Highland Beach: Drawn to cartoons

Humor on exhibit in Highland Beach emerged from artist’s hair-on-fire epiphany13570558891?profile=RESIZE_710x

Marissa Acocella with the tools of her craft at home in Highland Beach. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Rich Pollack

It was New Year’s Eve 1990 and Marisa Acocella was searching for answers from a higher authority. 

A self-taught cartoonist who had been drawing since she was 3, Acocella earned a degree from the Pratt Institute in New York and was working as an advertising agency art director, catering to high-powered clients. She hated it. 

So she lit a candle to summon saints and others from above and ask for guidance. She accidentally leaned forward into the flame, setting her hair on fire. This happened right  after Acocella had added the line “she was a little upset during the meeting” to an irreverent drawing of herself with a gun in her mouth.

Then she had an epiphany.

“That’s when I realized that’s what I should have been all along — a cartoonist,” she said. 

Three and a half decades later, that once-frustrated commercial artist is an internationally recognized cartoonist whose work is regularly featured in The New Yorker. Her cartoons have also appeared in some of the top fashion magazines including Mirabella, Glamour, W and Elle, as well as in The New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine. 

Now 64 and living in Highland Beach, Acocella is also the author of three graphic novels, and the acclaimed graphic memoir — Cancer Vixen — detailing her battle with breast cancer that was diagnosed in 2004, three weeks before she was married. 

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Marisa Acocella has authored a book detailing her battle with breast cancer.

Through July 22, a sampling of 28 of Acocella’s cartoons from The New Yorker will be on display in the Highland Beach Library, along with underwater photographs by Mark Kosarin.

Visitors to the exhibit will note that Acocella’s work is somewhat eclectic, although fashion tends to be a favorite theme. 

“They’re about fashion but they’re not just about fashion,” she said. “They’re about women.”

Her work, much of which was created while she lived in Manhattan, can also be autobiographical and, of course, a little irreverent. 

“I look at the world through my own lens,” she said. 

Working for The New Yorker, she says, is not easy. The magazine famous for its cartoons has a reputation for being highly selective.

Like many of the cartoonists who submit ideas, Acocella sends 10 to 12 drawings every week to The New Yorker.

“It’s a lot of hard work,” she said, adding that as a cartoonist there is no steady paycheck. “You can go months without a sale.” 

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Acocella’s cartoons from The New Yorker are on display in the Highland Beach Library. This one hints at her love of fashion and a childhood as daughter of a luxury shoe designer. Cartoons provided

Coming up with ideas for the one-panel cartoons that appear in the magazine is the fun part, she says. “As an artist, you go where your imagination takes you, then you put it down on paper.”

The hard part, she adds, is re-creating the initial sketch that took five minutes to rough out and turning it into the final artwork, which can take days.

The daughter of a high-end shoe designer — her mother, Violetta, also of Highland Beach, designed the shoes Jackie Kennedy wore to her husband’s inauguration — Acocella grew up with sketches everywhere in her home. 

“The first thing I ever drew was a shoe,” she said. 

By the time she was 3 she was drawing women similar to those in the drawings her mother submitted with trend reports to manufacturers. 

“I got bored because the women weren’t saying anything,” she said. 

That changed when Acocella was 8 and the family went on a vacation to Bermuda. The resort where they stayed put them in a room that her mother was unhappy with, so the staff put them in a “pink elephant” of a house on the edge of the property. 

Gracing the walls were sketches and The New Yorker cartoons and Acocella soon learned that the house had belonged to James Thurber, a famous cartoonist and author for the magazine.

She stayed up to 3 a.m. reading Thurber’s books and studying the cartoons with captions, realizing she could make the people in her drawings talk. 

Acocella awoke four hours later with the sensation that something was crawling on her, only to discover hundreds of red ants all over the bed. 

“I tell people ‘That’s when I got bitten by the cartoonist bug,’” she said.

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Most of Acocella’s cartoons focus on women and fashion, although men are not immune from her wit.

During her career, Acocella worked on a twice-monthly reportage column for The New York Times — journalism in cartoon drawings — and had a monthly comic strip in Mirabella and later in Elle. 

Excerpts from the book Cancer Vixen appeared in Glamour magazine, with 72 panels on six pages. 

Cancer Vixen, which chronicles her successful battle with breast cancer — even though she didn’t have health insurance — is being considered as the basis of a television show and a movie.

Her books are available at the Highland Beach Library.

While working on another book, Acocella is continuing to come up with ideas, some of which manifest when she’s strolling through Highland Beach. 

“I get my best ideas when I’m walking,” she said. 

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If You Go

What: Art exhibit featuring works by Marisa Acocella, including 28 of her cartoons for The New Yorker, and underwater photography by Mark Kosarin 

Where: Highland Beach Library, 3618 S. Ocean Blvd.

When: Through July 22; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 10-4:30 Fri., 9-1:30 Sat. 

Information: 561-278-5455 or https://highlandbeach.us/231/Library

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