Dan's Papers - October 19, 2007

Some of the greatest American cartoonists of our generation are suddenly coming out of the woodwork here in the Hamptons. Two of them have contacted me in the past week.

I don't yet know if either of them have lived here for a while or recently moved here - cartoonists live very private lives as a rule - but there is something very unusual, and for me very exciting about this activity. I have been doing cartoons for much of my adult life. I have even just concluded a five-month show featuring 82 pieces of my work at the Tower Gallery in Southampton. And I am a great admirer of those who are the brilliant practitioners of this craft.

The first cartoonist to contact me was Gahan Wilson. He sent in a proposal for a cover for Dan's Papers. And the return address is in Sag Harbor.

Wilson is the master of a kind of dreamy, science fiction sort of cartooning. His work quite often appears in the New Yorker magazine, which is considered the holy grail of cartooning from all practitioners' point of view. The style is a strange bulging exaggeration of reality. There are often monsters involved. But the work is very different than that of, say, Charles Addams, who might first come to mind in that regard. Addams is straightforward Victorian horror cartooning. Wilson is stranger, more dreamlike.

Gahan Wilson contacted me indirectly. His agent sent a pencil sketch of a drawing he offered us for the cover of the Hamptons International Film Festival issue. If we liked it, he would color it, and send it to us completed. We liked it and he did. It is the cover this week. But I had no idea that this man, one of my inspirations, lived right here in Sag Harbor.

The second contact in the past two weeks came from R. O. Blechman. You may not have heard of him, but you would know his work if you saw it. He has spent a lifetime doing these wiggly drawings that he has sold not only as cartoons but also as illustrations for articles, books, magazine advertising and TV commercial campaigns. They invariably involve this strange man, or a group of these strange men, all wiggly line drawings in black and white, that are really major works of art.

(A recent folio of his work carried an introduction by the French children's book illustrator Maurice Sendak.)

Blechman is having a showing of his work at the Mark Borghi Fine Art Gallery here in Bridgehampton. He is in town. The head of the gallery contacted this newspaper. Perhaps I would like to meet him.

Would I? You bet I would. Years ago, when I was fresh out of college and thinking I might like to make a career as a cartoonist, I took a cartooning class from Blechman and Charles Slackman, another great cartoonist, at the New York School of Visual Arts. After the completion of this course, Blechman took me under his wing, showed me how to put together a display folio of my work, gave me his Rolodex and sent me out to conquer the world of cartooning. In six months, with this help from him, I had sold cartoons to Esquire, Maclean's, The Realist, Redbook and The Saturday Review of Literature. But then I decided I preferred to run this newspaper. So I came back out to the Hamptons and abandoned that career - without ever breaking into the New Yorker. Blechman has been New Yorker approved, both inside and on the cover. And so has Gahan Wilson.

These cartoonists join a slew of other cartoonists who are either currently living here or did live here until their passing.

One was the late Charles Addams, whose cartoon works are currently on display at the Bridgehampton Historical Society until November. Charles and his wife Tee Addams were great friends of Elaine Benson, who owned the Benson Gallery here in Bridgehampton for a quarter of a century, and I got to know them quite well through her. Charles, who did those spooky "Addams Family" cartoons and Saul Steinberg, who lived in East Hampton and did those famous "A New Yorker's View of the World" posters, were considered by many to be the greatest cartoonists in America during the last half of the twentieth century - Addams more for his goofiness and popularity, Steinberg simply for the quality of his line, the discipline of his drawing and the artistic and almost psychological quality of his work. Both were New Yorker cartoonists many times over, as both inside and cover artists.

What is a cartoonist and what is a cartoon? Most cartoonists will tell you that cartooning differs from illustration in that it is either a single drawing or a sequence of drawings that describe a moment in time intended to make you laugh or see things in a new way, or both. Illustrations, by contrast, are less free standing and sometimes accompany something written. There are numerous world-class illustrators in the Hamptons. And there are three that I know well.

One is Mickey Paraskevas of Southampton, who for the last ten years has done illustrations for books, works of art, covers for this newspaper, drawings to accompany articles in this newspaper, two long running cartoon strips here (JR Kroll and Green Monkeys) and has, along with his mother Betty, produced children's books, television shows and puppet show characters. It is an amazing output of work and I am a great admirer of his style and sense of humor.

Another is Walter Bernard, who along with Milton Glaser runs one of New York's great graphic art houses, WBMG, and who has provided us with our annual Artist-Writers Game cover for the past fifteen years.

And a third is Charles Slackman, whose line drawings have illustrated many books in a pen and ink style reminiscent of but slightly to the left of the work of Edward Gorey.

I think I have been a kind of secret member of this coterie of cartoonists in many ways, or at least a secret admirer of them.

One time I met Robert Crumb in his studio in New York while co-publishing an underground newspaper called the East Village Other, and what a strange duck Crumb was (and is). I was in awe of his work.

Then there was Ralph Steadman. While in London years ago I visited a humor magazine called Private Eye trying to sell them my work - they didn't bite - and came to meet this amazing man who was there that day.

Steadman's drawings are legendary. In quality, they rival those of Saul Steinberg in America.

I recall one wonderful sequence of drawings he did at that time called "the Queen." It purported to be a contact sheet. Remember contact sheets? Those were the sheets of 36 small photos on an 8 x 11 1/2 piece of photo paper made from film negatives. You would choose the ones you wanted blown up, usually by circling those you liked with a grease pencil.

The contact sheet for "the Queen" showed 36 identical headshots of Queen Elizabeth II in full regalia, including diamond earrings and a crown. In 35 of them there was something wrong. She had her eyes closed. She was blowing her nose. She was picking her nose. She was yawning or squishing her face. And then there was one fabulous shot of her, head held high, big smile, crown at a jaunty angle. And that was the one circled, with little arrows pointed at it in case you didn't notice that was the one.

Steadman and I continued the friendship we started at Private Eye for a number of years. I visited him when I returned there. And when he came to the States, he visited me in East Hampton. Perhaps his most famous work was the drawings he did for Esquire as he accompanied Hunter Thompson to the Kentucky Derby. He had called ahead. Could he stay with us? He had this assignment he had to do. I picked him up at JFK and took him out to East Hampton.

"I thought East Hampton was right near the airport," he told me ruefully as I took him on this two-hour drive. He stayed in the Hamptons for a few days. Then was off to Kentucky for his assignment. The rest was history. Though he did acknowledge my modest contribution to his career on the book jacket of a subsequent volume of his work.

I love cartoons. Maybe I ought to get all the cartoonists in the Hamptons together for lunch at Bobby Van's one of these days.