The Perfect Cartoon: Part Two

Everyone has a favorite gag cartoon, one that he thinks best epitomizes this ridiculous yet sublime melding of art and amusement. A while ago I made a case for this captionless classic by Chon Day:

But, in the broad scope of gag cartooning, including New Yorker cartoons, the captionless genre is an anomaly. Of the close to eighty thousand cartoons published by The New Yorker in the past nine decades, I estimate that fewer than one per cent fall into the wordless-wonder category.

And when most people envision a “perfect” cartoon, their vision is not of a captionless cartoon but, rather, an image and a caption that work hand in glove to release the laughter that neither could inspire separately. That is certainly the case with the cartoonist Paul Karasik. His candidate for perfection is this classic by the peerless Peter Arno:

Here’s Paul to tell you the whys and wherefores of his choice. Take it away, Paul.

My go-to guy? The cartoonist who makes me believe that gag cartooning is a worthy vocation? The one who inspires me, after I go for long stretches without a sale, to continue to send in a weekly batch? Peter Arno. Hands down.

A gag cartoon is a delicate balance between the caption and drawing. Either element can exist alone, but together the gestalt kicks in. In a good cartoon, the caption improves the drawing, and vice versa. In the best Peter Arno cartoons, the alchemy is so strong that the impact on the brain is as indelible as the ink they were printed with. In the example above, a caption and a potent image were combined with such uncommon perfection that the caption became a common phrase embedded in American culture. This gag was drawn in 1941, and people are still unknowingly quoting it today.

Cartoons may looked dashed off, but, like music, like poetry, like the closing remarks of a well-prepared courtroom lawyer, cartoons are composed. Arno was a master of composition.

As a result of Arno’s masterful orchestration of the elements of cartooning, we absorb this drawing in a very specific sequence.

Because everything and everyone is pointing to the subject of this drawing, the first thing we understand is that a plane has crashed. Next we notice the general, who breaks rank to face right (we English readers prefer our imagery sequentially delivered from left to right and from top to bottom), directing our attention to the engineer. The general’s arrow-shaped nose commands us. Attenshun!

The engineer, in turn, faces toward the reader with his mouth open. Unlike everyone else in the picture, he is relaxed, erect, and lacks concern for the subject. He is so out of step that he is literally stepping out of the cartoon itself. And his right foot points directly and unequivocally to the final bit of requisite information: the caption.

Then there is the draftsmanship. The story goes that Arno had a drawing board that ran the length of his posh penthouse studio. After his sketch was approved and he was preparing to move on to creating the finished art, he lined the drawing board with twenty sheets of Bristol board, all with the same lightly pencilled drawing, each with slight variations. Then he would go down the line with his loaded brush and tackle each board until he achieved just the right degree of unspontaneous spontaneity. My last published cartoon in The New Yorker included a hand that took an entire weekend to make it look spontaneous. As a cartoonist, I look at this drawing by Arno and find myself both humbled and inspired.

What else is there to say, except, well, back to the old drawing board?

Good advice, Paul, even to those cartoonists who now use Wacom tablets.

P.S. Paul Karasik is a cartoonist and educator. “How to Read Nancy,” his book-length deconstruction of a single “Nancy” comic strip from 1959, co-written with Mark Newgarden, is due out this fall from Fantagraphics.