Being a cartoonist is a bit like being a writer of very, very short stories. The average cartoon caption is usually no longer than a sentence. And for many, a single word is word enough:
However, some captions are longer—much longer—and even have a novelistic quality to them, if only by way of parody. Here are two of my favorite examples of this genre, by Joe Mirachi and Jack Ziegler:
I know Jack wrote at least one unpublished novel before he saw the light and became a cartoonist. Perhaps that experience is what inspired these cartoons about the frustrations of the writing life:
In Jack’s case, literature’s loss was cartooning’s gain. Sometimes it works out the other way around. That’s been the story with Peter Steiner, who has published four hundred and twenty-one cartoons in The New Yorker, and whose place in the cartooning pantheon is forever secured by this panel he did, back in the nineties.
Not too long afterward, a series of events, which I’ll let Peter tell you about, led him to literature’s lair, where he is now happily ensconced as a four-time novelist. Take it away, Peter.
Thirty-five years ago, I set out to become a cartoonist, which, in those days, meant turning out an endless stream of cartoon ideas and sending them off in the mail week after week to various magazines, most of which no longer exist. It was, as I look back on it now, a ridiculous discipline—making funny drawings that no one would ever see. Eventually, though, a small percentage got bought and published and even laughed at.
Making a cartoon was always mostly writing. You’re composing a little one-act play, so the language has to be just right. Of course, some cartoons don’t have captions, but they still have characters and a sort of unspoken dialogue. Captions have to be extremely economical, as concise as they can be without jeopardizing the rhythm by which the cartoon reveals its humor. “Tell me, Miss Moneypenny…” and so on. The drawing may be the fulfillment of the cartoon, but the writing is its essence.
I became a novelist in the nineties, some twenty years after becoming a cartoonist. But while becoming a cartoonist had been my whole purpose back then, becoming a novelist happened almost by accident.
My father and I had that curious mix of closeness and distance, love and contempt, adoration and embarrassment that exists only between fathers and sons. So when he told me one day that he was mortally ill, I was overcome with the full spectrum of emotions and contradictory thoughts. “How dare he?” one minute; “Oh, please, no!” the next.
My head was completely awash with unmanageable stuff. I sat at my computer and tried to put it all into words. I found that by picking apart my reactions, describing my thoughts and emotions in detail, I could actually uncover some of their origins and trajectory. But when I read it over, much of what I had written seemed circular and self-indulgent. I thought at first I would abandon the project, but instead I made up a character (two characters, actually; a father and his son) and placed them in Vienna, Austria, in 1938. They became stand-ins for my father and me. And Austria, as the Nazis marched in, became a catalyst. Their dangerous situation—they were Jews—exacerbated their differences to an extreme degree, and demanded a resolution one way or the other. Suddenly, the writing took off, the story moved forward, and a novel was born.
When it was done, I immediately began another, and that second one became my first published novel, “A French Country Murder.”
I have found writing to be so amusing and pleasurable that I have written one novel after another. Those that were published have gotten good reviews and have been commercial failures. My fourth novel, “The Resistance,” which is about the French Resistance during the Second World War, has just been published and will, I expect, suffer the same fate. It doesn’t really matter. Like cartooning, it is, in the grand scheme of things, a ridiculous discipline. But it is one that I love.
P.S. If you’d rather be thrilled by Peter’s four hundred and twenty-one very, very short stories, they can all be found at cartoonbank.com.
