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Eric Drooker (b. 1958, New York) is an American painter, graphic novelist, and illustrator.

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 and spent the summers of 1969, 1970 and 1971 at Camp Meadowlark in Monterey, Massachusetts. 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, Drooker turned to poster art, creating flyers on local political issues while working as a tenant organizer. His images, done in a striking black-and-white style reminiscent of Masereel and other 1930s expressionist illustrators, were widely copied and reused by others—sometimes for unrelated purposes such as advertising concerts—and were popular enough that he could make a small income selling artwork on the street. During the 1980s, Drooker was further radicalized by his experiences with the police, due to their actions against squatters in the rapidly gentrifying Tompkins Square Park area and their increasing intolerance of unlicensed street artists and musicians.

His first published work appeared in leftist magazines such as the People's Daily World and The Progressive, and other underground publications such as Screw. When World War 3 Illustrated was founded by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, who shared Drooker's political beliefs and graphic approach, Drooker became one of the magazine's co-editors and frequent contributors. Eventually he began to sell illustrations to more mainstream publications, and became more widely known as a cartoonist when his short story "L" appeared in Heavy Metal. "L", along with two other stories, made up his first graphic novel, FLOOD! A Novel in Pictures—a wordless, dream-like narrative of powerless citizens' struggles with authority in a rapidly deteriorating New York City—which won an American Book Award.

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 and Ballads of the Lower East Side, is a compilation of comics, paintings, essays and music. Portions of his FLOOD! artwork were used for the album covers for California alternative metal band Faith No More's King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime and for Canadian punk band Propagandhi's Potemkin City Limits. Drooker's artwork has recently been featured on the back cover and in the accompanying booklet of the Leftöver Crack/Citizen Fish split release Deadline.

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.

He designed the animation for the recent film, Howl, a movie based on the epic poem by Allen Ginsberg, who collaborated with Drooker on the book Illuminated Poems.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eric Drooker", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0