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Perfect Nonsense: Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson
Perfect Nonsense tells the complete story behind one of the most innovative and under-rated Golden Age artists, classic children’s illustrators, and nonsense poets in American history. For more than 50 years, George Carlson created thousands of distinctive and dynamic cartoons, comics, riddles, and games that thrilled both children and adults with their fanciful spirit and nonsensical humor. There has never been a career retrospective of this startling cartoonist and illustrator — until now!
Carlson’s inspired cartoons — ranging from the intellectual to the surreal — place him at home with not only acknowledged masters of American humor like George Herriman, S. J. Perelman, Milt Gross, Bill Holman, and Jack Kent, but also globally celebrated absurdists like Beckett, Pirandello, and his life-long inspiration, Lewis Carroll.
Carlson also made his mark as an accomplished designer of more serious themes including magazine covers, political cartoons, advertisements, locomotive and naval illustration, and, most famously, the original book jacket for the first edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Now, after more than 15 years of searching, compiling, and conjuring, the incredible depth of George Carlson’s artistry and ingenuity finally gets the comprehensive treatment it has so long deserved with copious full color examples of material both exquisite and obscure. Alongside plentiful cartoons, individual drawings, and comics (including Carlson’s “ghost” work on Gene Byrnes’ Reg’lar Fellers), this edition offers a meticulously researched critical introduction, rare examples of original art and unpublished projects, and a biographical timeline of Carlson’s first three decades as a commercial artist drawing on recently unearthed artifacts from the Carlson family estate.
Perfect Nonsense focuses on Carlson’s prolific work as a gag cartoonist, children’s illustrator, commercial designer, and art instructor from 1907 to just before World War II. Decades before his celebrated Jingle Jangle Comics, Carlson forever altered the nature of children’s publishing during his tenure as chief artist and designer for the pioneering children’s pulp, John Martin’s Book. Carlson turned the magazine itself into a toy, filled with seasonal games, holiday cut-outs, curious crosswords, graphic exercises, puzzles, riddles, rebuses, and more.
As Carlson himself once observed, his early works brim with a unique spirit of happiness and fun. We have not only captured the very best of that spirit in this collection, but also the many secrets behind its legacy. Loaded with wonder and wit, the creations of George L. Carlson will inspire cartoon and comics aficionados, teachers of children’s media, scholars of American humor, and anyone interested in the ever-evolving landscapes of image and language.
Carlson’s inspired cartoons — ranging from the intellectual to the surreal — place him at home with not only acknowledged masters of American humor like George Herriman, S. J. Perelman, Milt Gross, Bill Holman, and Jack Kent, but also globally celebrated absurdists like Beckett, Pirandello, and his life-long inspiration, Lewis Carroll.
Carlson also made his mark as an accomplished designer of more serious themes including magazine covers, political cartoons, advertisements, locomotive and naval illustration, and, most famously, the original book jacket for the first edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Now, after more than 15 years of searching, compiling, and conjuring, the incredible depth of George Carlson’s artistry and ingenuity finally gets the comprehensive treatment it has so long deserved with copious full color examples of material both exquisite and obscure. Alongside plentiful cartoons, individual drawings, and comics (including Carlson’s “ghost” work on Gene Byrnes’ Reg’lar Fellers), this edition offers a meticulously researched critical introduction, rare examples of original art and unpublished projects, and a biographical timeline of Carlson’s first three decades as a commercial artist drawing on recently unearthed artifacts from the Carlson family estate.
Perfect Nonsense focuses on Carlson’s prolific work as a gag cartoonist, children’s illustrator, commercial designer, and art instructor from 1907 to just before World War II. Decades before his celebrated Jingle Jangle Comics, Carlson forever altered the nature of children’s publishing during his tenure as chief artist and designer for the pioneering children’s pulp, John Martin’s Book. Carlson turned the magazine itself into a toy, filled with seasonal games, holiday cut-outs, curious crosswords, graphic exercises, puzzles, riddles, rebuses, and more.
As Carlson himself once observed, his early works brim with a unique spirit of happiness and fun. We have not only captured the very best of that spirit in this collection, but also the many secrets behind its legacy. Loaded with wonder and wit, the creations of George L. Carlson will inspire cartoon and comics aficionados, teachers of children’s media, scholars of American humor, and anyone interested in the ever-evolving landscapes of image and language.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published November 19, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 21, 2021
Who is George Carlson? I'm glad you asked. It's about time someone did. George Carlson is Samuel Beckett in a clever plastic disguise. He is Harold Pinter scrubbed clean of the adolescent fear and obscurity, decked out in popcorn balls and confetti. He is Genet without hangups. He is Pirandello buttered with dream-dust and wearing water wings. He is Santa Claus and Peter Pan and the Great Pumpkin and the Genie in the Jug and what Walt Disney started out to be and never quite made... [Carlson] was one of the first cartoonists of the absurd, and a) how he came to develop his style in a time when cuddly animals were the going thing, b) a publishing house like Famous Funnies that trafficked in cuddly animals employed him, and c) kids like myself who really couldn't have understood what he was about, dug him... are improbabilities too staggering to deal with.
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
March 25, 2020
George Leonard Carlson was a writer and artist who was born in New York City in 1887. He studied art as a schoolboy. By the time he was 16, he was working as a professional artist. The single artwork of his that seems to have been most celebrated was his illustration for the dust jacket of the first edition of the phenomenally popular novel Gone with the Wind. It is a nice, somewhat cartoonlike picture, but far from the work that Carlson is chiefly remembered for now.
What Carlson is best known for is his work for children, thousands of puzzles, drawing tips, advertisements, illustrations, and comic books. Hundreds of them appear in this book
The book is divided into sixteen sections:
1. Preface by Allison Currie
2. Introduction by R. C. Harvey
3. At Long Last, the Carnival's Come Back
4. Early Works and Illustrations
5. Pulps, Poems, and Pixies: John Martin's Books
6. Carlson's School of Nonsense
7. Jolly Books
8. Songs, Games, and Other Pastimes
9. Tutorial Cartooning and Art Instruction
10. Trains and Transportation
11. Portraits, Presidents, and Personalities
12. Adventures in Advertising
13. Original Art, Lost Works, and Forgotten Frolics
14. Laughter, Puns, and Speed
15. The Pie-Face Prince
16. Jingle Jangle Tales
There are subsections
as well.
The first three sections are primarily text with many illustrations. This is quite extensive; it goes through page 43. Much of this is interesting, but some is not.
Section 4 has some of my favorite Carlson illustrations, including the top two pictures from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (p. 55), the picture labeled "The Silver Knight and the River Fairy" (p. 63), and the illustrations from The Adventures of Toby Spaniel (p. 66-67) (among my very favorites). This section also includes Carlson's illustrations for Howard R. Garis's "Uncle Wiggily" books. (My favorite single picture in the book is from Uncle Wiggily and the Apple Dumpling [p. 34].)
The "John Martin's" books in Section 5 were a series of volumes for young children. Some of the pictures I like most in this section are the holiday illustrations, such as those on p. 95.
The material in Section 6 includes a bunch of invented creatures and many illustrated puns.
The "Jollybooks" in Section 7 are more works for young children. These were used for advertising by stores.
The title of Section 8, "Songs, Games, and Other Pastimes," describes the contents of that section. The "Puzzles, Riddles, and Games" portion included in that section has a lot of material, much of which I found frustratingly difficult. I wish that the answers to the puzzles had been included. Maybe children were brighter in those days.
Section 9 has advice for young cartoonists. (This includes a quite unpleasant and inappropriate caricature of an African-American child.)
I like most of the illustrations in the "Trains and Transportation" section. In addition to the pictures of trains, there are some very nice pictures of ships (p. 189-193).
I was less impressed with Section 11,"Portraits, Presidents, and Personalities." The brief poems that accompany the pictures "The Indian" and "The Mexican" (both p. 203) seem to me to at least border on being racist; I don't know if these were written by Carlson.
"Adventures in Advertising" in Section 12 includes some appealing illustrations, especially one for a milk company. There is a poem with that advertisement which begins:
Hurray for health! Hurray for fun!
Hurray for us and everyone!
which reminds me of the lines from a poem in the novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis:
“Hurrah for health in Nautilus,
For Pa and Ma and all of us"
The following section is titled "Original Art, Lost Works, and Forgotten Frolics." This includes an illustrated poem titled "The Midnight Ride of Dicky Deere," with some good, funny pictures (p. 225-227). I especially like the one in which "grave giraffes in separate holes / Were working hard as telegraph poles."
The full title of the next section is "Laughter, Puns, and Speed: The Whifflesnorting Thrills of George
Carlson's Eastern Color Comics." This is a two-page article by Daniel F. Yezbick, the editor of this book, introducing the final two sections dealing with Carlson's work as a writer and artist working in comic books. This is the only part of Carlson's work that I knew of before reading this book. In 1970, the author Harlan Ellison contributed a chapter to a book about comic books, All in Color for a Dime, edited by Richard Lupoff. Ellison's essay was an encomium to George Carlson's work in the comic book Jingle Jangle Comics. Ellison made Carlson sound like one of the greatest comic book creators. I had never read any issues of Jingle Jangle Comics but I was certainly intrigued by Ellison's descriptions of Carlson's work.
Some years later I purchased a collection of stories from comic books, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969, edited by Dan Nadel. One of the stories was George Carlson's "The Youthful Yodeler and the Zig-Zag Zither," which originally appeared in the April, 1943 issue of Jingle Jangle Comics. Ellison was right; this is terrific. When I found out that this book about Carlson and his work existed, I ordered a copy immediately. (The book was published in 2014 but I didn't know about it until 2020.) Unfortunately, none of the comic book stories in Perfect Nonsense are quite as good as the tale of "The Youthful Yodeler and the Zig-Zag Zither" in my opinion, but some come very close.
There are thirteen reprinted comic book stories in Perfect Nonsense. The first seven all have the same principal character, Dimwitri, the Pie-Face Prince
of Pretzelburg. Dimwitri is an amiable young man who falls into frequent adventures. Dimwitri's father is King Hokum. Dimwitri is in love with the Princess Panetella Murphy. (In later issues, the princess's first name is spelled "Pannetella." My guess is that children reading the comics thought that the first spelling should be pronounced pain-tella.)
The introductory information to the comic book section says that there are eight Pie-Face Prince stories in the book and that one of them tells a tale in which the Prince "and King Hookum are saved when a well-placed marble bust belonging to 'Ignatius Smear' beans the villain." There are really only seven such stories and the falling marble bust story is not one of them. (And the king's name is "Hokum," not "Hookum.")
I note that the name of this feature also changes from "The Pie-Face Prince of Pretzelburg" to "The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzelburg." Also, I find it interesting that in one of the stories the whites of the Prince's eyes start out as bright blue but then return to the normal white color. Pannetella's eyes also turn blue in just one panel. (The two very different unicorns in the comic book tales both also have blue eyes.)
One more cavil: the name DIMWITRI turned upside down does not, even in Pretzelburg, look like GREEN WITCH.
In general, I like the stories that do not feature Dimwitri better than those that do. Even the names of the non-Dimwitri stories are funny: "The Moon-struck Unicorn and the Worn-out Shadow"; "The Straight-shooting Princess and the Filigree Pond-lily"; "The Musical Whifflesnort and the Red-hot Music Roll"; "The Rocketeering Doodlebug and the Selfwinding Horse-fly"; "Skip Van Wrinkle, The High-Hatted Hunter"; and "Sleepy Yollo, The Bedless Norseman." Once again the introductory material lists an additional story that is not actually in the book.
Most of these comics book tales that don't feature Dimwitri are very funny, both in the artwork and the text. They are filled with puns, non-sequiturs, and references well beyond what I think that a child in the 1940s would be likely to understand. (As a decidedly non-child in the 2020s, I suspect that I still missed some of them.) Take, for example, the last story in the book, "Sleepy Yollo, The Bedless Norseman." To really appreciate the title, the reader would need to be familiar with Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which features the character "The Headless Horseman." The brief introduction to this story begins:
Once upon a time, during the days of real smörgåsbord, there lived a mighty and blond Norseman named Yollo.
I not only like the use of the word "smörgåsbord," which surely not one American child in a hundred would understand, I love Carlson including the diacritical marks on the first two vowels. There is an even more obscure reference later in the story when Yollo, asleep at last, dreams of an old-fashioned seltzer-type siphon labeled "SVAG DRICKA." I looked that up, not really expecting to find any information, and I discovered that "svagdricka" is a Swedish term for a form of sweet, dark, low-alcohol malt beverage or small ale.
And the tale also features "a near frozen raven with a blond wig named Eric," a most engaging character who saves the day.
The cover is made, I think, of some kind of cardboard, with a cut-out section on the front revealing the part of the first page that has the title on it. On my copy, the material covering the cardboard (or whatever it is) has already started coming apart. The cover design is based on two of George Carlson's pictures from 1924, the cheery Sunny-Bunnies and the fretful Pricker-Stickers. Inside the book, on pages 118-119, there are short poems about each. The Pricker-Sticker verse is nice. I don't think that the Sunny-Bunny poem is as good, though:
SUNNY-BUNNIES
Yes, we are Sunny-Bunnies,
And do not ever doubt
That sunny hearts can always turn
The sunshine inside out.
If you turn sunshine inside out, I think that what you get is gloom, which is clearly not what was intended.
George Carlson died in 1962. Perfect Nonsense is a fine memorial to Carlson and his work.
The following are links to a terrific two-part article about George Carlson:
http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg...
http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg...
What Carlson is best known for is his work for children, thousands of puzzles, drawing tips, advertisements, illustrations, and comic books. Hundreds of them appear in this book
The book is divided into sixteen sections:
1. Preface by Allison Currie
2. Introduction by R. C. Harvey
3. At Long Last, the Carnival's Come Back
4. Early Works and Illustrations
5. Pulps, Poems, and Pixies: John Martin's Books
6. Carlson's School of Nonsense
7. Jolly Books
8. Songs, Games, and Other Pastimes
9. Tutorial Cartooning and Art Instruction
10. Trains and Transportation
11. Portraits, Presidents, and Personalities
12. Adventures in Advertising
13. Original Art, Lost Works, and Forgotten Frolics
14. Laughter, Puns, and Speed
15. The Pie-Face Prince
16. Jingle Jangle Tales
There are subsections
as well.
The first three sections are primarily text with many illustrations. This is quite extensive; it goes through page 43. Much of this is interesting, but some is not.
Section 4 has some of my favorite Carlson illustrations, including the top two pictures from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (p. 55), the picture labeled "The Silver Knight and the River Fairy" (p. 63), and the illustrations from The Adventures of Toby Spaniel (p. 66-67) (among my very favorites). This section also includes Carlson's illustrations for Howard R. Garis's "Uncle Wiggily" books. (My favorite single picture in the book is from Uncle Wiggily and the Apple Dumpling [p. 34].)
The "John Martin's" books in Section 5 were a series of volumes for young children. Some of the pictures I like most in this section are the holiday illustrations, such as those on p. 95.
The material in Section 6 includes a bunch of invented creatures and many illustrated puns.
The "Jollybooks" in Section 7 are more works for young children. These were used for advertising by stores.
The title of Section 8, "Songs, Games, and Other Pastimes," describes the contents of that section. The "Puzzles, Riddles, and Games" portion included in that section has a lot of material, much of which I found frustratingly difficult. I wish that the answers to the puzzles had been included. Maybe children were brighter in those days.
Section 9 has advice for young cartoonists. (This includes a quite unpleasant and inappropriate caricature of an African-American child.)
I like most of the illustrations in the "Trains and Transportation" section. In addition to the pictures of trains, there are some very nice pictures of ships (p. 189-193).
I was less impressed with Section 11,"Portraits, Presidents, and Personalities." The brief poems that accompany the pictures "The Indian" and "The Mexican" (both p. 203) seem to me to at least border on being racist; I don't know if these were written by Carlson.
"Adventures in Advertising" in Section 12 includes some appealing illustrations, especially one for a milk company. There is a poem with that advertisement which begins:
Hurray for health! Hurray for fun!
Hurray for us and everyone!
which reminds me of the lines from a poem in the novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis:
“Hurrah for health in Nautilus,
For Pa and Ma and all of us"
The following section is titled "Original Art, Lost Works, and Forgotten Frolics." This includes an illustrated poem titled "The Midnight Ride of Dicky Deere," with some good, funny pictures (p. 225-227). I especially like the one in which "grave giraffes in separate holes / Were working hard as telegraph poles."
The full title of the next section is "Laughter, Puns, and Speed: The Whifflesnorting Thrills of George
Carlson's Eastern Color Comics." This is a two-page article by Daniel F. Yezbick, the editor of this book, introducing the final two sections dealing with Carlson's work as a writer and artist working in comic books. This is the only part of Carlson's work that I knew of before reading this book. In 1970, the author Harlan Ellison contributed a chapter to a book about comic books, All in Color for a Dime, edited by Richard Lupoff. Ellison's essay was an encomium to George Carlson's work in the comic book Jingle Jangle Comics. Ellison made Carlson sound like one of the greatest comic book creators. I had never read any issues of Jingle Jangle Comics but I was certainly intrigued by Ellison's descriptions of Carlson's work.
Some years later I purchased a collection of stories from comic books, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969, edited by Dan Nadel. One of the stories was George Carlson's "The Youthful Yodeler and the Zig-Zag Zither," which originally appeared in the April, 1943 issue of Jingle Jangle Comics. Ellison was right; this is terrific. When I found out that this book about Carlson and his work existed, I ordered a copy immediately. (The book was published in 2014 but I didn't know about it until 2020.) Unfortunately, none of the comic book stories in Perfect Nonsense are quite as good as the tale of "The Youthful Yodeler and the Zig-Zag Zither" in my opinion, but some come very close.
There are thirteen reprinted comic book stories in Perfect Nonsense. The first seven all have the same principal character, Dimwitri, the Pie-Face Prince
of Pretzelburg. Dimwitri is an amiable young man who falls into frequent adventures. Dimwitri's father is King Hokum. Dimwitri is in love with the Princess Panetella Murphy. (In later issues, the princess's first name is spelled "Pannetella." My guess is that children reading the comics thought that the first spelling should be pronounced pain-tella.)
The introductory information to the comic book section says that there are eight Pie-Face Prince stories in the book and that one of them tells a tale in which the Prince "and King Hookum are saved when a well-placed marble bust belonging to 'Ignatius Smear' beans the villain." There are really only seven such stories and the falling marble bust story is not one of them. (And the king's name is "Hokum," not "Hookum.")
I note that the name of this feature also changes from "The Pie-Face Prince of Pretzelburg" to "The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzelburg." Also, I find it interesting that in one of the stories the whites of the Prince's eyes start out as bright blue but then return to the normal white color. Pannetella's eyes also turn blue in just one panel. (The two very different unicorns in the comic book tales both also have blue eyes.)
One more cavil: the name DIMWITRI turned upside down does not, even in Pretzelburg, look like GREEN WITCH.
In general, I like the stories that do not feature Dimwitri better than those that do. Even the names of the non-Dimwitri stories are funny: "The Moon-struck Unicorn and the Worn-out Shadow"; "The Straight-shooting Princess and the Filigree Pond-lily"; "The Musical Whifflesnort and the Red-hot Music Roll"; "The Rocketeering Doodlebug and the Selfwinding Horse-fly"; "Skip Van Wrinkle, The High-Hatted Hunter"; and "Sleepy Yollo, The Bedless Norseman." Once again the introductory material lists an additional story that is not actually in the book.
Most of these comics book tales that don't feature Dimwitri are very funny, both in the artwork and the text. They are filled with puns, non-sequiturs, and references well beyond what I think that a child in the 1940s would be likely to understand. (As a decidedly non-child in the 2020s, I suspect that I still missed some of them.) Take, for example, the last story in the book, "Sleepy Yollo, The Bedless Norseman." To really appreciate the title, the reader would need to be familiar with Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which features the character "The Headless Horseman." The brief introduction to this story begins:
Once upon a time, during the days of real smörgåsbord, there lived a mighty and blond Norseman named Yollo.
I not only like the use of the word "smörgåsbord," which surely not one American child in a hundred would understand, I love Carlson including the diacritical marks on the first two vowels. There is an even more obscure reference later in the story when Yollo, asleep at last, dreams of an old-fashioned seltzer-type siphon labeled "SVAG DRICKA." I looked that up, not really expecting to find any information, and I discovered that "svagdricka" is a Swedish term for a form of sweet, dark, low-alcohol malt beverage or small ale.
And the tale also features "a near frozen raven with a blond wig named Eric," a most engaging character who saves the day.
The cover is made, I think, of some kind of cardboard, with a cut-out section on the front revealing the part of the first page that has the title on it. On my copy, the material covering the cardboard (or whatever it is) has already started coming apart. The cover design is based on two of George Carlson's pictures from 1924, the cheery Sunny-Bunnies and the fretful Pricker-Stickers. Inside the book, on pages 118-119, there are short poems about each. The Pricker-Sticker verse is nice. I don't think that the Sunny-Bunny poem is as good, though:
SUNNY-BUNNIES
Yes, we are Sunny-Bunnies,
And do not ever doubt
That sunny hearts can always turn
The sunshine inside out.
If you turn sunshine inside out, I think that what you get is gloom, which is clearly not what was intended.
George Carlson died in 1962. Perfect Nonsense is a fine memorial to Carlson and his work.
The following are links to a terrific two-part article about George Carlson:
http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg...
http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg...
March 12, 2014
I grew up adoring my family's old picture books, which included a set of Uncle Wiggily stories illustrated in the 1930s by the great George Carlson. Uncle Wiggily's world as pictured by Carlson, was the perfect embodiment of the the kindly and resourceful gentleman rabbit, along with the muskrat lady housekeeper, their friends and their cozy world. The colored pictures were rich in detail and saturation, and the black and white line drawings very skillfully done as well. Fast forward to the days of the internet and I searched desperately for more of Carlson's work. I found a few puzzle books, but knew there must be more out there. Eventually I found out that he had contributed heavily to John Martin's Book for children (JMB)from about 1915-1933, and acquired a few, but these magazines are scarce and expensive. To my delight I came across a blog last month announcing the publication of "Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson." http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg... and http://www.tcj.com/figuring-out-georg.... What a treasure trove is in this blog posting alone! I ordered the book online, and when it arrived, I could not have been more delighted if I were a little girl on Christmas morning. The book is hefty and tall, with a thick cover with a cutout to show the title page. It is chock-full of beautiful art and biographical info about Carlson and his 50 year career as a largely unsung illustrator. I might have known this, but learned that Carlson was a huge fan of Lewis Carroll, which makes sense when you see all the rebuses, crossword puzzles, puns, etc. that Carlson did for JMB and the Platt & Munk puzzle books. One small disappointment was that the samples of Uncle Wiggily art have poor coloring (they're a little too dark and muddy compared to the original publications), but the Jingle Jangle comic pages are bright and beautiful, as are all of the samples from John Martin's Book, and much, much more. I give this a very enthusiastic 5 stars and would love to see a second volume published one day, since reportedly this large volume is just a small sampling of his output.
April 7, 2014
A TREASURE TROVE OF VINTAGE IDEAS FOR TODAY’S DESIGNERS
Today George Carlson is nearly forgotten, but for the first half of the 20th century he was one of the most prolific and well-known illustrators in the United States. His whimsical and arresting full page illustrations appeared in children’s books and magazines, comic books, and adult novels (he drew the cover for the first edition of Gone With the Wind). Editor Daniel Yezbick spent 15 years collecting and assembling examples of Carlson’s work, including sketches and unpublished projects. Yezbick’s notes about Carlson’s different projects reveal a deep interest that’s infectious.
Carlson’s superb sense of design and color (usually limited to black and one other color) is evident on every page of this book, making it useful as a visual reference for artists and web designers. – Mark Frauenfelder
Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson
by George Carlson and Daniel Yezbick
Fantagraphics
2013, 320 pages, 9 x 12 x 1
$28 Buy a copy on Amazon
Today George Carlson is nearly forgotten, but for the first half of the 20th century he was one of the most prolific and well-known illustrators in the United States. His whimsical and arresting full page illustrations appeared in children’s books and magazines, comic books, and adult novels (he drew the cover for the first edition of Gone With the Wind). Editor Daniel Yezbick spent 15 years collecting and assembling examples of Carlson’s work, including sketches and unpublished projects. Yezbick’s notes about Carlson’s different projects reveal a deep interest that’s infectious.
Carlson’s superb sense of design and color (usually limited to black and one other color) is evident on every page of this book, making it useful as a visual reference for artists and web designers. – Mark Frauenfelder
Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson
by George Carlson and Daniel Yezbick
Fantagraphics
2013, 320 pages, 9 x 12 x 1
$28 Buy a copy on Amazon
September 26, 2023
Word to the wise: This is more of an art book than it is a collected edition. Only 69 out of the 318 pages are reprints of comic books. The rest of the book is a compilation of Carlson's artwork across various publications over the course of about 40 years. Carlson did 700 pages of comics among many other things.
Carlson is considered a forgotten legend of the Golden Age of comics. His artwork has a whimsical, childlike quality to it. His comic book work leans heavily on anthropomorphic animals and bad puns. To be fair, his work was intended to be read by children nearly 80 years ago, not dissected by a middle aged man in the 21st century.
His artwork graced many children's publications, and he was probably most famous for his work on the Uncle Wiggly children's books. It's wild to think about how an artist who was once so popular and beloved is now nearly forgotten. This is the purpose of this book, to remind people how important Carlson once was.
His comic book work leaves me cold, though. I do not enjoy “kiddie” comics but I understand their historical significance. This book just isn't my cup of tea, even if it is beautifully made and thoughtfully put together.
Carlson is considered a forgotten legend of the Golden Age of comics. His artwork has a whimsical, childlike quality to it. His comic book work leans heavily on anthropomorphic animals and bad puns. To be fair, his work was intended to be read by children nearly 80 years ago, not dissected by a middle aged man in the 21st century.
His artwork graced many children's publications, and he was probably most famous for his work on the Uncle Wiggly children's books. It's wild to think about how an artist who was once so popular and beloved is now nearly forgotten. This is the purpose of this book, to remind people how important Carlson once was.
His comic book work leaves me cold, though. I do not enjoy “kiddie” comics but I understand their historical significance. This book just isn't my cup of tea, even if it is beautifully made and thoughtfully put together.
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