Archive for the ‘Cartoonists’ Category

Their mortal anxieties captured in a picture

June 13, 2023

In a Psychiatrist cartoon by Oren Bernstein in the New Yorker of 6/12/23:


(#1) The patient flopped on the therapeutic couch is a despondent octopus [6/14: oh dear, apparently a squid rather than an octopus; later on 6/14: not exactly a squid either (see comments) — so an OSB cephalopod, of a previously unreported species]; the analyst has presented the cephalopod with  a Rorschach inkblot (designed as a projective psychological test), which has aroused the patient’s deepest fears, of fleeing the pursuit of death

I know, you don’t see the savagery of an attacking shark, but then you’re not an octopus [or squid].

(more…)

Ed Koren

April 19, 2023

From The New York Times on-line on 4/14, ” Edward Koren, 87, Whose Cartoon Creatures Poked Fun at People, Dies: For six decades in The New Yorker and elsewhere, his hairy, toothy, long-nosed characters offered witty commentary on the foibles of the American middle class” by Robert D. McFadden.

Witty, but gentle and affectionate, reflecting the man’s character, and explaining why he himself was viewed with affection not only by his readers but also by his fellow cartoonists. He has died in the fullness of time, but nevertheless we experience his death as a great loss; he was one of those rare people I feel should have been granted a special dispensation to live forever (as I have written of psycholinguist Anne Cutler — a good friend of mine for 50 years — and chamber musician Geoff Nuttall — an acquaintance from his years in the St. Lawrence String Quartet in residence at Stanford; Koren I never met, but knew only through his work and through the deep regard of his colleagues).

(more…)

The tiger and his boytoy

February 8, 2023

… on the psychiatrist’s couch, in a 7/12/11 cartoon by Canadian cartoonist (illustrator, graphic novelist, and children’s book author) Dave Whamond:


(#1) A cartoon about cartoon characters (from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson), with a character reversal — the tiger Hobbes is real, and the boy Calvin is his stuffed toy, though Hobbes fantasizes that the boy is real

(more…)

The bearded cartoonist, post-simectomy

January 17, 2023

It begins with a Facebook posting by Bob Eckstein on 1/12:

BE: The Daily Cartoonist just ran this piece … and that is Sam Gross on the cover on the right:


(#1) The BE cartoon: a bearded fellow — I take him to be a cartoonist (since this is in The Daily Cartoonist) — in a hospital bed, post-simectory

Note simectory ‘the surgical removal of a simian’ — in this case not an actual simian, but the simulacrum of a monkey: a one-man-band-monkey toy. I hadn’t realized that such toys are still being made, but it seems that they are (classically they are wind-up metal — “tin” — toys, but now they appear to be battery-operated plastic, and considerably more durable than the vintage versions; I speak with recollected sorrow over the short life of my very own monkey-band toy, roughly 75 years ago).

(more…)

In the realm of the footstools

December 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:


(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool

(more…)

A touching memorial

November 20, 2022

My life continues to be mostly absorbed by the Respiratory Virus and what I’ve come to call the Sleep Monster, which has had me knocked out for five hours of today already. Bits of my waking time have been taken up by useful domestic things, like replacing my dead slipper / moccasins and assembling a pleasing Thanksgiving meal for myself (a bowl of very eccentric but satisfying posole — pork, white hominy, red, with idiosyncratic embellishments).

Otherwise, I’ve been consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow over the shootings at Club Q in Colorado Springs; I hope to be able to post on that subject soon, but not now. In any case, before this news came to me, today’s Zippy strip came in, with a touching (and characteristically funny) memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith to his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin, who died back in September and then was memorialized in a service  by a bunch of unruly friends back on the 10th.

This is way too brief, but it’s the best I can do before my day runs out.


Just to note that these people are of my generation: Griffith is 4 years younger than me, Noomin was 7 years younger. For comparison: I’m essentially the same age as Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, and only 2 years older than Joe Biden.
(more…)

The Aussie firedog

April 8, 2022

(There will be a few excursions in passing about men’s bodies and man-on-man sex. If you can manage an appearance or two of the sexual verb fuck, you’ll be ok.)

From Ann Burlingham a couple days ago, a greeting card with a photo from the 2020 Australian Firefighters calendar, showing a man and his dog:


(#1) How to read the man, how to read the dog, and how to read the relationship between them

It turns out that there’s an amazing amount of content packed into this photo — I’ll try to reveal a bit of it here — and the photo leads to much more, including andirons, Dalmatians, lexicography, and the cartoonist George Booth.

(more…)

Gahan Wilson

June 9, 2021

From Mike Pope on Facebook, commenting on yesterday’s posting “Bizarro cannibalism”, on the Cannibal cartoon meme:


(#1) The Man in the Cannibal Pot: Cartoons by Gahan Wilson (1967)

[MP:] Speaking of tropes, I had this book when I was a kid. I don’t know if you can see, but he’s emptying a bottle of poison into the water

Lovely; a metacartoon, or perhaps second-generation cannibal cartoon, taking the meme for granted and playing with its conventions.

(more…)

Cartoonists at leisure

January 15, 2020

With a heads-up from Bob Eckstein, Michael Maslin’s Inkspill column for 1/14/20, “Fave Photo of the Day: New Yorker Cartoonists At Lunch”. The photo:

(more…)

Zippy and Griffy on the Hanna-Barbera diner tour

August 1, 2017

In two recent Zippy strips, Zippy and Griffy, raging over limited animation, visit a diner in Delaware and an abandoned diner in Kentucky:

(#1)

(#2)

Three things: Hanna-Barbera; The Hollywood diner in Dover DE; and the Happy Days Diner in Cave City KY.

(more…)