Who Needs Donuts When You’ve Got Lovely Interviews Like This? A Talk with Mark Alan Stamaty

In 2019 my sister and I considered the 1973 picture book cult classic Who Needs Donuts? on our podcast, with the intention of best determining whether or not it could be called “a classic”. Written by Mark Alan Stamaty, the book can only be described as a fever dream of food fanaticism. Our hero, a small boy named Sam, is donut obsessed. When he meets a man that introduces him to more donuts that he’s ever seen in his life, things take a wacky turn. For the record, Kate and I DID decide that the book was a classic, and I am happy to report that we are not alone in that assessment.

The recent republication of Who Needs Donuts? by Drawn & Quarterly this month marks a return to form. A reprise for this much beloved book. You should see the press materials. Here’s my favorite info: “It has fans spanning decades from Maurice Sendak and Nora Ephron to Patty Jenkins and Bob Odenkirk. Most recently, in T Magazine, the great Carson Ellis named Donuts a book everyone should read by age 10.”

And who can argue? So I did what any red-blooded American librarian with a penchant for creepy donut hoarding men (wait, what?) would do. I asked Mark to answer my questions and by gum he answered. Here then is our talk:

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Betsy Bird: Mark! What a delight to get to talk to you (albeit in an interview form) after all these years! And man. You are absolutely everywhere with the re-release of WHO NEEDS DONUTS? I want to get into its fandom and all that, but before we do I literally don’t even know the origin story of this book. Way back in 1973, you wrote a picture book. Why? How? Where did it come from?

Mark Alan Stamaty: In the Fall of 1965, I left the Jersey Shore, where I grew up and moved to New York City to study art at The Cooper Union. The city, for me, was a thrilling place. There was so much to see, so much happening every minute, everywhere. Especially out in the streets. And a central thing I did for years and years was go for long walks around Manhattan taking it all in, in the daytime but also often at night, which was something I’d started doing before I came to the city – long walks at night. Since I wanted to be a writer, as well as an artist, I always had a sketch pad with me to make sketches and notes about things that caught my attention.

One night around 11:00 PM, I went into the Bickford’s Coffee Shop on 3rd Ave & 23rd Street that was open all night and sat down at the counter (there were no tables). I loved going in there late at night to watch all the goings-on among the interesting characters that would be there in the late/early hours. I’d draw them and sometimes write down things they’d say. 

When I first entered, there was an old woman kind of slumped over the counter looking like she was asleep. After I’d been sitting there for maybe 40 minutes or so, a well-dressed man in a jacket, tie and overcoat came in and ordered two cups of coffee to go.

The waitress said: “Would you like donuts with your coffee?”

“No, thank you”, said the man.

At that point, the old woman sat up, pointed at the ceiling and said, “That’s right. Who needs donuts when you’ve got love?”

Immediately, I wrote that down in my sketchbook. In those days, I was living in a boarding house connected to a church on Gramercy Park. When I got back to my room, I wrote her words on a large sheet of paper and taped it to my wall and, whenever people came into my room, they would read it and be amused.

A few years later, after I’d illustrated my first picture book – YELLOW YELLOW – of a story written by Frank Asch, I was living on MacDougal St. and I started trying to write my own stories. After a few embarrassing misfires, I was looking around my apartment and saw that same sign on my wall and thought “YES! I want to make that old woman’s line famous!”

So Sam comes to the city from a suburb inspired by the street I grew up on. I did play around with a lot of the elements there as I did with the city streets. Sam, by the way, is my initials backwards and also the name of my maternal grandfather. I, like other boys of my generation, was cowboy crazy, hence Sam’s outfit. And a lot of the book is how the city FELT to me. Kind of overwhelmingly crazy and wonderful. So much to see everywhere. The horsebirds and elephantbirds were how the pigeons felt to me. Mr. Bikferd was meant to represent a kind of silly lunacy that was, to me, kind of quintessential of/to the city. 

Mr. Bikferd, as you probably noticed, is named after Bickford’s and the license plate on his donut wagon – 166 E. 23 – is the address of that Bickford’s. “Mrs. Asay’s Coffee” is named after our next door neighbor when I was growing up who would have coffee with my mother in the mornings.

And Pretzel Annie was inspired by an old, probably-Ukranian woman who sold pretzels on the corner of 4th Ave & 14th Street, whom I passed almost every day on my way back from Cooper Union.

The boys playing catch in the street on the last page are the “big kids”, Howard and Danny, who lived on our street and played catch until the cover came off the ball and they were throwing a ball of string back and forth.

So, that’s pretty much the origin story.

BB: Mein Gott, that’s incredible stuff. And for the record, if someone wants to also republish Yellow, Yellow, I adore that book. You know, your style has changed in different ways over the years. Back in the 70s you could fill pages and pages with doodles and details (there’s a shot of Sam sitting against a lawn where every single blade of grass is perfectly outlined). The artist Peter Sis once joked that early in his career he made the mistake of using dots in his art, and he got locked into that style. Was there a point at which you just didn’t feel inclined to doodle in that way anymore, or did it never truly leave you?

Mark: It might be fair to say that, through the years, I’ve developed a number of different styles. I suppose that’s something like the fact that I love the work of some very different fine artists, like Durer, Matisse, Picasso, George Grosz, Bonnard, Pollock, Mondrian, Leger, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Beckmann, Etc., Etc.

The style of WHO NEEDS DONUTS? is quite taxing. I love it, but it’s one type of thing I like to do. And it’s a certain type of intensity that is not the sum total of who I am.

My book Minnie Maloney & Macaroni is another style I enjoy. That was all in pencil of varying degrees of hardness and softness, which is really a pleasure to work with. It got to feel like painting with graphite. You can put down a soft layer, like an HB and then got over it with a hard layer like a 6H and it’s just kind of splendid, the sorts of things that happen, the feel of it. I did Where’s My Hippopotamus? in that approach also with two color overlays and I tried to keep it simple and that was a great change for me. And my Elvis book Shake, Rattle & Turn That Noise Down! was a chance to draw and paint in full color, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Even when I did comic strips in newspapers, I liked to experiment, change it up, stretch the boundaries of my work, discover something new.

Presently, I’m working on an autobiographical graphic novel that is another kind of move beyond what I’ve done in my earlier work.

I like to evolve, change and grow in my work as much as feels true to myself.

BB: Speaking of that kind of variety, your career over the years has encompassed everything from political cartoons to picture book autobiographies. You dipped in and out of children’s books throughout. What about the form has periodically appealed to you?

Mark: I love children, though I’ve never had any of my own and I have great admiration for parents who’ve taken on such a momentous task of raising a child. I was never sure I was up to it. But I was a Big Cousin to all my first cousins, a camp counselor, a baby sitter and an uncle. I think I’ve been a good uncle and, years ago, I got high praise for my babysitting. 

So, I enjoy kids. I love how they think. I love things they say. And I love to be nurturing toward them. I love to give them some love, make them feel appreciated, give them a little happiness and encouragement if I can.

And I do have vivid recollection of being a kid. I think Maurice Sendak said something to the effect of he wrote his books for the child he was. I probably botched that, but I believe it was something like that. I was a fan of Jean Shepherd on the radio and he would start a lot of his stories with: “I’m this kid, see…”   And I knew exactly what he meant and I think most listeners did.

It’s a kind of magical realm, the mind of a kid. Even as I write this, I’m seeing myself in my childhood bedroom looking up at my parents and having some sense that I’m in a bit of a different world from them, from their adultness. 

So, a picture book for children has its own sort of magical possibilities and it’s one of the places I like to go in my work.

BB: What was the initial reception of WHO NEEDS DONUTS? And how has its fandom changed over the years? 

Mark: The initial reception was quite mixed, You can google the October 14th, 1973 review of it by Barbara Bottner in the New York Times Book Review, in which she called it “phantasmagoric” and said I’d created a graphic world of “dazzling and outrageous proportions” with an “incredible display of endlessly amusing detail.” And there were some other great reviews and the title page was awarded a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. On the other hand, there were some very negative reviews, objecting to the grittiness, etc. of the drawings. One of those negative review was in Publisher’s Weekly, but something interesting happened later on with regard to that. In 1977 when my Hippo book was released, I was invited to the offices of Publisher’s Weekly to be interviewed for an article about humor in children’s books. And while I was sitting in the conference room being interviewed, a woman came in and interrupted us briefly. She said she was the person who wrote that negative review of WHO NEEDS DONUTS? and she apologized and said she was wrong.  So, that was a great, validating moment.

After the first time it went out of print, I started being contacted by people desperately seeking copies of the book. One of them was the writer-director Nora Ephron. She said she and her boys would take WHO NEEDS DONUTS? out of the East Hampton Library every summer. They loved it. But one summer it was no longer there. She really wanted a copy, so we traded books – two of hers for two  of mine. 

Another person who contacted me was a young man who paid me $100 for a signed copy to try to win back his girlfriend who loved the book. (A few years later, he called and said it didn’t win her back, but he did get over her.)

In 2002, I offered a copy of WHO NEEDS DONUTS? on Amazon. I said “New, first edition, signed by the author – $500.” A few weeks later, a man in California bought it for his wife.

The following year Knopf Random House brought it back in print for the next 20 years and it was very well received. I also found out that, among the fans of the donutbook, are Patty Jenkins, the film director of “Wonder Woman” and the comedy genius Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”), who recently posted a very nice short video about it on his Facebook page.  

So, I continually hear from fans of the book. It isn’t everybody’s favorite, but the people who love it REALLY love it! 

BB: Man, I always knew I liked Barbara Bottner for a reason. Well, Mark, this has been grand. The only thing left to ask at this point is what else are you up to these days? 

Mark: Well, as I mentioned, I’m currently working on an autobiographical graphic novel for grown-ups and probably teenagers. I started working on it eight years ago. It’s essentially a bildungsroman and kind of coming-of-age also. It deals with a lot of themes of my life. It’s about difficulties I experienced in my youth and how I found my way. The first eleven chapters take me up to about the age of 32 and the last chapter is looking back. Personally, I think it will be the best thing I’ve ever done. I may have to put in another two years to finish all the drawings. I’ve kept diaries since I was a senior in high school. This book I’m currently working on is pretty much the book I’ve been trying to write all my life.

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One of these days I’m going to have to make a site of all the Best Interviewees I’ve encountered on this site. Mark would certainly make the cut. Huge thanks to him for talking with us today and to Julia Pohl-Miranda and the team at Drawn & Quarterly for connecting us. Who Needs Donuts? is newly published as of right now, so go on and feed that curiosity that I know you’re feeling. It’s good for what ails ya! And if you’d like to see Mark yourself, he’ll be appearing at the Lucky Rabbit Literature Festival in Kansas City this week. Enjoy!

Filed under: Interviews