The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"I hereby declare that all members"
Yo!
Poems:
“Covid Snow” by David Baker: A poet with Covid watches squirrels and gives away his best image in the title. Maybe that’s fitting for something that hopes to shift unnoticed, white on white. Does it shake your limbs? And whose limbs are shaking – the tree’s or the poet’s? Genus is made verb: The “dead ash” – do they drop flakes? – and the “living pear” – or, maybe, pare, like the poet trims the image; it’s harder to see nothing in all this white noise.
“I Was a First Alto in the 1980s” by Deborah Garrison: Here is the song the speaker sung, in this memory poem that traces an era as if it were a person, known then, number blocked, ignored in favor of a jumping dog – who nonetheless brings it all back. Garrison sees forty year old losses in these refound fortieth-birthday faces; all those gone, in this poem which is slyly funny, slyly sad, and mostly just sly, reflect and are borne back.
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: Two hikers in a landscape which reminds me of the art of Joseph Yoakum. Yoakum’s colored-pencil palette is subtler, and I think Mattotti’s composition would benefit from less-psychedelic rays; only the top third, with its counterintuitive bushes and hills, keeps this from reading as stoner dorm art.
Pg. 9: Do people do things at work because their boss tells them to, though? Do they really?
Pg. 15: go piss girl
Pg. 16: MPJ1 today stands for Management-Potential Jabbering.
Pg. 29: A decent puzzler.
Pg. 31: Showrunner: Ryan Smurphy.
Pg. 34: MPJ today also stands for Marc Perceiving Julius: “Cry order, and let slip the cats of peace.”
Pg. 38: Wouldn’t be funny if someone said this to me in real life.
Pg. 41: Misanthropic, obscure, and elitist: I’ll give you two, but you can’t have all three.
Pg. 43: Got distracted by the combo of the character’s hair and the cabinet knobs, which my brain continuously perceived as a thought-bubble tail for a solid ten seconds. Moving past that, this is fun; I like a detail-dense labeled map which has multiple jokes but ensures they serve one central joke.
Pg. 46: Possibly too real for a talking-fish joke; still Best of the Week.
Pg. 49: Pretty bland, but the last one made me think about if the Proust book started “For a long time, I used to crack a Bud early,” which is not nothing.
Pg. 51: So obviously an Elvira / Cassantra Peterson joke they should have to pay royalties.
Pg. 54: Can’t quite label it a third MPJ in one issue with no actual visible pet, but it’s cutting it close.
Pg. 58: Beta rat. Rat can’t pull. Ratso no rizz-o.
Pg. 63: Improve the drawing and you shouldn’t need the caption.
24 Years Ago Today
Cartoon Setting Stats:
Current issue:
5 Home/Family
0 Workplace (general)
1 Workplace (specific)
3 Parties/Third Spaces
4 Zany/Talking Animals
2 Other
Archival Issue (2001):
7 Home/Family
3 Workplace (general)
7 Workplace (specific)
5 Parties/Third Spaces
0 Zany/Talking Animals
7 Other
In 2001 there are tons of jokes of various sorts, with one notable exception: Not a talking animal in sight. And then there’s now. Should “Junk Molluscs” count as a “zany” animal? Probably not. But I’m counting it. Meanwhile: More evidence, in the present, that millennials don’t want to work? The magazine suggests it is because they’re talking to their pets, or maybe the walls.
gots
“Mid Pets Joke”, as per the dark lore. ↩