Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:

(#1) No miracle!  But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it

(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)

Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Sam Gross.)

Matthew 14:22-33 in the KJV:

(#2) The secret is: you must believe

About Sam Gross. From my 1/17/23 posting “The bearded cartoonist post-simectomy” (about a Bob Eckstein cartoon), in a section on SG:

Sam Gross. A photo of the great gag cartoonist:

(#3) [caption:] SG, September 17th, 2014, photo taken in downtown NYC

Wikipedia tells us that SG (born August 7, 1933) is an American cartoonist, specializing in single-panel cartoons — and then provides a somewhat goofy life history, told in Gross’s voice. And  includes this account of his work habits:

Gross averages 16–17 drawings a week, and numbers and dates every one. Once finished, he photocopies the drawings on forty-four-pound stock paper, then punches three holes and puts them into loose-leaf books; Gross is afraid of losing his original copy and idea. In 2012, Sam Gross had a total of about 27,592 cartoons.

SG has a special place in my world, because he’s the creator of the cartoon that brought me the woolly mammoth as my totem animal

(#4) The totemic cartoon

SG’s cartooning career began in 1962 and continued through the early 2020s; he died on 5/6/23, just 4 months after my posting about him and Bob Eckstein. Thanks to SG’s meticulous record-keeping, cartoons of his that had never before appeared in the New Yorker, like #1, can now pop up there every so often.

This entry was posted on August 22, 2025 at 10:06 am and is filed under Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.