The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
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This week’s supplement is for paying subscribers! (It’s not gonna be a one-week-on, one-week-off thing, necessarily, but so far it’s worked out that way.) Enjoy.
Poems:
“Backbend” by Diane Mehta: Words yearn for movement, and Mehta reveals that yearning; watching a limber display, the speaker projects a desire, that to move this way must reveal one “limber / in the heart the way I used to be.” We harden with age; a child’s easy somersaults leave us. Mehta is in residency at a ballet, and she manages, here, to write about viewing dance as a release with a cost – “vanishings” that take us out of our own bodies. Excellent.
“Pregnancy on Street-Cleaning Day” by Laura Kolbe: A multivalent meditation on, I think, compartmentalization; the mind’s ability to move away from “the nature of things” despite a desire to be “honest” – there’s no vision of the “true grandeur” Kolbe privileges, it could be anything; maybe it’s unwriteable. Phones and following directions and being a non-famous president are the strange examples of what’s not at the heart of things – and I suppose it’s all in the title; the “pregnancy” is true, the street-cleaning day is false. I’m not sure I buy these conclusions, but they’re stated with enigmatic elegance.
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: Weepy watercolor marathoners blend into landscape. Really nice. And I appreciate that the magazine doesn’t shy from near-abstractions like this.
Pg. 11: Holmes-away-from-home.
Pg. 15: Joke is nothing, but great sitting bears.
Pg. 16: Charming and clever. “Elderly tangled Slinky” isn’t the easiest thing to draw legibly; Thompson nails it. Best of the Week.
Pg. 23: I feel like Peanuts pretty much owns the gag “what if small children experienced ennui” such that it can only ever feel like an imitation.
Pg. 24: Premise is OK, but the execution feels “stock”.
Pg. 29: Fun fact: In Japan, the characteristic vegetable that children dislike is not broccoli but green bell peppers. Pixar even localized a gag from Inside Out to correspond.
Pg. 32: My umbrellas invariably turn inside-out (speaking of…) in a way that breaks their internal workings long before they have a chance to get tattered. I’m very thrifty, but not wanting to buy another umbrella doesn’t track with any behavior I’ve observed in myself or others.
Pg. 35: Totally nonsensical – even in the surreal logic of the joke it’s absurd, because there’s no “floor” on which to trap the plane – but it still kinda works.
Pg. 38: Excellent decision not to go zany with this. We can imagine the card’s interior, which is the punchline; no self-evident funniness is required.
Pg. 40: MPJ today stands for Might Perturb Joggers.
Pg. 45: More evidence that The Mob Doctor should’ve been a comedy.
Pg. 46: What’s the German word for “feeling of dread derived from looking up the history of any German car company”?
Pg. 51: I suppose “What if animals subscribed to human stereotypes about themselves” is at least slightly diagonal to the worn-out “what if animals did human things?”
Pg. 52: I would so much rather experience any of the top four things than be yelled at by a stranger…
Pg. 57: Are those giant strips of bacon in the lower right? That spoils the dryness of the joke a bit.
Pg. 58: Strong – and I like how the foreground people are realistic but the opera singers are lumpy and tiny. I suppose you can’t pull this joke off with the Met Opera, since they use chair-back subtitles.
Pg. 64: Strangely obsessed with the pageboy haircut on the angel.
45 Years Ago Today
