Themes in the cartoons of Mike Twohy: woolly mammoths as gigantic sources of meat, the edgy relationships between dog and cat. Starting with a cartoon in the latest (4/15/19) New Yorker:
(#1) “You tend to overuse the exclamation point.”
The editor strikes. Eager-to-please, enthusiastic dog faces aloof cat.
Then from the New Yorker site, again the editor:
(#2)
While finding a good copy of #1 for Harrie Kd on Facebook, I came across two of Twohy’s adventures in mammuthiana, both of them intersecting the world of Ice Age human beings with subworlds of modern times:
(#3) Take-out food
(#4) Shopping for groceries
A note on the great utility of the woolly mammoth, the wompom of the Ice Age.
You can do such a lot with a wompom,
You can use every part of it too.
For work or for pleasure, it’s a triumph it’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that a wompom cannot do
— Flanders & Swann
Mammoth skins provided warm furry clothing. Mammoth bones could be fashioned into tools and weapons, the large ones serving as building materials. And then there was all that meat.
And a note on Mike Twohy, from the site of Simon & Schuster, which publishes his children’s books:
Mike Twohy has been drawing cartoons as far back as he can remember. The author and illustrator of Poindexter Makes a Friend, Outfoxed, and Wake Up, Rupert!, he received his MFA in painting in 1973 from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 his first drawing was published in The New Yorker, which has published his cartoons regularly ever since. He has written and illustrated several books for children, including Outfoxed, about which the Horn Book said “storytime audiences will howl with laughter.” [A clever duck convinces a fox that he’s a dog.]
(#5)
He lives with his wife, cat, and Newfoundland in Berkeley, California.
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