J. Lennon - The Funnies

Of course it was the most racist cartoon I’d ever seen. Underneath it were the words “To Carl, who wants to be a Cartoonist,” and below that was my grandfather’s signature. He had drawn another, rougher picture of the black man’s face and added “Love, Pap.”

I turned to the first page. There were four three-paneled cartoons. The first one went like this: in the first panel, the black man was in a chair, rubbing his stomach. His voice bubble read, “Ooo-ee, I’m hongry for some corn pone!” A small cat was rubbing itself against his legs. In the second, he was pouring some batter into a pan, and saying, “Hmm…Where dat kitty?” In the third, the corn pone was finished, steaming in its iron skillet, and the cat’s head was sticking up out of it, charred and frazzled. The black man was doing what he had been doing on the dedication page: jumping in astonishment, gripping his head.

As it turned out, every single strip was like this. The black man chose a task, lost the cat, then found the cat somehow entangled in the task. “I loves the banjo,” the man said in one strip, as he strummed. “Where dat kitty?” he wondered in the second, and in the third, the cat’s head had punched its way through the sounding head of the banjo and wedged itself between the strings.

I read the whole thing. The cat turned up in an automobile engine, a horse’s mouth, a chicken coop, a well (“I’s thirsty!”). It was awful and great simultaneously: a formal puzzle to be “solved” over and over, a clever series of means to the same worthless end. I was reminded of Wurster’s grueling exercises, and how they were supposed to make a good cartoonist out of me. In a way, this had happened to my grandfather. The strip was, its over- and undertones aside, endlessly ingenious. It was also, much like the Family Funnies, utterly shallow.

For the first time in a solid week of actual work, I was reminded of what a pitiful contribution I was making to the world of creative enterprise. Who needed the Family Funnies? What kind of people enjoyed it, week after week? I could see them now, with their perfect teeth and golf-inspired clothes, gathered around the kitchen table, complacently tittering at the Sunday comics. If my grandfather was anywhere near as smart as my father, then he must have faced the same problem: do I make the comic strip something worth doing, or do I just do it? And it appeared they made the same decision.

I put the book down and pulled out the manila folder, then slid the drawings from it. For a second, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: my cartoon mother, standing, a look of consternation on her face, my father’s head looming goofily over her shoulder. Then I noticed they were naked. I turned the drawing on its side. Her legs were parted slightly, his hands clamped over her breasts. Visible between her legs was the base of his penis, shaded in with a couple of quick lines. Folds of boobflesh squeezed out between his fingers, and his eyes were half-closed over a look of intense and slightly sinister desire. And her face: that irritated expression barely masked something else, an intense and embarrassed pleasure.

I turned to the next page. More of the same, this time her on top of him, and then after that a rogues’ gallery of sexual poses and acts I had not ever previously imagined my parents privy to. My mother dominated each drawing, her breasts and crotch, and her pained features.

Why had he done this? Somehow his boozing and ranting and womanizing just didn’t measure up to the sheer indignity of these drawings: not only was my mother forced to act out his fantasies, she was made to dislike it, and then to enjoy disliking it. It was the secret expression of my father’s desires, and it was his apology for them, and it was his justification for doing it in spite of the apology.

But in the end it was him I felt truly sorry for. If drawing those pictures was a lonely act, keeping them in the safe was an act of profound desolation. It was as if he’d kept a chunk of the heart that would kill him suspended in a jar, so that he could moon over it whenever he wanted, up to the day he died.

I put the drawings back in the envelope. Then I stuffed it, along with the book, into the garbage bag.

* * *

Later, after my trips to the recycling center and the dump, I curled up on the couch and watched, for the first time in years, the Family Funnies television special. It was a Thanksgiving affair, washed in the appropriate earth tones and bright fall colors. The special first aired on a Thanksgiving Day sometime in the late seventies, and I remembered gathering in the living room with my family to watch it. Dad was drunk in protest. He had gotten louder and louder, and made increasingly less sense, as our meal progressed, and by the end the rest of us had stopped trying to carry on our own conversations around him and began to pack, like squirrels sensing the imminence of winter, as much food into our bellies as we could fit. During the special, I struggled with the sleep-inducing properties of turkey, knowing that if I fell unconscious my body would eject most of what I’d eaten. From the panicked expressions of nausea on my siblings’ faces, I could tell they were doing the same thing.

It was with considerable relief that we received the good news: Dad liked the special. The plot was silly, really — the Thanksgiving turkey is stolen, an angel appears to Bobby in church, our dead dog Puddles saves the day — but Dad snorted and cackled at his own jokes, repeating them at top volume in a slurred voice and spilling liquor in wide wet arcs all over the living room floor.

There could have been no clearer evidence of our real family’s divergence from the one we were watching on TV. While the FF Mom bustled about in her apron and heels, making preparations for the big feast, the actual Mom was slumped glowering in an armchair, rhythmically clenching and unclenching the fingers of one hand and rubbing her temple with the other. The more frenetic and demented things became on the screen, the gloomier they got in the living room, until my father’s laughs turned to sobs, and we were all sent to bed. I stayed awake a long time, plugging my ears with my fingers and trying to remember each and every scene of the Peanuts special, which came on next and which I was missing for the first time ever.

Tonight, however, I attempted to focus on the bizarre animation of Brad Wurster. In one sense, the special was much like others of its time: cheesy animation, with fewer drawings per second, and backgrounds that, for simplicity’s sake, didn’t move at all. But in another sense it was strangely accomplished. Wurster had taken the limitations imposed on him by the special’s budget and created a subtly disorienting, visually arresting semi-masterpiece. I turned the sound down to blot out the context and watched the images move in slow motion.

Wurster seemed to break an obvious rule of animation, which was that all parts of a character’s body, if moving, should be doing so at once. Instead, he moved about half of a character’s body in one frame and the other half in the next, so that it possessed, at full speed, a strange unbalancedness that complemented perfectly the situation on the screen. Bobby, when he gazed up at the altar and saw the friendly angel, seemed to sway, barely perceptibly, in the pew; his eyes closed one at a time and opened the same way. My mother, nonplussed at the turkey’s disappearance, looked like her head was about to bobble right off her shoulders. It was as if the actors portaying my family had been replaced by passionate but unpracticed Eastern European understudies. I stared transfixed until I got too hungry to go on, then I turned off the set and walked downtown, still dazed, in the day’s last light.

Custard’s Last Stand was curiously lethargic, as if the throng had just received some mildly bad news. People engaged in measured conversations. Teenagers hatched plots in subdued groups. I got into line and quickly grew bored waiting, and so scanned the customers in front of me to see who was slowing things up. That’s when I noticed somebody familiar. A short man with a guarded posture, like he feared sudden arrest by rogue cops. I waited until he was given his food, then watched him turn around.