The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"Why do they always do that"
Poems:
“Sugar” by Andrea Cohen: A lovely run-on-sentence poem about stories and memory, how they intersect and diverge. Sometimes conversations are “somebody / else’s car our key unlocked”, driving off places you don’t recognize and can’t inhabit. The ambiguity of “maybe as an action item” in the Billie Holiday song mirrors the ambiguity of the central event (who was there? who is here?) – as if to suggest a willful blindness to impermanence and ambivalence may be a prerequisite for love.
“Poem Never to Be Read Aloud” by Dobby Gibson: Speaks to the violent impossibility of language in clever but somewhat didactic fashion. A political statement is worthy, but Gibson isn’t exactly making one here – he advocates for action while making clear how impossible it is to speak action into being. Without blind courage, how the hell are we supposed to write poems? Gibson is too awake not to be anxious, and it affects every line.
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: The usual Campion thing – shades of the same color, a centered landscape receding into depth – though it’s his first cover that’s more rural than urban, and I think it fits him fairly well. The bike rider’s extremely long neck, though, is stylization gone awry.
Pg. 9: This ought to have run during football season, or at least the playoffs of some other sport. But it’s good.
Pg. 11 [Sketchpad]: Like reading a selection of tweets with zero likes.
Pg. 15: I’m sure Lonnie Millsap is a good person, and I don’t like to resort to name calling around here. However… Lonnie Midsap.
Pg. 21: Pretty clearly Baxter running a one-man Cartoon Caption Contest with a random drawing. Luckily, because he’s not being voted on by the public, he can take things in bizarro-world directions instead of trying to make sense. Quite good.
Pg. 22: The argument has been made (in these very pages!) that Gauguin may have been the real ear-chopper. In either case, is there any reason not to use male pronouns for the textee here? Sure, Van Gogh probably wasn’t gay, but you don’t have to be gay to want a man to text you back sometimes, and the ear thing was very much a guy-on-guy tiff.
Pg. 27: Brevity is the emotional labor of wit.
Pg. 31: Okay, but have you tried antidepressants?
Pg. 32: Extremely Terry Gilliam-coded. Perhaps not Steed’s most elegant work, but I laughed.
Pg. 34: This general idea is very famously called the Peter Principle.1 It doesn’t need pointing out.
Pg. 42: Induced Demenswear.
Pg. 47: Not an interesting gripe. If anyone can tell what the movie is supposed to be, though, please write in! You’re a better buff than I.
Pg. 49: The idea that Donnelly asked herself the question “What if your spouse was a horse?” and decided a humorous or whimsical response was “maybe you would both still eat at the same time” is itself quite funny. I’m undecided as to whether that makes the panel funny.
Pg. 50: The sort of emotionless observational joke that does nothing for me… but the caption is fairly well-phrased.
Pg. 54: Really clever. There are a lot of ways to execute the drawing, most of them too gruesome (blood) or cartoonish (skeleton); I think removing any hint of corpse entirely and letting our imagination do the work is probably the right call. Best of the Week, with Steed narrowly getting the silver twice in a row.
Pg. 57: The “No” box is really funny, the rest is filler. If “yes” just lead to a box that said “Grilled Cheese”, this would be brilliant.
Pg. 60: A very Borscht Belt gag; good execution.
71 Years Ago Today
(covers face with hands)
The more specific idea is quite close to what’s unfortunately known as the Dilbert Principle. ↩