December 30, 2019 Issue

This week, in The New Yorker, I was delighted to find a reprint of John Updike’s great “Lost Art,” which originally appeared in the magazine’s December 15, 1997 issue, and is included in Updike’s 1999 essay collection More Matter under the title “Cartoon Magic.” It’s about Updike’s love of cartoons and his “brief cartooning heyday” at the Harvard Lampoon. It shows a deep pleasure taken in studying various cartoonists’ work and describing their styles. For example:

V. T. Hamlin, for instance, who drew the syndicated strip “Alley Oop,” had a deliberate, gridlike style of cross-hatching that, mixed with the peculiar inverted proportions of his cavemen’s legs and arms, signalled a special solidity in the progress of his dinosaur-studded panels. Hamlin, like Alex Raymond of “Flash Gordon” and Harold Foster of “Prince Valiant” and Milton Caniff of “Terry and the Pirates” and then “Steve Canyon,” seemed to be operating well within his artistic capacities, as opposed to Chester Gould of “Dick Tracy” and Harold Gray of “Little Orphan Annie,” who I felt were drawing at the very limit of their skills, with a cozy, wooden consistency; Gould, in his doubts that he had made this or that detail clear, would sometimes enclose an enlargement within a sharply outlined balloon, with an arrow and a label saying “2-Way Wrist Radio” or “Secret Compartment for Cyanide.” Fontaine Fox of “Toonerville Folks” and Percy Crosby of “Skippy,” on the other hand, worked with a certain inky looseness, a touch of impatience in their confident pen lines. This inky ease attained opulence in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner,” the lines of which experienced a voluptuous thickening when limning the curves of Daisy Mae or Moonbeam McSwine. Capp and Caniff and Will Eisner, who drew the bloody, vertiginous “Spirit” comic books, were virtuosos; closer to a child’s heart, and containing the essence of cartoon reality, were the strips of finite artistic means, like “Mutt and Jeff” and “Bringing Up Father” (Jiggs and Maggie)—holdovers from an earlier, vaudevillian era—and adventure strips whose implausibility was framed in an earnest stiffness of execution, such as “The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician.” Strikingly minimal, in that pre-“Peanuts” era, was Crockett Johnson’s “Barnaby,” whose characters appeared in invariable profile and whose talk balloons were lettered not by hand but by mechanical typesetting.

My favorite sentence in “Lost Art” is this surreal beauty:

Li’l Abner’s hair was always seen with the parting toward the viewer, and Mickey Mouse’s circular ears were never seen on edge, and Downwind, in Zack Mosley’s “Smilin’ Jack,” was always shown with face averted, and Smokey Stover, in Bill Holman’s “Krazy Kat”-ish slapstick, kept saying “Foo” apropos of nothing and drove vehicles that were endlessly shedding their nuts and bolts.

You don’t have to be crazy about old cartoons to appreciate “Lost Art.” You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its description.