Adam Blatner

Some modern cartoonists tickle my fancy: Would that I could be like them! Wait: I am like them, but not professionally. That is, I don’t have a syndicated column or sell my cartoons to magazines or newspapers. It occurs to me that I might. A number of these artists take off from Gary Larsen (the Far Side) and offer cartoons that are sometimes very far out.

Lynda Barry, a cartoonist, does wild, weird, and wonderful art. I have in front of me a little strip featuring invertebrate fashion and style—especially insects. Wow! She also does the black poodle Fred Milton and his very doggy take on things. Her major strip about alienated kids between 5 and 16 are poignant.

Roz Chast also is delightfully weird, and I have in front of me a magazine cover called “Errands.”  She is a spokesperson for the nerdy—and being a tiny bit nerdy when I’m out of my element, I empathize.

I also like Tom Tomorrow—especially when he does the weird aliens in the other realms.  Indeed, science fiction, the far future, etc, offers us angles for political criticism.

My cartoons are metaphysical take-offs or explanations of doodles from the deep unconscious, two steps to the right. No, up a bit. Weird stuff that can all be easily rationalized, the way dreams do, make it seem entirely plausible, when you explain it that way.

The subconscious is beyond analysis quick and clever! We can’t track it, and it is but one of many reasons that I intuit that mind operates not only unconsciously, but supra-consciously. That is to say it is open to flashes not only of base motivations but often higher inspirations! In this latter respect, it might help to imagine that “we” (in this dimension) are also open to projections in three dimensions of a higher dimensional energy. Indeed, one of my goals is to point this out. We’re not all there is, and as a logical consequence, when we die—and we do— yet there’s part of our consciousness that transforms and does not die!

What do I know! I’m just riffing on the great mysteries. One must be a bit wacky, you know. It’s the only sane way to respond to the very paradoxical nature of higher reality.