In Praise of Partch
When I was a little kid my parents had a lot of cartoon books around. There was a big book of New Yorker cartoons, a book of cartoons from Punch (an English magazine whose humor was lost on an American child), Bill Mauldin’s Army (WW2 humor) and bunch of books by a guy who we called Vip, whose real name was Virgil Franklin Partch. He was a “drinking” cartoonist, a pro-drinking cartoonist. It was a time of non-ironic humor and his stuff celebrated getting drunk and chastised teetotalers with a zeal that borders on drunken surrealism. As a kid I dug him because he reminded me of Mad’s Don Martin. Now, as an adult who enjoys a drink now and again I dig it on a completely different level, some of it even approaches genius. This stuff is from a book called Bottle Fatigue (1950/ Duell, Sloan and Pearce)
ugh! 