DAHLOV IPCAR: 1917-2017

Word has come that the great children's book artist and writer Dahlov Ipcar has passed away, seven months short of her 100th birthday.

She was one of my favorite artists as a child. The cover of the forthcoming King-Cat #77 was drawn in tribute to her, and in working on it I pulled out some of the old Scholastic Books editions of her work that I’ve owned since I was a kid… I was surprised and delighted to see how big of an almost unconscious influence she’d had on my own work. I had no idea she was still alive while I was drawing it.

Tucker Stone of No Brow Books has shared the following remembrance (via Facebook and The Comics Journal), and posted a short video made a few years back in her studio. A treasure.

"A few years ago, pretty soon after I started at Nobrow, my friend Jason and I drove to Georgetown Maine and interviewed Dahlov Ipcar, who was 96 at the time, about her children’s books that we were getting ready to re-issue via Flying Eye. She was electric: 96 years old, living alone (it was her elderly son’s job to supply her with groceries), very direct, funny and acerbic as hell. I loved her. I wrote her letters afterwards (that was her preferred method of contact with me) whenever I had something of note to tell her about my work on her books, and I spoke to her a few times on the phone to set up some interviews and assist her with supplying books for events she would do at a local children’s hospital. She was always on top of it, and funny in a crusty, tough way that belied decades of commitment to craft and hardcore farmhouse living.

She just passed away, which was expected. I am sorry to her family for that, but I know how incredibly proud her sons were to work with her, and how much she loved and missed her husband, who passed away himself decades ago. Her life was lived as fully as one could dream of –a family she loved, and an art she devoted herself too. One of the first things that she told Jason and I when we arrived to make the attached video was that she had no interest in living to be 100 years old–as she put it, she was tired of spending so much of her morning going to the bathroom–and that was only the first of many things that made us laugh.

I just checked. Her 100th birthday would have been this November. Nice work, Dahlov."

 --Tucker Stone

Dahlov Ipcar from Nobrow Ltd on Vimeo.

Thank you Mrs. Ipcar.