Someone Called. I Don't Know. Someone.

Back in June, I declared COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends. Now, after months of preparation, I'm declaring this will be NON-COMICS WEEK. Which is to say, for the next few days I'll post about things that have something to do with comics, but aren't comics.

And what do I mean by "comics"? I'm largely adopting Scott McCloud's definition in Understanding Comics and Making Comics, while recognizing its limitations. (Indeed, I recommend reading Dylan Horrocks's fond critique of McCloud's approach, "Inventing Comics.")

McCloud's definition requires a sequence of images and thus excludes single-panel cartoons, even though those share a lot of visual language and history with comics. So I'll start NON-COMICS WEEK with one of my favorite single-panel New Yorker cartoons of recent years. It fortuitously appears on the cover of The New Yorker Book of Kids Cartoons, so I can share it here without any copyright guilt.


The little boy with the model airplane is telling the phone in some annoyance, "Uh-huh. . . Uh-huh. . . Uh-huh. . . YES, I'm writing it down!"