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Remember 60, 70 years ago when annotated collections of Mauldin and Herblock cartoons were published with appreciated regularity? Truth be told I got most of mine later on from used bookstores. But I was reminded of those when the Tribune Content Agency offered up a pdf of Kevin Kreneck‘s “Dangerous Days and Really Long Nights: Forty Years of National And World Events Through The Lens Of Political Cartooning.”
Kevin is one of seven talented artists who contribute to Tribune Content Agency’s Op Art feature.
The others are Nancy Ohanian, Jennifer Kohnke, Mark Brown, M. Ryder, Michael Osbun, & Mark Weber.
Throughout his 40-year career, Kevin Kreneck has used his artistic talents to illustrate national and world events with humor and gravity. His work has appeared in newspapers and digital publications across the country, helping readers make sense of complex issues through powerful visual metaphors.
Kevin’s commemorative book has been recently updated with 15 additional pages of compelling editorial artwork, bringing the total collection to 80 pages. These new additions provide even more insight into his four decades of visual commentary on the events that have shaped our world.
The 40 years is a bit of a stretch. Though there are throwback mentions to events of the late 20th Century it starts off with Bush Two and makes a 12 year dash through his second term and Obama’s two terms to get to the Trump years which make up the majority of the reminiscing. Trump shows up on page 22.
But it is an enjoyable review of the past twenty years and the Kevin Kreneck caricatures themselves are worth the price of admission even without the running commentary. I realize that sounds like damning with faint praise since the price of admission is a click of the mouse, but I really did like Kreneck’s stippling style of illustrating characters, objects, and events of recent memory. I was unaware of the talented Kreneck and his writing compliments the art nicely.
Now we need collections of those other six TCA Op Art contributors.
Sideshow
Maybe your memory goes back 50 years to the heyday of the underground, not alternative, press of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though they say if you can remember those times you didn’t really LIVE through those times.
In the 1970’s, Venice was still pretty “hippy-esque” and it’s not surprising that it finally got it’s own underground newspaper. Subtitled, “Greatest Show on Pulp!” the aptly titled, VENICE SIDE SHOW tabloid was a psychedelic panoply that echoed other counterculture newspapers like the local LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS and Bay Area broadsheets BERKELEY BARB and THE SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE that were either gone or on their way out by 1974 when this was printed. Unlike the others, though, VENICE SIDE SHOW focused on fun and was bereft of politics. There is no mention of Nixon, Watergate or the Vietnam War and the closest article to anything politically radical was Harlan Ellison’s satire, “Ecoawareness”.
Far more comix content than those above named underground papers Venice Sideshow brings together an impressive list of cartooning contributors (most not original to the publication): Edward Gorey, Gilbert Shelton & Dave Sheridan (Fat Freddy’s Cat), S. Clay Wilson (with a rare page that can actually be shown here), Robert Williams, a four page interview with Ron Cobb, pages by Thomas Warkentin (five years before he took on the Star Trek comic strip), Heinrich Kley, and others including the complete 22 page Whiteman Meets Bigfoot (“epic love story…this classic but unusually plotted (for Crumb) tragicomedy, a middle-class family man falls in love with a female Bigfoot”) by Robert Crumb.
With Harlan Ellison, Fritz Lieber, William Burroughs, Jack London, Bob Lawrence.
World of Monsters presents the only(?) issue of Venice Sideshow from September 1974. Varning för Snusk!
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