I’m going to get a little personal with this post, as the theme of comics from the seventies has provided me with a great excuse to talk about one of my favourite subjects for cartooning and something that is likely to make me pick up a comic if it’s included: cats. Preferably talking cats, but either way, cats. You might call it my pet subject, when I’m not banging on about neoliberalism.
I’ll admit that I struggled to think of a seventies comic, series or graphic novel that really grabbed me enough for me to want to write about it, despite the decade being a momentous time with the changes to the Comics Code and the aesthetic developments culminating in Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract With God (1978), as Dave covered in his post. Being a huge fan of self-publishing and the DIY ethos celebrated by the likes of Jeff Smith and John Porcellino, I was poised to write about Dave Sim’s Cerebus being the genesis of this, but Cerebus didn’t really hit its stride (commercially or in terms of its cartooning being effective and engaging) until the eighties, so I felt like that would have been cheating. I then thought I might write about Peanuts being at the peak of its commercial success in the seventies, and still managing to retain its brilliance and transcendent, hilarious humanity throughout, but before I did so, I read this great roundup of seventies comics from Tom Spurgeon, and found exactly what I’d been looking for in the shape of B. Kliban and a gigantic, funny-faced cat. Spurgeon called Kliban “the funniest cartoonist of the decade, edging out [Gilbert] Shelton and [Garry] Trudeau,” and that grabbed me right away, encouraging me to click through hundreds of Kliban’s cats on GoComics, which now collects the contents of his 1975 book Cat and releases them as daily comics.
I’m sure I’d never heard of Playboy cartoonist B. Kliban until this week, but I instantly recognised his style and, more significantly, an excellent command of cats – something I’m always on the lookout for in fellow cartoonists, hoping to pick up tips for my own feline creations. He’s good at cat anatomy and at capturing movement (I can’t remember who it was who said that when you draw, you draw the pounce of the cat rather than the cat itself), but more than that, he captures their playfulness, their aloofness, their absurdness, their idiocy, the strangeness of how they act in a world they clearly think belongs to them but is somehow dominated by large, snooty, strange humans. Kliban’s cats talk very rarely. In fact, the vast majority of his cats just doing human things, often quotidian things, and I find this aspect of his cat cartoons quite charming. Often, too, his cats are shown indulging in hedonism, or living a life of luxury. There is always a level of absurdity to a cat doing anything, especially heightened with anthropomorphism. However, once you enter the world of Kliban’s cats there is never a feeling of jarring or sharp absurdity or strangeness. Why wouldn’t cats sit in a hot tub and gaze upon the Golden Gate Bridge in the sunset?
The main thing that hit me about Kliban, however, was not the comics themselves, but a quote from him in his New York Times obituary (he died somewhat prematurely in 1990 aged 55 – I wonder if he’d be a bigger and more widely studied name in comics if he had lived through the 1990s and 2000s):
”People assume I’m gaga about cats,” he said in 1978. He added: ”I like them, but I’m not silly about them. Cats look like cartoons. There’s something funny and vulnerable and innocent about them.”
Now, I’ve been drawing cats for a year or two, and have been writing about cats for a lot longer. My undergraduate dissertation was a study of talking cats in literature and television, from Kafka on the Shore to Sabrina the Teenage Witch. However, I didn’t grow up with cats, partly because my dad is allergic, and I still don’t properly have one – there’s just a neighbourhood cat that comes and goes, that takes my food and my love and disappears into the night. I’ve just always been fascinated by them and how they both mirror and confuse people, and how they have such a unique relationship with humans. I’ve been thinking for some time that comics is the perfect medium for this, due to the prevalence of great work in this area (see Meredith Gran, John Porcellino, Ilana Zeffren, Jeffrey Brown, to name but a few) and my own fulfilment in drawing them. However, I hadn’t yet found such a neat distillation of why it is that cats make such great subjects for cartooning, and this little quote from Kliman totally nailed it. They’re visually exciting in a way that lends itself to comics and to the fluidity and expressiveness of the physical act of drawing, and they’re also funny and strange.
If there’s a message in this, it’s that the seventies probably contains clues as to the development of things that we like to draw today, and that the single-panel cartoons and comic strips of the seventies had a bigger influence than we might care to give them credit for. It’s easy to forget, with newspapers and especially Sunday strips in steady decline in terms of readership since the eighties, that there was a time when pretty much everybody – in the UK and North America, at least – was reading some kind of strip or single-panel cartoon in the paper on Sundays, if not daily in a magazine. This level of popularity can’t not permeate, and I’d venture to say that the strips of the seventies have had a huge effect, in terms of visual subconscious, on the art form of cartooning in the subsequent decades, right up to the present day. I’d need a lot more examples to prove this, of course, but having found an instant connection between Kliban’s cats and my own, it feels very real to me right now.
Also, drawing cats is fun. Go and draw a cat right now. Go on. I dare you. And for the record, I also love dogs. I don’t think it has to be either/or. Draw cats, draw dogs, go have fun like they did in the seventies. Maybe you’ll be able to merchandise your cartoons just like B. Kliban did.
