R.C. Harvey returns today with a look at the great Virgil Partch.
The extravagance of his graphic inventions inspired similar excess among those who attempted to describe what they saw going on in front of them. In Newsweek: “The line drawings of Partch’s angular and rectangular characters have something in common with the tragic figures of Picasso’s Spanish War ‘Guernica’ … But Partch’s men, with their bushy or bald heads, pop eyes, bird-beak noses and cavernous mouths have their own particular brand of frenzied insanity, which makes them funny in almost any situation.”
Partch’s cartoons, said Goldstein, “made a style of drawing and thinking, with roots in cubism, surrealism and dada, part of America’s daily life.”
And Collier’s movie scribe Kyle Crichton thought Partch’s work “revealed plain signs of a pathological condition.”
The anonymous author of the Partch entry in Current Biography (1946) noted that “a Vip character sometimes wears an expression of dazed or wondering imbecility, but more often is glaring at some person or thing with fanatic intensity. … One Partch admirer has said, ‘the cartoons are funny if you enjoy remembering your nightmares.’” But it is not recommended, according to another critic, that Partch’s cartoons “be probed and examined for deep hidden meanings.”
And around the web:
Joanna Draper Carlson writes about her approach to crowd-funding comics.
Over at the CBLDF site: A capsule history of obscenity rulings.
The mighty SPX is expanding due to exhibitor demand.
Apropos of nothing, Jay Babcock's uncut first five years of the band Black Flag.
And this is a fine looking poster.
