(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
Okay, we were just kidding about that new Garbage Pail Kids card being the height of Abbi Jacobson’s fame. As much as we love GPK, it doesn’t take some pun-happy Art Spiegelman wannabe to immortalize the Broad City co-creator– she’s actually a capable illustrator herself, and she has a nifty new book coming out. On Wednesday, Oct. 26, she and her Broad City co-star, Ilana Glazer, will talk about it at Space Ninety 8 in Williamsburg. Consider it an off-season reunion while you wait for Season 4 to drop.
They’ll have plenty to talk about: According to its epilogue, Carry This Book was written during five months that were “incredibly significant” to Jacobson. Among other things, she reveals, “I wrote season four of Broad City. I learned about managing multiple projects. I learned that I have a lot to learn about managing multiple projects. I fell in love. I surprised myself.” Jacobson thanks Glazer, her “partner in crime,” for “telling me over and over that I could finish this and that we’d be okay. You’re my favorite person to procrastinate with.”
The concept of Carry This Book is “weirdly specific, and also wildly random,” according to Jacobson: “I made a list of famous people and fictional characters and imagined what they might carry around with them,” she writes in the intro. And yes, the fictional characters include Glazer’s counterpart Ilana Wexler, who carries period pants and Trojans in her bag, and Abbi’s own Broad City character, who carries pumpernickel toasts and an issue of Oprah magazine. (We also get to see what Oprah herself totes around.)
Each page shows a cluster of someone’s belongings as if Ilana has just dumped them out while searching for her passport. We see their favorite books (Christopher Columbus is reading How to Rape and Pillage), their ID cards (David Bowie has no less than 8 of them, for all of his various personas), their work tools (Banksy carries night-vision goggles) their grooming methods (a mustache comb for Prince), and their podcast playlists (Michelle Obama is apparently a fan of Marc Maron’s WTF.)
Needless to say, the presidential candidates are featured: Trump carries XXXL gloves (“for show”) and pocket mantras such as “you are a genius” and “you can sue anyone for anything.” Hillary (no stranger to Broad City) carries a Metrocard (“practice makes perfect”) and a history book (“when you’re making history,” Jacobson annotates, “you have to know where we’ve been to know where we need to go”). Jacobson even lays out the contents of her own travel toiletry bag, admitting that the 35+ items therein might just be “completely insane, right!?”
If you’re wondering whether Jacobson’s fellow Garbage Pail Kid, Lena Dunham, made the cut, the answer is no (Carrie Bradshaw did, though). But Dunham will be talking to Jacobson at Symphony Space on Tuesday. That event is sadly sold out, but Wednesday’s event at Space Ninety 8 (98 N. 6th St., Williamsburg) is free and open to the public. It starts at 8:30pm. You can also pre-order a signed copy of the book, available Oct. 26, from Strand.