Since I last wrote about the Library of Congress’s “Cartoon America” exhibition (in “Comics in Context” #157), the show has been extended until February 24, 2007, and I’ve also discovered the Library’s online version of the exhibit. The Library does not have the rights to display online all of the artwork in the show, but you can find a number of the pieces I previously described, including the Bambi concept drawing, the Betty Boop model sheet, the New York cartoons by Peter Arno and James Thurber, the Winsor McCay Gertie the Dinosaur drawing and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip, and the Charlie Brown soliloquy in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts.

“Cartoon America” poses a very basic question to the viewer, which is made explicit in the interview with editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant in the accompanying book Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress (edited by Harry Katz and published by Harry N. Abrams). In an interview (p. 244) Oliphant says, “it’s a wretched word, cartooning, Without being precious, when you talk about cartooning, you don’t know what sort of cartooning you’re talking about. Are you talking about Disney? Are you talking about gags? Are you talking about illustrations? It’s an all-encompassing word, which drives me crazy.” What, then, is cartoon art?

Originally, as Wikipedia states, the term “cartoon” meant “a full-size drawing made on paper as a study for a further drawings, such as a painting or tapestry. ” During the Renaissance, an artist who was going to paint a fresco would first do a full-scale drawing–the “cartoon”–as a guide. Hence, you may see preserved “cartoons” of this sort by Leonardo or Raphael exhibited in museums.

Claypool Comics editor/writer/artist Richard Howell recently told me that cartooning involves “economy and exaggeration.” As we use the term nowadays, “cartoon” usually means a drawing that entails a degree of caricature, usually for humorous purpose, or an animated film. An editorial cartoon can be entirely serious, but it usually is drawn using caricature, exaggerating human features. Although an animated film need not necessarily be funny, it is popularly called a cartoon, just as comic books are called “comic,” even though most of them nowadays deal in genres other than comedy. As for “economy,” this word suggests that cartooning, even if it does not involve caricature, involves drawing figures and objects in a simplified manner rather than with detailed realism.

So, is caricature a determining factor in whether or not something is cartoon art? This is something I wondered while exploring a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” which is dominated by expressionist works by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, and runs till February 19, 2007 (You can find an online version of this exhibition here). Most of these portraits are heavily caricatured, reflecting the artists’ opinions of German society in the years preceding the Nazis’ rise to power. These are all paintings and drawings, which the Metropolitan displays as works of fine art, but are they also arguably cartoons?

But can you have cartoons without caricature? In the Cartoon America book (p. 248) the veteran editorial cartoonist Oliphant laments that “The great ones [cartoonists] could really draw, going back to [James] Gillray and [William] Hogarth… I grew up believing that cartooning was a noble profession. Unfortunately, these days nobody seems to care much about drawing. It’s a great loss to the profession. We have a whole state of cartoons that pay no attention at all to drawing. Like these people have never seen Charles Dana Gibson.” Gibson was best known for his “Gibson Girls,” drawings of beautiful “modern” women of the first years of the twentieth century; although Gibson’s work isn’t in the “Cartoon America” show, it does turn up in the book (see pages 14, 22 and 246). But there’s no trace of caricature in these drawings, which are done in a very naturalistic style, even if the women are idealized figures. Isn’t Gibson an illustrator rather than a cartoonist? Yet Gibson was included in the cartoonists’ “Hall of Fame” on Mort Walker’s Museum of Cartoon Art, and the “Cartoon America” show has an entire section devoted to illustration.

This section has illustrations that involve a considerable degree of “cartooniness,” such as a “Raggedy Ann and Andy in the River” by their creator, Johnny Gruelle (1880-1938). But other illustrations on display are wholly realistic, including a drawing (circa 1937) of Davy Crockett and settlers by Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who was included in the Dahesh Museum’s “Stories to Tell” show on the Golden Age of American illustration (see “Comics in Context” #132).

Then there are illustrations in the show that fall somewhere between these two poles. In “Alcohol, Death and the Devil” (circa 1830-1840) by George Cruikshank (1792-1878), the illustrator of many of Charles Dickens’ novels, the fantastic figure personifying Alcohol–a scrawny man whose head is a skull, topped by serpents like Medusa’s–is nonetheless portrayed realistically enough to seem an ominous menace. The Devil, hovering behind Alcohol, has a simple, caricatured face that makes him seem more humorous than dangerous, and their potential victims, in the background, are drawn as simple cartoon figures, most of whom have only blank ovals for heads. (After visiting the Library of Congress, I went over to the National Gallery of Art, and there, in an exhibition titled “The Artist’s Vision: Romantic Traditions in Britain,” I found another Cruikshank piece. So here is an artist who has been claimed as both a practitioner of cartoon art and a creator of fine art!)

In her 1918 work “Uncle Sam’s Girl-Shower” (Cartoon America p. 144 and here), pioneering female cartoonist/illustrator Nell Brinkley (1888-1944) comments on young women coming to work in Washington D. C. during World War I by depicting them floating down from the sky on the left of the picture. In a large panel to the right of center, one of Brinkley’s young women converses with Uncle Sam, a tall, elderly man who here is dressed in a conventional suit rather than his familiar stars-and-stripes costume. The women’s round, youthful faces with their simplified features are not only endearingly cute but are arguably cartoonish, but their figures and clothing are drawn quite realistically, in what the show’s website calls “a distinctive, fine-lined drawing style.” Moreover, Brinkley naturally portrays Uncle Sam as an old man that one could meet on the street in real life..

The handsomest piece in this section is a 1922 story illustration (“The phone rang, and Hugh leapt to answer it.”) (Cartoon America p. 23 and here) by James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960), another artist who was included in the Dahesh show. Husband Hugh’s smug sense of triumph is so broadly portrayed in his face and body language that it crosses the dividing line into caricature. But the emotions of his wife Polly, who seems vulnerable and beleaguered, are portrayed more subtly, and her face looks more naturalistic than her husband’s. Indeed, apart from Hugh’s broad facial expression and stance, the couple and their surroundings are drawn quite realistically. Flagg’s nuanced delineation of shadings and textures through fine linework seems to belong more to the world of fine art than to cartoons, which we tend to associate with broader strokes of the pen.

The Cartoon America book includes two pieces by the Punch caricaturist Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914), who is best known today for his classic illustrations for the original editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Though neither of the Library’s pieces come from those books, Tenniel follows a similar strategy in them, juxtaposing the real and the unreal, the naturalistic and the caricatured. In “A Contented Maid” (1894) (p. 53), a rather dowdy, but relatively realistically drawn woman, is led past a naturalistic background by a pompous man who incongruously wears what seems like a jester’s costume. Through his exaggeratedly proud facial expression, gesture and stance, Tenniel “cartoons” this unlikely suitor. In the other example, “The Old Story” (1884) (p. 51), the division between the real and the caricatured is even stronger: here Red Riding Hood, realistically drawn, encounters the wolf, who stands upright and wears a full suit of clothes, including a top hat, and, like a good British gentleman, carries an umbrella. As he did with the White Rabbit and other talking animals in the Alice books, Tenniel pulls off the feat of turning the wolf into a caricature of a man while still making him look realistic enough to fit into the same naturalistic world as the human being in the picture.

Since we’re investigating the connection between caricature and cartoon art, it’s appropriate that one of the six segments into which the “Cartoon America” show is divided is entitled “Caricature,” including works by theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and political caricaturist David Levene.

In this section is a striking 1954 “Self-Portrait” (Cartoon America p. 229) by New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who depicts himself holding a bottle of ink in his right hand and a pen in his left, drawing an elaborate, calligraphic series of curlicues where his head should be. Steinberg is presenting his artwork, his creations, as his identity. He is suggesting that his head is full of artistic imagery. A possible implication is that the Steinberg of the picture has drawn his body as well, suggesting that he is his own creation: he has devised his own persona as artist: Max Fleischer’s Koko the Clown comes “Out of the Inkwell,” and in this picture, so does the artist. Perhaps Steinberg is suggesting that he has no identity apart from his work, an idea with dark implications. Since the calligraphy is more beautiful than the seemingly crudely drawn body, perhaps he is suggesting that art is superior to nature. This is a simple picture, which on the surface seems intended only to amuse, and yet it inspires so many interpretations.

Here too can be found a 1743 etching by the British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764), whom the website calls “the father of English caricature,” entitled “Characters & Caricaturas” [sic] (Cartoon America p. 29 and here), in which he depicts over a hundred faces. The website explains that “Hogarth distinguished between characters (faces drawn from nature) and ‘caricaturas” (faces with exaggerated and grotesque features).” To demonstrate his point, along the bottom of the etching Hogarth drew copies of handsome faces by Raphael; alongside copies Hogarth drew of grotesquely caricatured faces by Leonardo da Vinci and another Italian Renaissance artist, Annibale Carracci. In his preface to the Cartoon America book, its editor Harry Katz asserts that ”American cartoon art evolved from varied historical sources” including “Renaissance grotesques drawn by Leonardo da Vinci and Pier Leone Ghezzi [and] the English and French print satirists of the eighteenth century,” a category that includes Hogarth and James Gillray. (I reviewed the New York Public Library’s Gillray retrospective back in “Comics in Context” #72.)

Consider: Leonardo is one of the foremost geniuses in human history, who turned his hand to numerous forms of the arts and sciences, and it also turns out that he is one of the fathers of modern cartoon art!

Perhaps the biggest surprise that the Cartoon America book will have for readers is its revelation of how many significant figures in the history of fine art worked in cartoon art. In the book’s “A Brief History of American Cartooning,” which is actually lengthy and rewardingly informative, Katz explains that “It was the Englishman William Hogarth who, between 1720 and 1760, revived the art of caricature from the Renaissance, elevating comic art to an unprecedented seriousness of purpose.” (p. 29).

Hogarth is a key figure in the history of comic and cartoon art in another way, which Katz misses but which Scott McCloud pointed out in his landmark book Understanding Comics. Hogarth was renowned for creating series of pictures which told a continuous story, such as his Marriage a la Mode, six paintings which today hang in the National Gallery, London, from which Hogarth made engravings. Such sequences of pictures by Hogarth were pioneering examples of what Will Eisner termed “sequential art,” the form more popularly called comics. According to the website Hogarth did “Characters and Caricaturas” in 1743 for the “subscription ticket” for the Marriage a la Mode engravings.

Katz credits “the first political cartoon published in America” to one of the nation’s Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, whose celebrated cartoon “Join, or Die” was published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754 (shown in Cartoon America, p. 24). It pictures a snake broken into segments representing the pre-revolutionary American colonies. The cartoon doesn’t display any great drawing ability; what makes it powerful is its metaphorical concept. Franklin’s point is that the colonies must join forces to combat their adversaries in the French and indian War; otherwise the “snake” will perish.

Though the snake has represented evil since the Book of Genesis, Franklin’s serpent was widely adopted by American patriots as a symbol of their country, including Paul Revere, whom Katz credits as another significant figure in the history of American cartooning. But the example of one of Revere’s cartoons (which he actually copied from a sketch by his brother) that Katz reprints in the Cartoon America book (p. 9) once again raises the question of what a cartoon is. “The Bloody Massacre,” first published on March 28, 1770, is a depiction of the infamous Boston Massacre of American patriots by British redcoats. The composition is fine, but the architecture in the background is drawn far more skillfully than the humans in the foreground. Revere isn’t practicing caricature here, but merely demonstrating the limitations of his primitive skill at drawing the human face and form.

A friend of mine suggested to me that there is a difference between cartooning as a style and the cartoon as a format. But just what makes this a cartoon? Isn’t it rather a 1770 equivalent of today’s courtroom sketches, an effort to record an actual event through realistic illustration, a skill in which Revere was severely lacking?

Making the connection between 18th century British cartooning and American cartooning clear, Katz points out that Gillray himself adopted Franklin’s image of the snake as a symbol of America for his 1782 cartoon about the British defeat at Yorktown, the final battle of the American Revolutionary War (p. 28).

Another important figure in fine art whom Katz credits as a significant influence on the history of cartoon art is France’s Honore Daumier (1808-1879), who is renowned for utilizing caricature for social and political satire.

A clear example of Daumier’s mastery of cartoon art is “Le ventre legislatif,” translated as “The Legislative Paunch” (Cartoon America, p. 118), created in 1834 as a print for subscribers to a journal called (appropriately) La Caricature. In it Daumier caricatures members of the French legislature as a collection of grotesques: smug, self-satisfied, bad-tempered, and obese. One of the legislators in the front row has an enormous, beak-like nose, making him look like a vulture wearing human clothing. That’s an image that later political cartoonists will use.

But another print for La Caricature which Katz includes in the Cartoon America book (p.119) involves no caricature whatsoever. This is “Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834” (which you can also find here), which depicts the aftermath of an incident in which French troops invaded a building suspected of housing an assassin and slaughtered the inhabitants. In this picture, all naturalistically portrayed, are several of the victims, notably the corpse of a man in a nightshirt lying on the floor, atop a small, dead child, with blood streaming from its head onto the floor. Daumier isn’t joking here: the power and the horror of this lithograph lie in its utter realism.

It’s not “cartoony” in the least, but I suppose one might call it an editorial cartoon, in that it is a drawing that comments on a political issue of its time.
But is every drawing–or print or painting–that makes a political point a cartoon? Is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which criticizes the Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, a cartoon? I’ve always thought so, since it involves caricature-like distortions of form. But what about Eugene Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830)? I’d say no, and there’s no caricature involved, yet it uses a symbolic figure at its center, the woman representing Liberty, the same device traditionally employed by editorial cartoonists.

Katz contends that Daumier was an influence on another major figure of the fine art world, the American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), and reprints his 1856 print, “Arguments of the Chivalry,“ which records the notorious incident in which a Senator from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, beat his fellow Senator, Massachusetts’ Charles Sumner, with a cane in an argument over slavery (Cartoon America p. 37). This, too, seems to me to fit into the same area as courtroom sketches; Homer draws the people naturalistically, without any satiric exaggerations, and I cannot count this piece as a cartoon. If this is a cartoon, then any drawing on a political subject is a cartoon, and the term “cartoon” loses its distinctive meaning.

Nonetheless, the Cartoon America book makes the point that there have been important figures in the fine art world who have also created cartoon art. Katz reprints pieces that are clearly cartoons by the Ashcan School painters George Luks (p. 50), who also worked on The Yellow Kid, and John Sloan (p. 60), as well as a drawing by Stuart Davis which straddles the border between cartoon art and illustration (p. 63). One could describe Davis’s simplified, stylized graphic approach towards elements in this drawing as moving towards abstraction and moving towards cartooning with equal justice. Remember that in the “Masters of American Comics” show, co-curator John Carlin often described aspects of its cartoons as abstract.

In his essay about Lyonel Feininger’s comics work in the Cartoon America book, Art Spiegelman writes that “Only a handful of American painters of the period dabbled in cartooning–George Luks’ work on The Yellow Kid comes to mind–but lots of esteemed European modernists–Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gris, Kirchner, Kupka, and Grosz, to name just a few–drew cartoons for publication either at the beginnings of or throughout their careers” (p. 134). There are Picasso’s and George Grosz’s names again.

The full title of the last of the six divisions of the “Cartoon America” exhibit is “The Ungentlemanly Art: Political Illustration,” and the brochure explains that Art Wood, the editorial cartoonist who compiled the collection from which the show is drawn, used the term “illustration” “to describe the enormous talent and craft that went into a work of art produced to capture a moment in time.” This just further muddies the waters as far as drawing a distinction between cartoon art and illustration, as well as possibly suggesting that these “political illustrations” are somehow superior works of art to gag cartoons or comic strips. the pieces on display in this segment of the show all engage in either the “exaggeration” or “economy” that marks them clearly as editorial cartoons.

Among them is a piece by the great 19th century editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902), who not only popularized the elephant and donkey as symbols of the Republican and Democratic parties, but even defined the visual image of Santa Claus; all of these are examples of the power of cartoon art to affect the culture.

The Nast cartoon in the show, “The Crown Covers a Multitude of Shortcomings” (1888), mocks former Senator and Republican Presidential candidate James G. Blaine for his “crowning folly”. Nast cruelly undercuts Blaine’s considerable political stature by portraying him as a fat, ungainly figure with unkempt hair who seems to have a misshapen leg and walks with a cane. A sign behind him ironically refers to “a step in the direction of free trade”: Nast’s Blaine looks as if he might topple over if he took another step. To the left of Blaine, Nast has drawn a crown atop the derriere of some unidentified animal, as if Blaine had created a Bizarro World in which crowns no longer rest atop the heads of regal leaders.

There is a more celebrated and powerful Nast cartoon in the Cartoon America book (p. 45), “Let Us Prey” (September 23, 1871), in which he caricatures his most notorious target, the corrupt New York political leader William M. “Boss” Tweed and his cronies as vultures with human heads, as if they were 19th century versions of the Harpies of Greek mythology.

Contemporary political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant paid homage to Nast with his cartoon in the show, “Waiting for Reagan” (1982), in which he portrays various right wing critics of President Reagan as human-headed vultures. Oliphant’s version is arguably eerier, since he gives them eyes without pupils, surrounded by heavily shadowed sockets, rendering even their human faces inhuman. The Cartoon America book includes a 1965 cartoon, for which Oliphant won a Pulitzer Prize, showing Ho Chi Minh holding the corpse of a North Vietnamese civilian, in what may be an allusion to Michelangelo’s Pieta (p. 260).

Most contemporary editorial cartoons that I see today are gag cartoons, but when I was growing up, my favorite editorial cartoonist was Herbert L. Block, alias Herblock (1919-2001), who worked in the Nast tradition of visual metaphor. Starting his career in 1929, he moved to The Washington Post in 1946 and continued drawing cartoons for that paper until his death at the start of the 21st century. Growing up, I would borrow Herblock’s books of collected cartoons from my local library to teach myself about history since World War II, and I looked forward to the publication of a new collection every presidential election year.

There is a Herblock cartoon in the “Cartoon America” show and more in the book. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover on arriving at the Library of Congress that it was running a show of his work, “Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock,” which runs through January 20, 2007 in its aptly titled “American Treasures” gallery (and which has an online version). After his death, the Herb Block Foundation donated 14,000 of Block’s finished cartoons and over 50,000 of his preparatory sketches to the Library of Congress; “Enduring Outrage” presents only a select handful of this massive collection.

Herblock’s symbolic figures can be familiar ones. In “The Gray Plague” (January 29, 1967) he uses the traditional image of the Grim Reaper, a skeletal, robed figure carrying a scythe, to critique the potentially lethal effects of air pollution. What makes this cartoon powerful is the unusual way he uses the Reaper, who becomes a gigantic figure amid modern skyscrapers, towering above gridlocked traffic. Smoke pours from chimneys, and Herblock’s shading all through the cartoon suggests an atmosphere thick with smog and smoke. A cloud hovering above the street is labeled “Air Pollution,” and the Grim Reaper, likewise rising from the street, himself seems like an ominous cloud that has taken a macabre form. With his scythe, the Grim Reaper represents Death come to harvest the victims of pollution; he is a medieval figure within a contemporary setting.

Another cartoon about pollution, “The Drums” (March 21, 1979), demonstrates the darkly ironic side of Herblock’s sense of humor. Here the Grim Reaper beats the tops of metal canisters marked “Radioactive Wastes” and “Toxic Chemicals,” as if he were playing bongo drums, as the contents of other dangerous canisters leak out into a lethal stream. The medieval image of the “Dance of Death” links Death with rhythmical movement, as if to music; here Herblock updates the musical metaphor.

The most famous symbolic figure that Herblock created is a modern version of the Reaper: Mr. Atom, an anthropomorphic atomic bomb with a sinister brow, a five o’clock shadow, and hairy hands, making him look like a brutal, potentially violent thug. The image may seem obvious, but again, Herblock’s greatness lies in his inspired uses of this imagery. In a May 14, 1963 cartoon, Mr. Atom looms over the globe, placing his left hand upon it, as if it were his possession. With his right hand he snuffs out a candle, labeled “Test Ban Hopes.” In clever touches, the candle has already virtually melted into a pool of wax, and the puff of smoke from its extinguished flame takes the form of a mushroom cloud from an H-bomb explosion. The cartoon’s title, spoken by Mr. Atom, is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “. . .Out, out brief candle! LIfe’s but a walking shadow. . . .” The line is a chilling description of mortality. The epic scale of Herblock’s cartoon, picturing the Earth, shifts Shakespeare’s line from referring to Macbeth alone to involving all of humanity; simultaneously Shakespeare’s words lend Herblock’s darkly humorous cartoon a sense of profound drama.

Herblock could not only chill his readers but also shock them. His January 13, 1993 cartoon “Bosnia” echoes Daumier’s “Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834.” Block’s cartoon shows the corpses of a woman and a baby, with a pool of black blood linking their heads. The woman has been impaled by two enormous weapons: a knife marked “Milosevic Serbs” and an umbrella (such as British gentlemen traditionally carried) labeled “World Leaders.” In other words, Herblock blames not only the brutality of the Serbs but also the inaction by the proper, respectable diplomats and politicians of the rest of the world. Surprisingly, the woman’s body is half-naked. Perhaps Herblock was trying to emphasize her vulnerability (as Daumier did with the man in his nightshirt) or was alluding to the sexual assaults on women during the Bosnian war. Or perhaps Herblock was alluding to the fine art tradition of painting mythical or symbolic figures as partly or wholly nude, as with the topless figure of Liberty in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Block’s woman, after all, represents all the Serbs’ victims in the war in Bosnia.

Herblock’s work is not just “enduring outrage” but “enduring art”: though he was responding to topical events, his work continues to be relevant to the present.

Take, for example, his January 28, 1968 cartoon which shows Uncle Sam, literally up to his neck in water, holding a rifle above his head as he makes his way through a swamp labeled “Asia.” Herblock’s subject at the time was the Vietnam War, but the cartoon could equally serve as a comment on America’s current involvement in Iraq.

Consider, too, another cartoon, from May 29, 1987, that involves no fantastic figures or settings, and nowadays takes on new relevance. Lying on a floor is a newspaper with the headline, “’I think it’s better if the Iranians go to bed every night wondering what we might do.’–Reagan.” Herblock instead shows us a man , wearing a button labeled “U. S.” lying in bed in a darkened room lit only by his eyes, staring out in sleepless worry and dismay.

So there are certainly many rewards to be found in the Library of Congress’s two current shows on cartoon art. There are many pieces I haven’t described, including fine examples in the comic strips section of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates (from 1942), Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1943), Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs (1935), Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1962), Johnny Hart’s B. C. (1969), Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse (1983), Richard Outcault’s Buster Brown (a 1907 Sunday strip in which he meets Outcault’s Yellow Kid!), Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 (1934), and Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals (1933).

Yet although James H, Billington, the Librarian of Congress himself, bids us to “prepare to laugh, wince, and wonder at the best of the best of American cartoon art” in his foreword to the Cartoon America book (p. 10), there is a canyon-sized gap in both the show and the book. Where is the original artwork from comic books?

DC Comics president Paul Levitz contributed a brief essay about comic books to the catalogue, but discusses them principally as objects of nostalgia. The book’s editor, Harry Katz, concedes in his afterword that “More work needs to be done toward acquiring drawings for Underground Comix, comic books, and graphic novels.” (p. 307). No kidding. How can a national collection of cartoon art lack any original artwork by Jack Kirby, to name just one of the missing? Since the American comic book as we know it began in 1935, the Library has seventy-two years worth of the history of this artform to catch up with. Aside from animation, comic books and graphic novels have arguably become the most significant form of cartoon art in the last few decades. Yet neither the “Cartoon America” show nor the book betray a real sense that they have missed out on something important. Katz’s “A Brief History of American Cartooning” concentrates almost entirely on editorial cartoons and comic strips. How strange that the show and the book keep trying to incorporate illustration under the heading of cartoon art while nearly ignoring the comic book medium. Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Chris Ware turn up as essay writers in the Cartoon America book, but it contains none of their own artwork.

A seeming exception to this exclusion of comic book work is a chapter on the “Cartoons of 9/11.” Here are striking works by comic book artists Kieron Dwyer, Peter Kuper, and Sue Coe. There is a powerful piece by Will Eisner, “Reality 9/11” from 9-11: Emergency Relief (2002), showing a man watching the devastation at Ground Zero on television: blood drips from the TV set, smoke billows out from the picture tube, and the man seems covered in ash (p. 303). There is even Alex Ross’s cover for DC Comics’ 9/11 Vol. 2 (2002), showing Superman and Krypto looking up in admiration at a poster of police, firemen, and medical workers (p. 306).

But except for a Doonesbury 9/11 strip, all of the comics art reprinted in this chapter are single panel works, not sequential art at all! Indeed, these single panels are really editorial cartoons that were published in comic books rather than newspapers.

The Alex Ross cover poses a final quandary regarding the definition of cartooning. Ross usually works in a style of heightened photorealism, influenced by illustration, and devoid of the “exaggeration and economy” associated with cartooning. In works like Marvels, Kingdom Come and the current Justice, Ross demonstrates that it is entirely possible to do comics that are not cartoon art.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
To my surprise Marvel has just published yet another Essentials volume of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this one reprinting the 1989 Update limited series, on which I was the principal writer. An even bigger surprise was that, just in time for Christmas, I received a reprint royalty check for an Essentials volume of the Handbook! And I had resigned myself to never getting anything more out of any of these reprint books than a complimentary copy! Well, I was going to recommend that you buy the new reprint volume anyway, and now I have even more motivation to do so!

I also recommend that you visit the blog of my friend and fellow former Marvel writer Peter B. Gillis, who just posted some characteristically insightful reflections on the current state of superhero comics, inspired by our encounter on Christmas.

-Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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