The Cartoon & Poem Supplement

"I just need to find a way to monetize"

In honor of the cartoon on page nine, this edition is free for everyone.

Poems:

“Coots” by Rosanna Warren: Superb. The birds – which may not even be coots; clock the way the expertly planted uncertainty in the first line undercuts or at least complicates the rest of the poem’s ideological surety – are presented as the epitome of single-minded survival. Two observers (“we”) are almost subsumed by the image of the birds, the harsh parents that nature presents. Warren’s message is brutal on its face, but there is a vein of irony and skepticism running beneath her words that suggests the speaker’s human view is only one way of reading this scene.

“Midnight in the Pain-Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’” by Donna Masini: The informality and straightforward if anxious humor here is a nice surprise in the magazine. Slammy, even; not brooking overanalysis; still, the uniquely overstimulating sparseness that contemporary religious searching demands we contend with is, indeed, “ridiculous”. It demands a cocked eye, not a saint’s steadiness. Masini provides.

Cartoons:

Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.

Cover: Love this in theory! But there’s some weird stuff going on with the resolution. The central pigeon is obviously blurry, even on the print magazine; the mice have an odd pixelated effect. I think the scans of the woodcuts weren’t high enough DPI, and the after-the-fact photoshopping wasn’t done with this in mind.

Pg. 9: 👀 Best of the Week. Subscribe to this newsletter.

Pg. 14: Kempa does good work getting the concept across, though it isn’t exactly funny.

Pg. 17: Waterfowl joke!

Pg. 23: ‘The music you like is now old’ is something of an evergreen theme in Emma Allen’s pages; the execution here is pretty good.

Pg. 25: Really nothing.

Pg. 28: I like the joke despite the overdrawn uncertainty on the angel’s face, which looks more like skepticism anyway.

Pg. 32 [Sketchbook]:

Pg. 60: The idea that Trump is an exclusively male phenomenon has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point.

96 Years Ago Today

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