A Cockeyed Menagerie: The Drawings of T.S. Sullivant

While historically significant, this mammoth collected work of cartoonist Sullivant (1854–1926), with commentary from artists and scholars, also showcases outdated tropes of his time. Sullivant’s celebrated career spanned 40 years, beginning in the late 1880s, and his quirky use of body language and inventive anthropomorphic animals proved to be influential for cartoonists like George Herriman as well as the Disney studio. The evolution of Sullivant’s pen-and-ink drawings is expansively explored here, such as how he started off using almost painfully tight cross-hatching and slowly loosened up his line to provide a joyful mix of spontaneity and skill. Sullivant’s animal gags exposed human foibles; he also favored cavemen, biblical figures (especially Noah), and tensions between horses and newfangled automobiles. Sullivant, like most humorists of his era, drew viciously anti-Semitic caricatures as well as other racist and xenophobic depictions, which are reproduced with a publisher’s note regarding their offensiveness, though some of the essayists seem to give him a pass (“Sullivant is Sullivant; good cartooning is good cartooning; and context is important,” writes historian Rick Marschall). And despite the brilliance of his skill, the humor runs stale (see: hobo jokes). But Sullivant’s inventiveness far outlived the trite gags and ideologies they were tied to; this completist volume offers a valuable resource for scholars and students of the comics form. [em](Jan.) [/em]