Cartoon Strips

The New Yorker

I have a digital subscription to the New Yorker magazine. I actually read most of the articles, but when I was a kid I only looked at the cartoons. Years ago I got "The New Yorker 75th Anniversary Cartoon Collection^[1] as a gift. It has a few of my favorite Addams family cartoons by Charles Addams. In one, a movie audience is watching a very sad scene. Everyone in the theater is crying, except for Uncle Fester, who is laughing. Another cartoon has Gomez, Morticia, and the butler at the roof of their house, preparing to pour boiling oil on Christmas carolers gathered outside their door below. This is the humor that spawned a TV show and several movies.

I selected three New Yorker cartoons for their humorous insights regarding several topics I care about. I may select one or two more.

Debt

Modern civilization is built and run by debt. Good debt builds roads and bridges, pays for education and expands businesses. Bad debt is for having fun, vacations, parties, nice clothes, and new gear. It's easy to get into debt and hard to get out of it. Teaser credit card interest rates lure you in. If you don't pay off the balance before the promotion period you can be stuck paying it off for years.

Alone

It's hard to maintain the habit and discipline of sanity when you are alone. If you become mentally ill, maybe because of your genes, or drugs or a traumatic experience, you are trapped alone inside your own head. Trapped and overwhelmed where no one sees or hears you, you don't grow up. When you don't grow up you become an asshole. If you are an asshole, people are right to leave you alone. This is the vicious circle of mental illness as I understand it.

You are There

Malls generally have maps drawn to scale with a red dot labeled, "You are here," to help shoppers get around. In the cartoon below, a presumably normal white guy out shopping at the mall is looking at himself, who is looking back at him. This reminds me of something I read a long time ago by the psychologist R. D. Laing, the "condition of alienation of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."^[2] R. D. Laing's words seem to be even more true today.

Note

The three New Yorker cartoons are licensed from Conde' Nast's cartoon bank. According to their FAQ^[3], "Cartoon licenses are valid for the life of the specific work that contains the licensed cartoon (say, the book that you self-publish)." This is reasonable.

References

1. The New Yorker 75th Anniversary Cartoon Collection
   by Bob Mankoff 1999.
2. The Politics of Experience
   by R. D. Laing, 1967, publ. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
3. Cartoon Bank FAQ
   A Feature of the Condeˊ Nast Collection, © 2019 Mainstream Data.

Calvin and Hobbes

When I was going to College in the late 1980s I'd pick up the student newspaper, so I could read the comic strips. Calvin and Hobbes was my favorite. After I graduated and started working I forgot about them and didn't notice when Bill Watterson abruptly stopped publishing in 1995. Today this is just as well as hardly anyone reads newspapers anymore, except on-line. A few years ago I shifted to on-line political comic strips, but around this time I began to get distracted and bored. Especially because since the 2016 US political election there's too much absurd stuff to lampoon and dreck to ignore.

At one time there were many Calvin and Hobbes fan sites. Anything worth remembering will have its own site somewhere on the web. Yet most of these fan sites have disappeared. I did find one, MOOD - Calvin and Hobbes - Full Story, posted on an MIT website. It doesn't look like it's been updated recently. I think it survived because it's been gathering dust in a corner and not making money, like my own blog. The two official websites I know of are CalvinandHobbes.com and gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes.

I kept two Calvin and Hobbes strips I cut out from the student newspaper, and now they are yellow and torn. Recently I decided to scan them into the computer, but I don't have Bill Watterson's permission to show them. Permission is hard to get because he is reclusive. I have no way to contact him, but I fully acknowledge that he is the author.

I'm making slow and torturous progress writing a book.  I'm thinking about asking for permission to include these two strips as illustrations. They're appropriate but, on the other hand, even if I got hold of him somehow, and he said yes, I’m not sure how many people out there would relate to an obnoxious white kid and his metaphysical relationship with his stuffed tiger.

The two comic strips shown here represent for me personally waking up one day and deciding to look around. This is traditionally supposed to happen in College, but it could happen to any of us at any time. One day we stop considering only ourselves and our own problems and start thinking about other people. From there we became more aware of the wider contexts we live in, our family and friends, community, the state or province we live in, our country, the world. As we gain knowledge we can work to make things better, and by doing so help ourselves. We become bigger, learn to govern our thoughts, and live in a "Universe of Obligation." Within this universe, taking care of obligations leads to finding meaning in our own lives.

[I contacted Andrews McMeel Syndication and was told they don't grant electronic use of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. The above two cartoon strip images are linked to the gocomics.com web site owned by Andrew McMeel Syndication. I claim fair use because this post is a commentary on Mr. Watterson's two cartoons and this web site doesn't make money. Here is Wikipedia's fair use description of a 06 Sept 1987 JPEG uploaded to their site.]