Graphic Grandeur (In Lieu of a Breeze Edition)

Oh, who cares how one develops? What the true entrepreneur wants to know is, how best to capitalize on it once it does develop?

Here's one chilling possibility:

 Cartoon by Liza Donnelly

Graphic Grandeur (Dangerous When Wet Edition)

 

Fifty summers ago, this Roger Kastel-illustrated poster made its debut on the exteriors, and in the lobbies, of movie theatres across the nation and around the world, promising filmgoers a terrifying cinematic experience. However, movie posters often promise things that the actual movies then fail to deliver. Did Jaws live up to its poster's promise? Well, if you were a filmgoer fifty summers ago--and most people didn't bother with movies during the summer until this one completely changed the business model--you already know the answer to that question, but play along with me anyway as we watch the trailer: 

Trailers also sometimes promise more than the actual movie delivers, even as it's a slicing and dicing of the actual movie. Trust me, though, Jaws delivered (with a lot of slicing and dicing of a different sort.) Personally, I've always found the film more exciting than out-and-out scary, but that's fine with me. Whatever gets the heart thumping. Based on a then-recent bestselling book by Peter Benchley (Robert's grandson) and only the second feature film by the then-still-in-his-20s Steven Spielberg, it quickly became the all-time box-office champ and remained so for the next two years until topped by another summer blockbuster Star Wars (which in turn was topped a few years later by Spielberg's E.T., the Extraterrestrial which made its debut during--you guessed it--the summer.) One thing that had no chance of topping it--at least not in the commercial sense--was some magazine parody, but that doesn't means my then-middle-school-age-self couldn't get a giggle out of this:

Looks like unsafe swimming conditions all around.

Illustration by Mort Kunstler

 

Graphic Grandeur (To Thy Own Self Beguile Edition)

 

Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was born on this day in 1903 (he died about five months short of 100 in 2003.) He caricatured a lot of famous people in his lifetime, including...

...himself.

He actually looks a bit more approachable in the photograph, but then he liked to exaggerate.

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.

Graphic Grandeur (Wool's Worth Edition)

 

December is here and temperatures are plunging, so if you're going outside, make sure to...

...bundle up.

1977 strip by Charles M. Schulz.

Graphic Grandeur (Bested Man Edition)

 

 

So don't have time to read all those wordy online news articles? Don't worry. As an alternative, cartoonist Ann Telnaes offers this more...

...condensed version.