Graphic Grandeur (Sketch as Sketch Can Edition)

 

1929-2025

 Shortly after A Bonfire of the Vanities came out, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay that took novelists of the day to task for wasting all their prose on navel-gazing and not directing their attention on society at large (as he had just done with Vanities.) Another way of putting it is these novelists were putting the personal over the political, and it needed to stop. While I understood Wolfe's point, I wondered why does it have to be one or the other. After all, society is composed of people with, well, navels. And while they may prefer we think of them as giants that walk the Earth, politicians are people, too, and can like anybody, can take things personally (which we may be seeing played out at the moment.) Isn't there a novelist out there capable of a balancing act between our innermost thoughts and the world's outermost outbursts? 

Not a novelist, as it turned out, but a cartoonist. Jules Feiffer was his name. Starting in 1956 in the alternative newspaper The Village Voice, the comic strip Sick, Sick, Sick, (later syndicated to mainstream newspapers as Feiffer), there is no need to divide your attention between the personal and the political, as you can now look at them as two sides (one with a belly-button, the other with a commander-in-chief) of the same coin:

 

 

 

 

 

Just as navel-gazing and socioeconomics both coexist in the same world, so too does comic strips and other forms of media that Feiffer also dabbled in from time to time such as plays, screenplays, novels, children's books, and this Oscar-winning animated short from 1960:  

 I know it's dated, but they could always bring the draft back. After all, Greenland awaits.