Ring-a-ding-ding

Basically filching the shapes and strength of those gag-cartoonists from the 1950’s and 60’s who regularly published in the likes of McCalls, Argosy, True Magazine, Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post (the New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy were considered the more upscale districts). The concept was supposed to be about shapes and space, balance and texture; although, and predictably, I found it impossible to ever truly get past the literal. Nor did I want to, since the cartoon’s subjects—middle-class sad-sacks cutting their grass, drinking too much at the neighbors’ party, getting fed-up in the car by the kids or the pets or a husband who won’t ask for directions—pretty well describe the kinds of thing I witnessed as a child during this same period, a paradoxically rich period from a kid’s perspective, I think. The artists themselves were suburban stiffs, blue-collar geniuses who had gone to war and, as long as they could keep getting away with drawing funny pictures for a living, were happy to settle for cozied exile in the suburbs.