CSotD: Cartoon Classic: Better like this? Or like this?
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This cartoon was on my office wall for several years, back in the middle-late 70s. It came from a magazine, but I don't remember which one — only that it had good reviews of sports cars, stereo equipment and wine, excellent fiction and insightful interviews, which is why I bought it. I never really bothered to look at whatever pictures it may have also featured, except, of course, for the cartoons.
In any case, I love Gahan Wilson for his ability to combine utter normalcy with raging insanity. In this case, it's the complete unawareness of the guy in the chair, contrasted with the vibrating lunacy of the eye doctor.
Wilson teases you with that sort of contrast in a way that is generally more straight-faced than Charles Addams, who often (though not always) added a normal person to react to the weirdness.
Wilson likes to make the reader fill that onlooker role.
Another of his classics, for instance, is a calm seascape along a deserted beach. In the foreground of this tranquil scene is an easel and paints, and a canvas on which is an uncompleted picture of that same seascape … but with a monster emerging from the deep.
It is as if Addams had simply shown the ski tracks around the tree, without the woman who had just made them, much less the onlooker reacting to it.
Addams invites you to ponder the mystery. Wilson almost dares you to figure out what happened, and to react to it.
In this cartoon, the humor is not in the doctor, who is in shadows, but in the calm patient, and the lighting helps to sell the gag by focusing on the patient and the eye chart. His lips are moving. He is reading the eye chart, and you have to wonder how far he has gotten, and, given the look of bovine concentration on his face, whether any of it is sinking in?
I don't know how many years this was on my wall, I don't know how many times I looked at it. I do know that it cracked me up every single time.
And it still does.
Post script: In searching — futilely — for the abandoned seascape cartoon, I discovered that the eye doctor cartoon is apparently one of Wilson's favorites as well and is all over the place, including on the cover of his "Best of …" collection. Of course, a "classic" cartoon is supposed to be one that people have seen before, but I was quite surprised at how ubiquitous it turned out to be.
So, as a bonus, here's one of my favorite Charles Addams cartoons, which you have possibly also seen as well. I don't know whether it is one of his favorites or not. I do know that it is one in which he does not feature a normal person reacting, so, if you are a normal person, please react to it.
In other news: Please note that I have added a new widget to the right rail that allows cartoonists who do not market through Amazon to promote their collections. Dave Blazek, whose Loose Parts has been the CSOTD several times and a bridesmaid several others, has made the first entry with an offer you really should check out.
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