Book Review: Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons

 reviewed by Sam Cowling, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Denison University

Phil Witte and Rex Hesner. Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons. Globe Pequot, 2024. US$29. https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781633889804/funny-stuff/

     In the event of aliens arriving on this planet, they could do scarcely better than consulting Funny Stuff in their perhaps-less-than-urgent quest to understand the cultural institution of the single-panel gag cartoon. (“Aliens encounter Earthlings” is cliché #1 in the authors’ appendix of cartoon cliches.)

Over the course of a breezy ten chapters, Phil Witte and Rex Hesner draw upon a broad and deep familiarity with the form. For years, the two have been writing an online column, “Anatomy of a Cartoon,” to “look behind the gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick,” which is currently hosted by CartoonStock at https://www.cartoonstock.com/blog/category/anatomy-of-a-cartoon/ . The ambition of the book is similar: to “talk about what makes single-panel gag cartoons work, offer insights into the underlying humor, and provide a backstage look at the profession itself.”(ix) On this front, Witte and Hesner are quick to note a key constraint on their pursuit of this ambition—namely, to avoid “crush[ing] the humor out of the cartoons under the weight of excess analysis.”(ix) As they put it later, “[o]ur approach is refreshingly not academic.”(12) There is every reason to think that Witte and Hesner have succeeded in their aims. Their commentary is credible, lively, and appreciative. The menu of single-panel gag cartoons (“cartoons” from here on out) on display is wide-ranging and capably chosen. The efforts to detail the production-side of the practice of cartooning are interesting and illuminating. There are other books that seek to demystify the practice of cartooning—often through more intensive autobiography and individual reflection—but Funny Stuff engages enough cartoonists to throw cold water on the notion that there is a single method common among cartoonists.

Like any book peppered with Thurber, Booth, Chast, and Steinberg, the cartoon enthusiast will find half-remembered gems brought back onto the stage. The reader who happens upon this book with only a limited sense of the form will be treated to a survey of pieces in the orbit of The New Yorker parceled out in a topical ordering. Some chapters discuss formal features, touching upon the role of captions or upon the drawing style of cartoonists. Others map out (to whatever extent possible) the creative process of cartoon-making and idea-summoning. Several chapters focus on the general pursuit of humor and then give pride of place to the notion that humor stems from incongruity, which is then discussed via a happy hodge-podge of examples. Two concluding chapters examine the extent to which a sense of a cartoonist’s “psyche” might be on display in their oeuvre and then take up the question of how the practice of cartooning and pantheon of cartoonists is informed by questions around diversity and identity. Throughout, Witte and Hesner are keen to let the voices of cartoonists shine through in the form of judiciously chosen quotes or via concrete examples from specific creative processes. Readers will find their general sense of the cartoon form, as well as their critical repertoire much expanded, and, of course, they will also have a handful of new cartoonists whose work they are eager to track down.

The most delicate audience for the book is the diehard, the aficionado, or the connoisseur. Such a reader, if unable to summon suitable patience, will find themselves vexed that a favorite cartoon is omitted or that a preferred cartoonist receives insufficient (or, heaven forbid, no) attention. As an intermittently patient reader, I was regularly reassured by Witte and Hesner’s sense of things and, in most cases, the usual and helpfully unusual suspects are touched upon in due course. (Even so, I am unable to resist the urge to commend Mary Petty to those interested in what the authors describe as “lavish” styles, and Sam Cobean as a maestro of captionless, yet thought balloon-bearing, cartoons.)

There is a broader and perhaps thornier sort of complaint well-versed readers might make: where are the kindred, British cartooning voices like Pont and Fougasse? Witte and Hesner plausibly cite The New Yorker as the center of gravity for this art form since mid-century, but, despite this, there are ways to usefully gesture towards the broader history of the cartoon, especially at Punch, without collapsing into the drearily academic. Given the quality of their commentary in this edition of the book, one expects Witte and Hesner would have valuable observations about the differences between a quintessentially American cartoonist like Thurber and his British counterpoint, Pont.

Early on, Witte and Hesner describe Funny Stuff as “a tribute to a unique art form.”(ix) This is a laudable aim, especially in what seems to be an era of declining regard for the form. Even so, there is a tension that emerges from the conflict between, on the one hand, the hope of extolling the virtues and power of cartoons and, on the other hand, the project of deepening our understanding of the form. Even while Witte and Hesner disclaim their discussion as “non-academic,” their efforts are regularly taxonomic, intellectual, and inquisitive—e.g., partitioning out different kinds of humor, sorting cartoonists into rough categories, and cataloguing the kinds of interactions between drawing and caption. Due to the former aim, there is an understandable urgency in this book to showcase as many lovely cartoons as possible. Left unchecked, that would simply deliver another cartoon collection. But, in keeping with the latter aim, there is a clear commitment on the part of the authors to get to the bottom of things (as much as one might). I suspect, however, that this can’t be done solely through attending to the good and the excellent. This reader was unable to find a cartoon in Funny Stuff about which the authors didn’t have a kind word. So, as awkward as it might be in practice and as strange as it might sound in theory, I suspect this book would have been well-served to include a handful of clunkers, coupled with Witte and Hesner’s commentary upon them. As the authors’ discussion of the practice of cartooning makes evident, failure—typically, in the form of cartoons rejected as leaden or inscrutable—is an invisible yet inevitable part of the cartooning world. Partly for this reason, in our pursuit of understanding how cartoons work, it seems that the misfires, the duds, and the clunkers may prove no less instructive than successes.

Then again, who wants to waste time on bad cartoons when there are so very many good ones?

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20^th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20^th century. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

When Le Chat Was Put Among the Pigeons

 Musings by Wim Lockefeer

In a time of pandemic, it was no more than a fait divers on the global news cycle, but it was a fait nevertheless: the plan of the Brussels regional government to invest 9 million euros in a museum for Belgian cartoonist Philippe Geluck and his character Le Chat met with less than favorable, or at least mixed, reactions. Protest predominantly focused on the perceived lack of artistic merit in Geluck’s work and on whether the government should spend that amount on a new museum in times of Covid (while the Museum of Modern Art has been closed for more than a decade).

What is Le Chat? Why would the Brussels government want a museum for a cartoon cat? And why is everybody in the art world seemingly so set against it? Here are some thoughts from a local part-time comics journalist.

For the casual observer, Belgium’s government structure may seem like an impossible Gordian knot. We have three communities, each with their own language (Dutch, German, French) and their own governmental functions. In addition, there are two state-like regions that don’t really cover the same grounds, but also have their own governments. Then there’s the region of the capital or Brussels (with its own government) and there’s the federal government. Even I had to look it up, and I’ve lived here for more than fifty years.

Belgium likes to present itself as the cradle of European comics. Almost every sizable town has its speciality store, and comics fairs and festivals are all over. In Brussels especially you’ll bump into comics around every corner, be it in one of its several museums (including the comprehensive Comic Art Museum and the specialized Marc Sleen Museum), along the comics mural route, in galleries and art houses and in quite a lot of comics shops, both in French and Dutch (and a little English).

Even though Philippe Geluck is a cartoonist, his most important work, Le Chat, largely is not a comic strip. During its run in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (from 1983 until 2013) his daily offering was quite often a single panel gag cartoon, with a penchant for bon mots, absurdism and self-referential jokes. Le Soir is one of the oldest newspapers in the country, and its readership is a perfect fit for Geluck’s kind of humor: respectable, highly educated, with a well-paying office job and quite progressive values, but not so much so as to ever be calling for a revolution.

Belgium may well be the birthplace of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, but for the longest time comics were considered to be low-grade children’s fodder, whereas the single-panel cartoon was a quality cultural product for the discerning connoisseur, with international festivals in places like Knokke-Heist since the early 1960s. Think of the status of the New Yorker cartoon in the USA.

Single-panel jokes have the additional benefit that they can be easily reproduced on all kinds of merchandising products. Over the years Le chat has graced numerous post cards, napkins, badges, magnets, posters, and lately, of course, face masks. Le Chat chocolates (Les Langues du Chat) in their collectable tins are a favourite to take along when visiting friends. Les Chat and its licensing is omnipresent.

Or rather, that’s what you’d think if you visit Belgium and land in Brussels National Airport (or, conversely, if you leave the country and want a final farewell to all the riches it has to offer). If you don’t consider the ever-present Tintin for a moment (or at least try not to), you’d think that Belgium is basically Chat country.

Which it isn’t. I’d wager that if you ask any one hundred Dutch-speaking Belgians, roughly 80% would not know about Le Chat or Geluck (although they would now, after all the hullaballoo in the papers). In Brussels, the urban centers in the south of the country, and in France, they are a bona fide hit though, with more than 14 million books sold.

Because, indeed, Geluck also managed to get his cartoons collected in a long-running series of albums, published by Casterman (historically, the publisher of the more respectable clear line of bandes dessinėes, such as Tintin or Alix). From 1985 onwards, Le Chat was a recurring feature in color in the avant-garde comics monthly A Suivre (also published by Casterman) and, as with most of the more popular titles in that periodical, later collected in up-market hard cover books.

All in all, Philippe Geluck is without a doubt a very successful creator, with numerous books in various languages, radio shows and television series, awards and honorifics a-plenty, and even an asteroid named after him. He could be considered, for better or for worse, one of the most recognized Belgian authors of the past few decades.

But even while he kept quite busy with his cartoon series, stand-alone books, spin-off books and animation series, Geluck also started try his hand at a different, even more profitable business - that of fine art. Helped by specialized galleries such as Huberty-Breyne, he started doing large scale paintings with the same zany, absurdist humor and, indeed, with Le Chat.

At high-profile art events like the Brafa art fair, Geluck is present with his paintings, offered at quite hefty prices, and limited-run multiples. And he is selling – this is the kind of art that fits the office wall of an accountant who wants to be more than just a dreary functionary. It’s funny (it has an actual joke that may break the ice), it’s easy (Geluck’s art style has been called a lot of things, but never sketchy or chaotic) and it’s largely innocuous.

Halfway through the 2000s, Geluck started mentioning how Paris and other French cities had approached him with proposals for a museum of some kind for him and his creation, and culturos in the Brussels government got a tad anxious. After all, haven’t they just lost Tintin and the Hergé Museum, to Louvain-La-Neuve-Ottignies, a provincial town in French-speaking Walloon Brabant (one that, admittedly, also had a university)? Could they afford to lose Geluck as well, and to France at that?

            And so, a plan was made, a site was chosen (a building that for the longest time had been empty, but that is situated on the Rue Royale, in the middle of the cultural heart of the city) and initial designs were presented to the assembled press.

After which a (small) wave of protests washed in, especially from the Brussels art world, with a petition asking why a museum dedicated to one man, a cartoonist with a simplistic style at that, was in the works, while the whole collection of the National Museum of Modern Art had been in storage for more than a decade, and while other (more serious, I gather) art was being neglected.

While all this was covered in the press and on TV, the Brussels, and Belgian, comics scene, kept strangely quiet, even though the Belgian Comics Museum had announced only two weeks earlier that it was forced to let go a third of its employees because it had attracted 70% fewer visitors due to the COVID crisis. In addition to the rent from the book store and coffee shop, tickets are the only source of income of this unique Museum.

            Philippe Geluck seemed quite shocked by all the hubbub the plans for his museum had caused. During a television debate on commercial station RTL he announced that, if a better goal for the building could be found, he’d gladly step aside.

            So, what to do? Perhaps turn the Rue Royal building into a modern art museum and support the already existing Comics Museum? Give Le Chat its own wing there? For the government bodies involved in the affair, nothing seems to have changed in spite of any controversy. Maybe we should simply wait a couple more years. After all, Geluck is still alive and very much kicking, while other bigwigs of the Belgian art world only got their museums long after their demises. 

 A version of this will be published in print in IJOCA 23-1.

Reviewer wanted for London Private Eye exhibit

The exhibit details are : Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye is at the Thomas Williams Fine Art Gallery, London W1 (020-7491 1485), from 22 April to 22 May

For more info, see "Forza Fantoni! The art of Private Eye's cruel cartoonist; Private Eye's best-known illustrator is also a poet, musician, playwright and painter with a self-destruct button as red as his shoes." By Ian Burrell.