now at @regicidal-optimism

While I’ve been looking at cartoons that I think are artistically important or at least interesting in some quasi-literary way, there are a whole lot of cartoons I love because I just love them, man, you know?

Carl Rose drew a lot of them, especially in the mid-to-late 1930s, and got full pages and sometimes two-page spreads on which to display his craft.

This is one of my favorite examples of his oversized, crowded panels which you can spend minutes getting lost in the details of. The caption, which provides the pretext for the drawing, is almost eye-rolling in its “satire”: A Caravan Of California Millionaires, Fleeing Eastward From The State Income Tax, Encamps For The Night In Hostile Wisconsin Territory.

But it’s the details that make it work on the level of joyful absurdity, rather than purely satirically. A lesser comic mind would have just circled the limousines and left it at that; Rose has titans of finance arguing over a map of the U.S., heavily-furred-up wives playing bridge, snooty servants lighting the candles for a four-course meal, a socially insecure guy still in his car trying to get his tie to come out right, and hired goons all around the frame making sure no raiders are coming to scalp our heroes.

CICADAS

Always in unison, they are / the rapt voice of silence,

so singleminded I cannot tell / if the sound is rich or thin,

cannot tell even if it is sound / the high, sustained note

which gives to a summer field / involved with the field at noon

a stillness as palpable / as smoke and mildew

know only: when they are gone / one scrubbed autumn day

after the clean sweep / of the bright, acrid season

what remains is a clearing of rest / of balance and attention

but not the second skin / hot and close, of silence.