Larry Marder

Larry Marder
Marder at the New York Comic Con in Manhattan, October 10, 2010
Born	Lawrence Marder (1951-05-29) May 29, 1951 (age 65) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist
Notable works	Tales of the Beanworld

Larry Marder (born May 29, 1951 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American cartoonist and writer, best known as the creator of comic book Tales of the Beanworld, which began as an "essentially self-published title" in 1984.

Marder was educated at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut in the early 1970s, earning a BFA degree in 1973. He earned "his living as an art director in the high-pressure world of advertising" in Chicago from 1976, balancing his time in that profession with "a remarkable interior landscape of the imagination that coalesced into the vivid ecology of Beanworld."

He cites as his major influences Jack Kirby, Rudolph Zallinger, Henry Darger and Marcel Duchamp.

Marder's Tales of the Beanworld began as a "collection of character sketches and concepts" that is described by Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette in Comic Book Rebels as "an essentially self-published comic (through distributed through Eclipse Comics)," launched in 1984. In a short period of time, the comic "evolved into what Marder terms 'a weird fantasy dimension that operates under its own rules and laws.'" Wiater and Bissette also term it:

The initial idea hit Marder when he was in art school, and "swept up in the conceptual art movement['s mantra]... 'Down with the object. Down with form. Idea is everything,'" which led him to "create comics where idea was everything." Removing the human figure, he "came up with something that would work in comics: the Bean figures," and began "goofing around with these figures." Revising and refining his characters through "political cartoons on Watergate and so on, that were published in my college newspapers using these Bean characters," although he came up with the characters in 1972, "the storyline didn't really come together until 1982."