Truth delivered in many ways

A dear friend told me a while ago that she had always cherished the classic cartoons in the New Yorker. Me too. When I was in my teens I used to babysit for a family that a huge bound volume of the best of NY's classics through the years from the 1920s. Everybody from James Thurber to Chas. Addams to the gem at the left here, which was kind of a perennial favorite in which the caption is still regularly used to describe something somebody finds alien and distasteful. It's so simple, and yet speaks volumes.

Part of my fascination with cartoons lay in the fact that I was, for a brief time period, an editorial cartoonist for a small newspaper. I had always drawn cartoons, from the time I was very young. It wasn't however, until I got the newspaper gig that I was put in the position of having to devise gag-lines for my drawings. Harder than you think. I soon came to realize that the drawing was the easy part, it was the gags that were difficult. And, of course, you must think of the gag first, and then devise a drawing that is appropriate to the comment.

As I did my own stuff, I remained resolutely fascinated by the skills of others in the field throughout history. Editorial cartoons began to see the light of day as commentaries in the works of Rowlandson and others in the early 19th century. They continued through Thomas Nast's expose of Tammany Hall corruption in the later 19th century, and some of the most powerful exposes of the grimness of human endeavor can be found with Bill Mauldin's brilliant 'Willie and Joe' cartoons of the lives of two GI dogfaces in World War II. Snoopy traditionally raised a tankard of rootbeer to old Bill Mauldin every year on Bill's birthday, just to show Charles Shulz's admiration for the man.

Yes, cartooning can be fun, but it's also a deadly serious business. So serious that a considerable chunk of the Islamic world was enraged by the European cartoons that recently were seen as poking derisive fun at the faith. Maybe they were. Maybe that is what commentary is all about.

In fact, cartoons can and have been about virtually everything, from good clean fun to the most sordid sex, and anything else in between. Playboy used to be a fount of fine cartoons. Maybe it still is, I just haven't looked at one in a long time. And, of course, I only ever got PB for the articles and cartoons -- right? Of course I did. Speaking of dirty magazines, there used to be a cartoonist for Penthouse (only for the articles and cartoons, right? The graphic virtually 'intrauterine' shots were simply too much for this lad) who went by the name of Fieldvole. Circumstances were that I actually met the guy, and spent a rather sodden evening with him in a Norwich, England pub. At some point in the evening we had a 'drawathon' in which others present would suggest an image and we would both draw it. Eventually Fieldvole looked at me in a rather irate way. "I just can't match the girls you draw," he said. "Yours are so pretty, and mine are so homely. How do you do that?" I had no answer. I could only suggest that I really like girls, and I guess I want to flatter them rather than insult them. Sometimes flattery can have a lovely spinoff effect. "Hmm" he said. "I'd never thought of a cartoon as an aid to seduction." Neither had I in all honesty. It was just a thought that came to mind at the time. I won't tell you if cartoons actually can work in that regard. That would be telling.