Every fall the various colleges at the University of Toronto hold massive, weekend-long book sales, letting donated books go at bargain prices, with proceeds supporting the college libraries. In the prologue to Seth’s book-nerd pamphlet, 40 Cartoon Books of Interest, he celebrates these sales as one of the vanishing IRL treasure-hunting experiences that eBay et al. have since supplanted. I can only agree with his fondness for them. I go to each sale every year and, while the pickings do seem to get slimmer each time, my personal library is still the richer for the books which I’ve managed to dig out of overstuffed and unorganised cardboard boxes, or for which I’ve fought off the elbows and grabby greedy hands of so many book dealers and other lame-o enthusiasts like myself. With the last of the major annual book sales upon us, I thought I’d take the time to reflect upon some of my prized purchases. To facilitate matters, I’ve limited my purview here to books I’ve paid $1 for—not to brag or anything.
The Lonely Ones, by William Steig (1942). I know unforgivably little about William Steig, beyond the fact that he was a New Yorker cartoonist and children’s book author. Even though I’ve seen that work, very little of it has really stuck with me—The Lonely Ones, however, would be memorable even if it hadn’t produced one of the most iconic of all cartoon images. Part of that brief, weird mid-century flourishing of inscrutable cartoon books that also counted Abner Dean and Saul Steinberg among its practitioners, Steig’s book most resembles a series of psychic or emotional portraits. On the right of each two-page spread, Steig draws an abstraction or malformation of the human form, naked and quailed or proud and standoffish but rarely content. On the left appears a line of cryptic text—“Mother loved me but she died,” say, or “I do not forget to be angry”—a poor code with which to decipher Steig’s absurd portraiture, and a gesture that forever divorces each of these lonely ones from any kind of understanding or interpretation.
Men, Women & Dogs, by James Thurber (1943; 1975). James Thurber was another New Yorker cartoonist, and one of the first who couldn’t really draw—but goddamn if the man didn’t know his cartoons. His other books feature selected cartoons, or they pepper drawings throughout their pages, but this is his one major all-cartoon volume, showcasing a bevy of his New Yorker panels, as well as the riotous, Hogarthian sequence “The War Between Men and Women.” Thurber’s men are all bald-pated, either nebbishes or predators, while his women are lumpy, determined, and very much in charge, if a bit loopy. Drunks, schemers, adulterers, upper-class twits, they inhabit a vague world of parlours and sitting rooms and cocktail parties, and communicate strictly in non sequiturs, which somehow end up seeming appropriate anyway (“See you at the barricades, Mr. Whitsonby!”, or “I brought a couple of midgets—do you mind?”). His dogs, removed from this fray, are noble, wise, a little sad, and the only beings with whom Thurber wants to feel a kinship, humane and calm creatures in a world of aggressive carousers.
Funny Cartoons, by Virgil Partch (1955). Virgil Partch is my favourite gag cartoonist, not because he’s necessarily the funniest, but because he possesses the most finely tuned sense of anarchy, meanness, and desperation— qualities the best and most honest humourists require in abundance. Perhaps because he did much of his work for men’s magazines rather than more upscale periodicals, Partch roots his cartooning in a sense of the body, rather than in ideas. He doesn’t draw people, that is, so much as he draws what it feels like to be a person, giving his characters an awkward, clayey solidity that belies how malleable they can be, especially when soused. I’ve got better books by Partch, but I like the terrible reproduction in this one—it’s like you’re reading an nth generation xerox on a break room corkboard, something so crass and true that’s spoken to so many people so much and so often that they’ve all felt the need to share it around, like some samizdat secret.
Boy, Girl. Boy, Girl. by Jules Feiffer (1961). Jules Feiffer is the most messily elegant of cartoonists, with the most sinuous line. The work in this volume, originally published in the Village Voice and Playboy, has now been collected along with ten years’ worth of other strips, in the indispensable Explainers, but this format still really flatters these cartoons. Here, each strip spreads out over at least two spacious pages, the panels strewn willy-nilly, allowing for a different sense of timing and flow than is present when they’re published stacked in tiers one on top of the other. Feiffer’s talkative neurotics worry about politics and work and relationships and money, in dialogue with each other or in soliloquy, speaking in captions that hang around their heads like so much lead. These are text-heavy strips, but Feiffer complements his wordy diatribes and self-analyses with the subtlest of changes between his almost-static images, slightly tweaking a gesture here or a facial feature there with his effortlessly expressive scribbles. All that, plus this cover is the heppest.
Lucy Looks at Life, by Charles M. Schulz (1967). I love this series of little Peanuts books from Hallmark. As Tom Spurgeon pointed out recently, every reformatting of this strip, every design choice that goes into its various presentations, puts new emphasis on aspects we may not have considered before. So, when the TV Christmas special gives the characters voices, we notice how odd this dialogue would be coming from the mouths of actual kids; when someone starts lopping off the final panels of each strip, we realise just how much dread and depression builds up before that final punchline; and when Chip Kidd lines up as many dailies on a page as will fit, we see just how insanely legible the strip can be, almost as though it had been type-set. In this Hallmark series, printing one image per page allows each panel to live on its own, and gives the drawing room to breathe. Of any of the Peanuts books, these are the ones that reproduce the art at something most closely resembling its original size—a rare luxury for a strip that was designed to conserve space in the first place. What would have been small empty areas in the peanut-sized strips printed in the daily newspaper become weighty with negative space here, while lines become large enough to seem like mere doodles before they resume their place in the composition as grass or Schroeder’s hair or a brick wall, and so on. This specific book is chock full of classic Lucy moments and epigrams—being crabby, mooning over Schroeder, doling out psychiatric advice—but it also positions her as a misunderstood romantic, someone whose values leave her standing alone at strip’s end more often than not. The lonely, depressing side of Peanuts has been over-emphasised lately, but this book is as fine an example of that approach as any. What a weird gift this would have made—even the colour scheme is morose! Thanks, Hallmark.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari, by Donald Barthelme (1965). Donald Barthelme’s first bewildering yawp of a book contains a couple of key passages in his work, in addition to classics like “Me and Miss Mandible.” “The aim of literature,” one of his characters says, “is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.” This book is not actually covered in fur, but it’s a handsome object nonetheless, sporting a design and typically intricate illustrations by Edward Gorey. (One year I also scored a first edition of John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor for a dollar, but sadly sans Gorey dustjacket.) There’s not much more cartooning content than what you see on the covers—love the blue and ochre and green, and the way the twig-creature reaches out longingly, puzzlingly for Caligari—but there’s a pretty by-the-numbers send-up of Batman, if that’s your thing. (“Wait a minute!” Batman said. “Wouldn’t it be quicker to get on the Dugan Expressway where it comes in there at 11th Street and then take the North Loop out to the Richardson Freeway? Don’t you think that would save time?”) The rest of the stories, though, are pure Barthelmismo, composed of left-field references and snowballing nonsense that somehow gradually accrue meaning and connotation, until climactic sentences like “Who is safe in home with Teenage Wolf abroad, with streets under sway of Beast with a Thousand Eyes?” make a shocking amount of sense. “The absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it,” another of his characters says. “I affirm the absurdity.” This book is a big fat affirmation, alright.
Self-Portrait: Book People Picture Themselves, edited by Burt Britton (1976). Barthelme’s got his picture in this curio, a book which is pretty much what it says it is and not much else besides, meaning its flip-throughability is formidable. Open it at random and wonder: Why does Anne Tyler draw so well? Does Donald Justice really look like a Doonesbury character? How the hell might John Cage depict himself? Is so-and-so in here and if so can s/he draw with better than second-grade ability? (Answer: yes, s/he probably is here, and no, s/he probably can’t.) A few observations:
1. The Canadians included, cordoned off into their own little corner, do not do us especially proud, though at least Mavis Gallant’s diary-portrait is original.
2. I like to look at the self-portraits by prose authors better than the ones submitted by actual cartoonists, designers, and artists, probably just because I enjoy seeing the writers out of their element, gasping and flopping around.
3. It’s gratifying to me that the authors I most admire contribute some of the most interesting portraits, or maybe I’m just seeing more in them because I know their works the best. In any case, I think Robert Coover’s and Cormac McCarthy’s are especially good at capturing the tone of their writing and their authorial personae, the one with his rogue’s gallery floating above his head like he’s J. Henry Waugh himself, the other drawing with heavy-leaded pencil and incorporating astrological signs and Bob Dylan lyrics.
4. The finest cartoonist in the book? Maybe Richard Wilbur, whose lines are clean and simple, and who goes for the lofty gag. Kurt Vonnegut has a bit of Gahan Wilson in him, and onetime aspiring cartoonist John Updike still has a capable hand. Of all of them, though, William Gaddis’s is to me the best, both because it’s technically accomplished, composed with wit and urbanity, and because it says most (and least) about its secretive subject. Also, the portrait Borges drew of himself is, understandably, awesome. Because that dude was blind.
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