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It’s a pity that Bud Handelsman, who died in 2007, isn’t around to celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Charles Dickens. If Bud were alive, he would have celebrated it with a cartoon.
Most people have, at best, “Jeopardy!” knowledge of Dickens, But Bud, an Anglophile who spent some years working for Punch, knew the novels inside out, and his cartoon parodies played with the nineteenth-century graphic style used to illustrated them.
In “Oliver Twist,” Sikes is eventually done in by his own hand, but Handelsman supplied another alternative in his “Alternative Dickens” series.
These alternative scenarios usually keep to one novel at a time.
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But Bud’s knowledge of Dickens was deep enough to do a mashup.
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And he could also use the template to slyly comment on contemporary issues.
All in all Bud did fourteen cartoons that dealt directly with the works of Charles Dickens. Alas, and sadly, Bud is no more, so there will be no more. But I hear you pleading, “Please, sir, I want one more.” O.K., O.K., in the words of that old beer commercial and pun very much intended: “This Bud’s for you.”
All of The New Yorker Dickens cartoons, Bud’s included, can be found right here.