The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"Let’s go somewhere a little less emblematic…"
This is ridiculously tardy and the review of the 100th anniversary issue is going to be even more ridiculously tardy. My Sunday is set aside entirely for writing it, and perhaps getting started on next week’s – er, this week’s. Or, in keeping with the confusing conceit of this newsletter… last week’s. Whatever you want to call it, the stack waits for no one.
Poems:
“Black Dictionary” by Jericho Brown: Three riffs on the elegy this week; this one memorializes Nikki Giovanni in Brown’s usual proclamatory style. He’s one of the strongest writers working in the loose post-Black-Arts style, so it makes sense he’d want to give Giovanni flowers. This succeeds on its merits, though, bobbing and weaving – never too precious or too forbidding. Last seven lines are just a little false. Otherwise smashing.
“Nothing New” by Robert Frost: Funny title for a newly-discovered but not new poem. This fits in with any of the second-tier aphoristic Frost poems (what he termed Grace Notes); it’s not “Nothing Gold”, but still a flake of gold – not nothing! There’s a softly mournful quality here that’s uniquely Frost; memory is elegized, minutely.
“Temple of Poseidon, Sounion” by Aria Aber: Here Aber is “restraining the impulse / to elegize what is still alive”, her father, taking photos of ruins – itself an elegaic act. The first half is finely observed but not risky, the second half is riskier but veers didactic. As a whole it’s a stellar character portrait of the father, but a merely good poem – the trouble is the speaker, who seems to be addressing a crowd, when such intimate matters would be better served by a more intimate, specific “you”.
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Covers: The original Rea Irvin is what it is, of course. Unfortunately, of the commissioned riffs, only Anita Kunz’s frog has any life – there’s a note of consumptive nihilism there that certainly fits the moment better than Diana Ejaita and Camila Rosa’s rust-tone-forward divine-feminine portraits with slightly corporate vibes or Javiar Mariscal’s sanded-down sunniness in a hideous shade of baby-poop. Kerry James Marshall’s affectless techy cheese fits the moment only too well.
Pg. 14-16 [Contributor Portraits]: Really charming.
Pg. 42: Either something’s going over my head or this is a half-step short of an actual joke.
Pg. 52: Excellent. The voracious furrowed brows on the tiny masochists are such a wonderful detail.
Pg. 72: I suppose this takes advantage of the context-free panel format, but my brain just fills in the details with the plot of Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.
Pg. 83: I dunno, I can hear both. Meow, on the other hand, is ridiculous.
Pg. 88: Unneeded wacky details galore – Baby bottle! Juicebox man! – but it’s still really hard to tell where we are. (I guess it’s “the fair”? Maybe I’m too much of a coastal elite to recognize “the fair”.)
Pg. 96: Lots of possible directions to go with this, most of them unfunny; you could do a lot worse than “the rats are still friendly toward Mickey while also razzing him.”
Pg. 100: A Hopper joke that’s not about Nighthawks – huzzah! It’s actually funny, even if you don’t recognize the artwork – double huzzah! Best of the Week.
Pg. 101: Helped by Finck’s drawing style, which doesn’t overindicate (the stone-faced Robin Hood is excellent.)
Pg. 106: An extremely long way to go for a joke about Goldfish, of all things.
Pg. 113: A rare “if someone said this to me in real life, I would crack the fuck up.” Very nice.
Pg. 114: MPJ today stands for Maybe Perseids Jumpiness.
Pg. 129: Hotelling’s Law is fascinating. (It’s a shame economics are so useless that its explanations immediately devolve into math with ridiculous assumptions. I want to know why there are three identical-looking juice shops within a block in practice!)
Pg. 131: Giving the “not enough horse” guy tighty whities and a beer is fantastic.
Pg. 132: In both concept and execution, reminiscent of a bad multi-camera sitcom. (Not sure if the fourth wall break is intentional or just a weird drawing, but it kills any drop of humor in this very tired joke.)
Pg. 134 [Comic Strip]: I dunno, this has very little to say. I suppose it’s meant to be charmingly discursive, but I’m not that charmed, and the final image is really quite smarmy.
Pg. 141: Shocked the fact-checker okayed this one: If it’s from a lamb, it’s lambswool, which is technically wool, but would never be sold as such – lambswool is way more expensive. Regular wool comes from a sheep, which surely changes the joke not a bit?
Pg. 144: Ah, but surely this is a sac fermé.
Pg. 148: Henry the 8th Avenue & St John’s Place Just Take The 2 or 3 Yeah This Used To Be My Parents’ Apartment But They Moved Upstate You Want Some Poppers?
Pg. 151: Theoretically tortured but in practice pretty funny, mostly due to the look of the worried train cars and Kyle’s crazed expression.
Pg. 155: Even in an extremely absurd scenario, imagining a crazed gunman in a public place short-circuits any comedy.
Pg. 160: …Or maybe the scenario just needs to be even more absurd.
88 Years Ago Today
if you aren’t early