In spirit of true ‘sunday funnies,’ I offer a few, inspired cartoons and animated funstuffs about writing, writers, and the literati.
If you’re looking for happy diversions from your hours in the chair, cartoons are a good place to lose yourself. Some can be wicked, while others offer inspiration, and still more give damn good stories! As a kid, I loved the old Classics Illustrated comics. Many a long, hot, Sunday in Hawaii I’d sit outside and lose myself in The Three Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans, or Moby Dick. As a twenty-something I fell in love with graphic novels, like the 80’s hits Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, and The Sandman. In fact, Neil Gaiman, author of Sandman, along with Alan Moore, Will Eisner, and Art Spiegelman, is often credited with bringing a ‘literary’ quality to comic books. Even our current book club selectee, Norman Mailer, loved Gaiman’s work, writing a book blurb for the trade paperback of Sandman and declaring it a “comic book for intellectuals.” Poetry’s graphic-novel style poem-as-comic-strip series offers a little taste of what’s possible when the two mediums merge; and then there’s just the silly stuff–the one-shot panels that make us all laugh. It’s easier now for cartoonists to get their stuff out. Blogs, Youtube, and self-publishing offer no end to the wonderful world of words and pictures merged.
