme personalities of the cast members (“they’re salacious and ridiculous and weird looking”), and Juzwiak’s own South Jersey origins.

“I think the most New Jersey thing you can do is choose to go to New Jersey,” Juzwiak says of the cast’s relative dearth of New Jersey natives. “To choose to align with that culture says a lot more than if you’re just born there. I think they fit in just fine.”

Rich explains that, like many of the VH1 reality shows he covers, “Jersey Shore” is a reflection of our culturally narcissistic societal tendencies.

“When I watch [reality television], it really is anthropological. It is looking at culture and understanding a way of life. This is just another group that hasn’t been examined.”

Juzwiak’s profession does have its pitfalls. What qualifies as escape for most people is always tied to work for a blogger. And with so much information and entertainment in circulation, the blogger is never off duty.

“I’m in this situation where I’m basically working day and night,” says Juzwiak. “But if something awesome happens, how the hell could I not share how it affected me? I would not turn my back on potential content. Ideas are hard to come by.”

It’s clear Juzwiak was built for this sort of thing.

“I’m extremely content in that I get to express myself to the fullest,” he says. “The only thing that holds me back is being tired. And it’s tough because it’s just a stupid blog. But it matters.”

On a recent Monday morning, five days before she’s due to appear at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona for a solo show of her artwork entitled “Silent Heroes,” Williamsburg artist Tara McPherson wipes teal paint off a palette knife, the only dirty instrument in her impeccable storefront studio on South 1st Street. Three paintings, two on the wall and one perched on an easel are in various stages of progress. The canvases (her first on linen —she usually paints on birch) each features one of McPherson’s signature beautiful babes, and each incorporates little blue, embryonic globule-like creatures—the latest additions to her fantastical world on paper. McPherson had just been asked to contribute an additional six more drawings to the exhibit, as songwriter Devendra Banhart had pulled out at the last minute (“What? A musician being flaky?” she joked), and all but one of the new pieces were still in early phases, just sketched enough to recognize the incorporation of McPherson’s tiny unsung heroes in each.

With a book signing at a comic convention on the weekend’s horizon and dinner plans with friends who only have the pleasure of seeing McPherson intermittently as she travels the globe in promotion of a new art book, collectible toys and gallery shows, McPherson estimated she would be up working in the studio to the sound of Spanish language tapes until 5am every morning until her departure. And yet, as she sat on a Victorian olive couch in her studio, blond-banged and smoky-eyed, sipping on an iced coffee from Verb on Bedford at 11am, she was calm as the early summer air.

“I work great with deadlines. If it’s like, ‘you have an art show in a year,’ I’m like, all right, I’m gonna go to Hawaii.  Hang out on the beach for a month. You tell me this is due Friday, and I can organize my life around that.”

For the last fifteen years McPherson has been planning her life and schedule around the creation of a world comprised of distinct line drawings and illustrations that are both twee and devilish, sweet and heartbreaking, enlightening and soul-crushingly sad.  Over time, McPherson has assembled a collection of coy, sleek and humanistic mutant/freaks—men and women with their hearts cut out, unicorn girls impaled through the abdomen by horned sea creatures, phantoms whose bodily malfunctions and abnormalities symbolize everyday battles of heart and spirit.  She has populated the world of rock poster art, collectible toys and most recently, fine art, with her cast of other-worldly characters—a child vampire named George, blossoming skull-flowers, buoyant, wide-eyed balloons named Mr. Wiggles, all of whom relay the most basic of human emotions, impulses and desires.  Even the most deplorable and unappealing of attributes—helplessness, selfishness, heartache—are portrayed with a macabre loveliness.

Tara McPherson’s painting “Laughing Through The Chaos Of It All,” (Giclee Print, 2009).

“She’s dealing with love and loss in her work,” notes Jonathan Levine, owner and proprietor of Jonathan Levine Gallery in Chelsea, where McPherson exhibited her first solo painting show in 2007.  “That sort of human condition is the main theme although she’s gotten into other sort of metaphysical ideas as well.  Her most personal work is about unfulfilled love, the nature of the heart, which is something a lot of people relate to.”

McPherson’s ability to construct images and worlds that people can relate to is only half the achievement. The other half is a result of an unfailing commitment to her craft.  Having grown up in Los Angeles, with most of her family originally hailing from Hawaii, she brings some of that California sunshine to Bedford Avenue, often punctuating sentences—especially those about her work—with “Yay!” (“And then he offered me a solo show, and I was like, “YAY!”).  Yet this four-year Williamsburg resident’s work ethic is distinctly that of a New Yorker.

“What I love about New York is that it is tough to live here, and if you can’t cut it, this city will just eat you up and spit you out,” she says.  “I like that you have to bust your ass, and up your level of production. You have to want it to thrive.”

And yet, McPherson’s devotion to her work keeps her away from the city that fuels her productivity. She has traveled so much in the past year, when she has reached with her tattooed arm for the keys to her Bedford area apartment, it hasn’t been to stay for longer than two weeks—just enough time to grab a coffee at Verb, eat some Korean (“I crave Dokebi!”), and DJ a quick gig at Union pool, “where all my friends work.”

“Just like artists tour to support their album, I tour to support my artwork,” she says.  “I am very goal-oriented. I know what I want to do. And if it takes me four years to do it, that’s fine.”

For example, two years ago, McPherson had a meeting with Dark Horse Comics about putting together an art book of paintings that, at the time, existed only in theory Seventeen paintings later, Dark Horse released Lost Constellations, Tara’s latest art book (her second produced by Dark Horse)—the tome she is currently on tour to promote. The book highlights among other things, the work done for McPherson’s 2007 solo show at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, a three-painting series called The Weight of Water, that explores, through surrealist female portraiture, the element in its three natural states.

Now a forerunner in a fine arts movement most recently dubbed as “Pop Surrealism,” (McPherson doesn’t think the term “lowbrow” applies to her artwork—“That’s hot rods and stuff,” she says), she plays with the physical manifestation of thought, depicting beautiful women with lavish, bubbling flowers sprouting atop their heads.  She intentionally blurs the line between underwater and starry, atmospheric environnments to show “how the deepest of the oceans are just as foreign to us as the depths of space.” Her contemporaries include talents like Esao Andrews, Jonathan Viner, Marcos Chin and Eric White, all artists who dabble in dreamlike imagery with dark edges, and many of who share McPherson’s passion for representing the female form.

What sets Tara apart from most of her fine art world compatriots is her willingness to explore the more commercial aspects of artisanship. McPherson first made her mark on the rock concert poster circuit, a world that straddles the line between consumable artifact and art for art’s sake. She embraces her name as a brand and her images are well-suited for merchandising. Her new line of toys, called Gamma Mutant Space Friends, was released just a few months ago by Kidrobot.  Her website now offers a slew of McPhersonated products including faux-suede pillows, lighters, laptop skins, and a set of semi-permanent car decals. “I wanted to do more merchandising and cool stuff—stuff that I like to get,” she says.

This marketing/promotional aspect of the industry is one of Tara’s unfailing strengths. Because of the accessibility of her images and the easy relationship viewers have with her artwork, Tara is one of a handful or artists who has been able to forge a career that is both as successful in the commercial realm as it is in the world of fine arts. She even teaches a class at Parsons called, “The Dark Side,” on how to explore a narrative in your artwork, and make it commercially viable as well as gallery friendly.

Tara McPherson is currently on tour promoting her second art book, Lost Constellations and will be a part of the American Artifact Rock Poster Art Show in NYC on October 15.). See more of McPherson’s upcoming events, work and products at www.taramcpherson.com.