Eric Drooker

Eric Drooker is an American painter, graphic novelist, and frequent cover artist for The New Yorker. He conceived and designed the animation for the film Howl.

Biography Drooker grew up in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, adjacent to the Lower East Side, which was then a working-class immigrant neighborhood with a tradition of left-wing political activism. He attended the Downtown Community School in Manhattan's East Village. Drooker developed an early interest in graphic arts and cartoons, particularly the woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward and the underground comics of Robert Crumb.

After studying sculpture at Cooper Union, Flood won an American Book Award. Portions of his Flood! artwork were used for album covers for the bands Faith No More and Rage Against the Machine. In 2006, the Library of Congress acquired the original art for Flood! A Novel in Pictures, including preliminary drawings, sketches, and cover paintings. The complete Flood! Archive is housed in the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, which is open to the public.

In the 1990s, Drooker broadened his scope from graphic arts to painting, creating several covers for The New Yorker and a book of illustrations of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, Illuminated Poems. His third book, Street Posters & Ballads, is a compilation of graphics, poems and songs about the Lower East Side. The book won the 1999 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel.

He designed the animation for the 2010 film, Howl, a movie based on the epic poem by Allen Ginsberg, who collaborated with Drooker on the book Illuminated Poems. His best-selling book, Howl: A Graphic Novel, visualizes the poem with animation art Drooker designed for the film.

Cultural references

His painting "Native New York" inspired Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Poem #7" from his book A Far Rockaway of the Heart.