Perspicuity

I did this cartoon in 1995 for Cori and my wedding program.

There’s a store near my home with a big industrial plastic sign out front. It’s the kind of sign that’s lit from within by long fluorescent lights. In big, bold letters it reads "WEDDING SUPPLIES." I always read it as "WELDING SUPPLIES."

Although I would have loved to, I did not wear a welding suit to the ceremony. If I had, I believe the nuptial event would never have occurred.

References

This cartoon is a failure.



I did it on commission for a book/tape course in Swiss-German culture. The publishers didn’t use it. I believe they thought it was too weird. Which it is. But before you judge it too harshly I’d like to say a few words about failure.

To succeed is to achieve something desired, planned, or attempted. It is the meeting of some set of goals. Conversely, to fail would be to not meet goals. Let’s look at how things can fail.

Say I have an assignment to write a paper on Benjamin Franklin, which is due on Monday. Further, say I don’t write it. That’s certainly failure. I would have missed all the goals of the assignment. Say I write a paper on Benjamin Franklin, but don’t hand it in until Thursday. Here I would have missed the deadline criterion. Or suppose I write a paper on Aretha Franklin. Even if I had written a good paper, I would have failed one of the stated goals. And there may be goals stated not by the teacher, but by the learning institution. For example, I must hand in a paper written by me, not by someone else. Or even unstated goals: the paper should generally not be written in crayon or Sanskrit. Sometimes goals aren’t clear. Say I write a paper on Mr. Franklin’s scientific contributions to society, but the teacher wanted me to write about his political contributions. Did I fail? It is much easier to identify failure when goals are clearly defined.

Trepanation (sometimes called trephination) is the surgical procedure of drilling holes in one's head for either medical or spiritual reasons. It has been found in numerous, disparate (as well as desperate) civilizations including the Mayan, the Egyptian, and the Sumerian.

There is a movement in Great Britain (dating back to the late 1960s) to reintroduce trepanation as a surgical procedure. In fact, some people have been trying to get it added to the National Health Service so that it would be covered by the government.

I grew up in rural New Jersey (not an oxymoron, honest) near a farm with an electric fence. Though never tempted to lick the fence, I did like to jump up and touch it to see if I would get shocked when my feet weren't touching the ground. (I can't remember the results: I guess I'll have to find an electric fence again.)

I thought it would be funny to have a sign saying not to lick, in the spirit of those inane signs that are posted on products so as not to make the manufacturers legally liable for random acts of stupidity: "Caution! Coffee is hot!," "Do not step on the top of this step ladder," or "Keep forks out of toaster and toaster out of bathtub."

I thought it would be silly to have a juxtaposition of rigid standardized tests and the contemplative, unsolvable Buddhist koans. The two most familiar koans are "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

This is one of my favorite designs. I really like the calligraphic quality of the simple lines. It took a long time to get this look. I drew it seventy or eighty times before I got it right. I like the idea of having the drawing style reflect the cartoon theme.

This cartoon is a reaction to the huge number of youthifications that have gone on in the cartoon/comic world: Muppet Babies, Warner Brothers’ Tiny Toons, Disney Babies, Scooby Doo Kids, ad nauseam. I asked myself: what would be the most absurd group to youthify? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!

I took the images right from an Albrecht Dürer woodcut (see references. I switched Famine and Death (I mean Famine should be the skinny one!). This also gave me the opportunity to give Death a pail-horse. I gave War a "Drawn & Quartered" tee-shirt, thinking I was so clever - come to find out there is a comic journal by the name Drawn & Quarterly. Sigh.

The Mayan civilization flourished in Middle America between A.D. 250 and 900. It turns out that there is no record of any Mayans enjoying the song "You’re Sixteen." This goes for the Johnny Burnette version as well as the Ringo Starr version. Incidentally, the song was written by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman - the same brothers who wrote a myriad of songs for Disney movies, including "Mary Poppins."

And the Mayans were still not impressed.

References

Yo-yo Ma is a world class cellist and person. This was my attempt to free him from the extremely tired "Yo Mama" references.

Throw Momma from the Train was a 1987 movie starring Danny DeVito, Billy Crystal, and Anne Ramsey. The movie title was derived from the 1956 Irving Gordon song "Mama From the Train." The song title was derived from Pennsylvania Dutch grammar, as in "Throw Momma from the train a kiss" or "Throw Amos down the stairs his hat."

Aphasia, the inability to articulate an idea or comprehend language, is typically associated with some types of brain damage. But I experience these tip-of-the-tongue moments all the time. I suspect most of us do, though some more frequently than others. George Bush comes to mind with his "we must hit the nail right on the top of the nail." I’m sure I got the quote wrong, but I certainly know the phenomenon personally. I am just lucky enough not to have been president during those flustering aphasic moments.

The word aphasia derives from the Greek "aphatos," meaning speechless or not speakable (a + phatos). What I find interesting is that "phasia" (a form of phatos) comes from the Indo-European root "bha," which means to speak. Descended from this we get such words as infant (not speaking), preface (before speech), prophet (one who speaks before something happens), phonic (sound of speech), fable (a spoken story), and symphony (sounding together). So says my American Heritage 3rd Edition.

The television show "Cheers!" first aired September 30, 1982. It was about a bar in Boston, and its theme song reminded us that "sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name."

Long after "Cheers!" went off the air, tourists were still flocking to the Bull & Finch, the real bar that provided the visual inspiration for the fictitious one. This bar was named for Charles Bulfinch, the architect responsible for the Massachusetts State House (right up the street from the Bull & Finch) and for the U.S. Capitol building.

Meanwhile, back at the dictionary... since I was already looking up "aphasia," I decided to dig into "cheers." The Indo-European root "ker," means head. Its Greek descendent "kara" ultimately gave us the word cheer and, of course, cheers.

If you bundle these roots together, you could get
"bha-kers¹," which is Bostonian for Talking Heads. Have I stopped making sense or did I just hit the nail on the ker?

For ten years I had the pleasure of taking public transportation to work while living in Boston. That became much more difficult a couple of years ago when I changed jobs. I started working for a company in Maynard, a small town about 20 miles west of Boston, and I've been driving to work ever since. Frankly, I don't like it. I could give lots of noble reasons - both economical and ecological - as to why I don't like it, but the fact is I'm simply not a car person. I don't like to pay insurance companies. I don't like to buy gas. I don't like looking for parking spaces. I don't like worrying about getting into accidents. And I don't like driving in traffic.