The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"Your grandpa’s dead."
Please note this is covering the Jan 13 issue (Roz Chast cover) and not the more recent issue. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. (Chickens = paying subscribers. Thank you, chickens.)
Poems:
“Waiting” by Bridget Lowe: Really interesting start, lying to us and occluding (on first readthrough) the subject of the poem. It’s productively disorienting. The rest, once you’ve read over it a few times and have your bearings, is a fairly expected portrayal of a troubled mother-daughter relationship. The ending thuds a bit.
“Summer Movies in Central Park” by Czesław Miłosz: A bulky hard-to-grasp early work by a master, one which leaves your poor servant feeling wrung out. I’m sure this is great, but I can’t occupy it; both its humor and its philosophy slip away. It’s an epistolary poem written to someone I know nothing about (Google is no help), it’s a poem about New York City that uses the city more as metaphor (for… something) than tangible place. I can’t do much with it.
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: I’d like this more if it weren’t vaguely pegged to an actual Hollywood Squares reboot, but Robert Moses as the only actual “celebrity” is a pretty great gag.
Pg. 9: A ton of riffs; if this didn’t tickle me, I still like that it’s not just the usual thing.
Pg. 11 [Sketchpad]: The buildup toward whimsicality is all wrong! Arrange these 2-1-4-3 and it’s instantly improved… though still not exactly funny.
Pg. 15: And the other slug says, “are you British, or is this a legacy publication?”
Pg. 22: Got a laugh. Making the flies big for flies but still small is such an odd choice, but a funny one. What makes this really land, I think, is the mix of tones – a dark joke about death and our pitiful reassurances against it, and an observational joke about the gross shit ceiling lights always have inside them – side by side. And starting with a blunt declarative sentence is so much funnier (because it implies a fairly brutal mother-fly) than a comma would be. Best of the Week.
Pg. 25: Pssh, if you still have labeled boxes you haven’t touched the true face of tea chaos.
Pg. 31: Calling it “Mr. Kent”’s nightmare implies that Superman isn’t merely posing as a human but has actually psychologically split off a banal portion of himself, reverse-Mr. Hyde style… which would be a more interesting plotline than a lot of what’s in the actual comics.
Pg. 32: Well… this is literally just my hateful inner anxiety monologue, put directly on the page. Glad to know it’s funny to someone (at least, when an old lady says it).
Pg. 33: MPJ today stands for Mother’s Predestined Justification
Pg. 34: Or you can use the dino flossers, and then feel a weird displaced guilt when you see them as litter.
Pg. 37: Not much of anything.
Pg. 41: Every family has jargon. Flerbs is maybe 85th percentile of weirdness. Which isn’t enough.
Pg. 45 [Sketchbook]: A well-told story, and huzzah for more actual comics in the magazine. It’s a clever idea to illustrate this as if it were a series of Picassos, but the execution is a bit half-hearted; some frames commit while others evince too much concern for legibility.
Pg. 46: Including two observers isn’t strictly necessary, but I like the difference in posture between them.
Pg. 48: Self-critique – the opaque system for getting cartoons into the magazine is probably the specific reference here.
Pg. 52: I feel like we laughed this phrase out of common usage circa 2013. (As in… “you’re advocating for the Devil?”
Pg. 56: Okay, that’s really dumb.
Pg. 57: Decent execution, but “what if Santa were world-weary” is a played-out theme.
Pg. 60: Really clever, if tweet-like – the illustration adds nothing but the idea of “ancient Greece” to the joke.
Pg. 63: No thanks!
99 Years Ago Today
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