newyorkette

^{(Click on the image to see the original on Fenwick’s flikr page.)}

Now for something completely different. Ray Fenwick doesn’t really do your typical cartoon. It’s not a strip. It’s not Snoopy. Apparently he takes flack from “real cartoonists.” (Who would presume, I wonder?) It’s very personal, but even so, it’s somehow not annoying. (It’s very easy to annoy me by using cartoons as an excuse for banal personal disclosures, particularly because they’re as much in popular demand as toilet paper, and will never go away.) Fenwick manages to be personal, without being cute or deliberately pathetic, and his irony picks up where self-indulgence ends, as in “HA! I made fun of myself, and that means I am humble!” There’s something Mark Twain-ish about him that I can’t quite pin down.

Even better, his swirls, which frightened me at first glance, aren’t girly swirls. They’re not about expressing a glorified feminine outlook on life, the way most swirls and twirls do, lately. (Such curlicues in typeface seem to be the graphics incarnation of that most annoying creature, the “girly girl.”) None of that here: Fenwick’s flourishes and use of calligraphy and letters will bring to mind The New Yorker’s Saul Steinberg’s “No” and “Love” cartoons, among others. Ray Fenwick’s swirls refer to a long tradition of western calligraphy and pictorial calligraphy. In fact, if calligraphy were to become a cartoon, this is what it would be like:

^{The Calligrapals! (This frame is an excerpt from the complete cartoon, which you can view by clicking on the image, above.)}

Or maybe like “darkness cometh” guy.

The Hall of Best Knowledge is updated weekly, here. It appears in The Coast Weekly, “in which a nameless author provides weekly lessons on universal concepts.”

Patterns by Fenwick (including this medieval pulp one, which I’m dying to have on my next summer dress): here.
Excerpts from LL Cool J’s “I need love”: here.
The Truth Bear: here.

Ray Fenwick’s pleasantly brownish website: here.
Ray Fenwick’s flikr page (with even more): here.
And don’t forget his “Kill” shirt: here.

And now, goodbye!

Posted Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 6:00 am under sunday comics. Feel free to trackback from your own site. All images on newyorkette.com are the intellectual property of Carolita Johnson, and you must ask (and receive) express permission to use them or reproduce them in any way whatsoever.