The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"Oh, man, I used to love playing with these things"
Paid-exclusive again this week.
Poems:
I really strongly disliked both poems this week and I feel bad because they’re both by early-ish-career poets who can probably use the exposure more than, like, Sharon Olds. I have to speak my truth, but I feel more ambivalent about it than usual.
“Hartford Hospital, November, Barack Obama Is President” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney: Another in a string of loss poems in these pages, this one doing nothing to distinguish itself. The language here is barely poetic; it’s just one sad little moment, given significance only because it’s part of Debevec-McKenney’s larger project about presidents (which seems awfully arbitrary). Tinfoil-deep.
“Bargaining with the Palisades Fire, I Buy a Pack of Edible Flowers” by Anna Journey: A series of unproductive turns, moving from chintzy nature descriptions to hammily gruesome nature metaphors to a final line so obvious and hacky one questions, as they say on Project Runway, the taste level. Yeesh!
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: Elegant and haunting.
Pg. 13: The rare marital-squabble joke that’s actually trying something.
Pg. 16: Hell being a mundane workplace is the most hackneyed joke there is about Hell. There was a whole Comedy Central show about it.
Pg. 19: No-farm to no-table.
Pg. 23: Something weirds me out about these characters, who don’t seem drawn in proportion to one another.
Pg. 29: Such a nullity I sort of admire it, which I suppose is the idea.
Pg. 31: I’m not that good at crosswords and I just pulled today’s mini up to see how long it would take. 26 seconds. Conclusion: These people are dumb.
Pg. 32: This is a long way to go for a bon mot – yard sale! Random guy being talked at! – but it works for me anyway, I think because it pairs nostalgia with misanthropy, a productive combo. Best of the Week.
Pg. 36: Not sure what this is all about. It isn’t really wacky enough to just be wacky, is it?
Pg. 39: MPJ today stands for Migrated to Phantasmic Jurisdiction.
Pg. 41: If you choose these particular genders and races, this joke inevitably becomes about gender and race, at which point what you have is a white-guy cartoonist performatively self-flagellating, which isn’t cute. On the other hand, if you chose different genders and races, the joke would seem hacky as hell – which it is!
Pg. 42: Mid Pest Joke.
Pg. 47: It would be hard to make this read without the spooky face, but it might have been worth a try.
Pg. 50: Not riotous, but I like that this is grounded in reality and un-zany.
Pg. 53: So much for un-zany!
Pg. 56: And, hey, while we’re at it: Speaking of conspiratorial thinking!
Pg. 58: The difference in the meaning of “again” here versus in the original suggests a world of multiple Humptys, trapped in some sort of catastrophic loop.
Pg. 61: It’s never that much faster. OK – except for the R train, which is slow as hell!
Pg. 63: MPJ today also stands for Menu Pacer’s Jaded.
Pg. 66: The bump while you figure out if “annex” here means “append” or “appropriate” is potentially productive, but nothing much comes of it.
Pg. 72: I think Katy Perry did this at the Superbowl.
81 Years Ago Today
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