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What Am I Doing Here?
What Am I Doing Here? is a startling masterwork by one of the forgotten innovators of American comics.
In 1945, after more than a decade as a commercial illustrator—drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life , Time , Esquire , Newsweek , and many other publications—Abner Dean invented a genre all his One might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. He used the elegant draftsmanship and single-panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turned them to a deeper, stranger purpose. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.
What Am I Doing Here? , Dean’s second book and perhaps his best, depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked but acts like they’re clothed—a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions. Through it all strolls (or crawls, or floats, or stumbles) Dean’s unclad Everyman, searching for love, happiness, and the answers to life’s biggest questions.
This NYRC edition is a jacketed hardcover with extra-thick paper, and features brand-new, restored scans of the original artwork throughout.
In 1945, after more than a decade as a commercial illustrator—drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life , Time , Esquire , Newsweek , and many other publications—Abner Dean invented a genre all his One might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. He used the elegant draftsmanship and single-panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turned them to a deeper, stranger purpose. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.
What Am I Doing Here? , Dean’s second book and perhaps his best, depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked but acts like they’re clothed—a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions. Through it all strolls (or crawls, or floats, or stumbles) Dean’s unclad Everyman, searching for love, happiness, and the answers to life’s biggest questions.
This NYRC edition is a jacketed hardcover with extra-thick paper, and features brand-new, restored scans of the original artwork throughout.
168 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1947
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 7, 2017
What Am I Doing Here? By Abner Dean is a unique collection of cartoons that seems wholly different from anything I have ever read, and I deliberately read a lot of strange and surreal stuff. I don’t even know how to talk about it, really. With a lot of cartoons, classic or otherwise, I laugh aloud. I get The New Yorker, for instance, and the very first thing I do is read through it for the cartoons, for the laughs. And sometimes I don’t get the deeply inside jokes.
With these cartoons by livelong New Yorker and nephew of sculptor Jacob Epstein Dean, who did cartoons and ad illustrations for The New Yorker in the forties, and published this book in 1947, rereleased for a new generation to puzzle about, I tend to think of them as absurd or existentialist, two movements that were going on about then. Everyone is naked in them, though it’s not clear why, because they’re not at all sexual in intent, everyone seems hapless, lost, isolated. What am I doing here, is a repeated refrain of cartoon captions? A pretty crazy world. I mght ask, why am I reading this, and he’d probably say, “exactly!” Nice to get the opportunity to read something from that period that seems consistent with a lot of contemporary surrealistic work. Orwell, Kafka, Thurber? Not sure how to place it. I like it because the work is puzzling to me.
Here, just take two minutes to scan some of his work:
https://www.google.com/search?q=abner...
With these cartoons by livelong New Yorker and nephew of sculptor Jacob Epstein Dean, who did cartoons and ad illustrations for The New Yorker in the forties, and published this book in 1947, rereleased for a new generation to puzzle about, I tend to think of them as absurd or existentialist, two movements that were going on about then. Everyone is naked in them, though it’s not clear why, because they’re not at all sexual in intent, everyone seems hapless, lost, isolated. What am I doing here, is a repeated refrain of cartoon captions? A pretty crazy world. I mght ask, why am I reading this, and he’d probably say, “exactly!” Nice to get the opportunity to read something from that period that seems consistent with a lot of contemporary surrealistic work. Orwell, Kafka, Thurber? Not sure how to place it. I like it because the work is puzzling to me.
Here, just take two minutes to scan some of his work:
https://www.google.com/search?q=abner...
November 23, 2024
Hard to convey the feeling of the rock in my gut as I flipped through this book. By depicting every person within the community as a naked body, Dean removes the need to analyze the content of the book through time period and context. It just is. And it’s not a pleasant picture.
January 25, 2026
Facile, self-congratulatory, and very, very dated - a time capsule of 1940s-50s New Yorker magazine middlebrow. It’s sexist as well, but nothing really vicious. I picture the intended reader as a man like Frank Wheeler in Yates’ Revolutionary Road - a suited stiff, approaching middle age, who wanted to become a writer in college and maintains, in a last fantasy of uniqueness, that he “has a novel in him,” and who speculates on the “Big Questions” with nothing but popularized Freud and journalistic summaries of existentialism to aid him. The figures are naked, which must have struck people as deep. 2018’s equivalent is a mediocre stand-up comic who’s going to tell you the truth about religion, but after he explains just how men and women are different.
December 31, 2016
While there were some comics that I enjoyed here, satirizing our highly commercialized world where independence is highly coveted, yet everyone also must adhere to labels and uniforms of belief, over all I found the collection sexist, so couldn’t enjoy it. Traditional male-centric gender roles and ‘values’ were never challenge and in fact enforced in nearly every panel. The main theme of the comic/novel is the search for self-actualization and all these ‘big questions,’ yet the character stumbling through the comics doesn’t really represent ‘everyman,’ but only white male cis het everyman.
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January 12, 2017cartoons are overrated
February 28, 2010
Leonard Rifas recommended What am I Doing Here? for my Picture Books as Sequential Art Class because it is a picture book for adults. The book consists of a set of surreal illustrations with poetic statements that you might overhear in conversation as captions. Notably in the introduction, Clifton Fadiman insists “This book is a real book, not a collection of cartoons.” An example of one of these vignettes: a picture of the main character, a naked man, in a phone booth floating above a dark sea has the caption "Tell me a story." The phone booth contains a setting sun and a potted plant and he is speaking into the old style phone with a separate mouth piece and ear piece. The man looks happy; unlike he does in most of the pictures. The different vignettes work as a whole, resonating with each other and creating a vision of the world that is familiar, but also it seems, intensely personal to the artist. I loved this book so much that I had to buy a copy online when I realized I wanted to keep the one from interlibrary loan forever. It is mysteriously moving, insightful, and fascinating. I keep finding new "favorite" pages.
June 15, 2007
Really strange, angsty cartoons.
July 28, 2007
This book makes my insides hurt in a big way. If you ask me, I will share it with you. You won't regret it.
March 21, 2009
probably the best book of all time. can't believe i rated 1400 books before it.
January 7, 2018
Page after page of the naked truth about humanity. Somehow both cynical and compassionate.
February 6, 2025
Published in 1947, Dean's book is an interesting counterpoint to a narrative about postwar American exceptionalism. Although on paper every red-blooded American should have been overjoyed that American individualist ideals triumphed over totalitarianism while also ushering in the golden age of consumerist capitalism, Dean dissents with this somewhat bleak collection of existentialist cartoons. It's an important work of visual art that captures universal human anxieties perfectly. I really enjoyed it.
March 25, 2022
The always nudity of everybody appeals to this naturist but the extremely loose "story" bored me the few times I thought that I understood anything that was going on- it was in no way effective in relating whatever he was trying to say.
Why did he put areonips on some of the chicks? Was that supposed to mean something?
Why did he put areonips on some of the chicks? Was that supposed to mean something?
October 23, 2017
What can I say about a world of existential dread populated by naked people gleefully jumping into the abyss? Nothing more than the great Abner Dean did in his book WHAT AM I DOING HERE? It's a question without an answer, but his drawings lead you to the ridiculous, where it's all okay.
October 13, 2023
Ooookay? It was okay? A bit dated, obviously, but also didn't do much for me.
September 11, 2025
Intricate illustrations and mildly confusing comic strips facilitate this collection featuring absurdist humor and surreal thought.
October 24, 2020
Existential humorous gags are not supposed to make you laugh out loud, some can even be a bit sad and nostalgic. This book was first released around 1947, so you have to take that into account when exploring each gag. The art aged particularly well, it's beautiful both visually and technically.
I would prefer a better book edition, although the dust jacket and the hardcover are good quality, the paper is not the best suitable, and the book should be bigger, instead of a A5 size, in order to appreciate better each drawing. Some gags even run for two pages and only occupied less than half of each page, making then rather small unnecessarily. True, the original 1947 edition was similar, but why do it exactly the same?
I would prefer a better book edition, although the dust jacket and the hardcover are good quality, the paper is not the best suitable, and the book should be bigger, instead of a A5 size, in order to appreciate better each drawing. Some gags even run for two pages and only occupied less than half of each page, making then rather small unnecessarily. True, the original 1947 edition was similar, but why do it exactly the same?
December 30, 2016
One of the few midcentury US cartoonists to be as existential and psychological as his European peers, Dean anticipated the themes of Feiffer, Schulz, and underground comix in his lushly graytoned cartoons about alienation, conformity, nuclear paranoia, and sexual relations in the 1940s. His art owes something to the mature Peter Arno and something to the young William Steig, but his angular figures and dreamlike landscapes are instantly recognizable as his alone. What Am I Doing Here? was his second book of cartoons; unlike most of his celebrated peers of the era (Arno, Steig, Addams, Partch), they had not been scattered in magazines before being collected into book form; he supported himself on advertising illustration and made his moody, philosophical books of cartoons for fun. They were popular enough that he published them regularly into the mid-50s, by which neurotic, psychoanalytic time the rest of popular culture had nearly caught up to him.
This NYRB (I guess New York Review Comics is the imprint) reprint is nice and solid, but I wish it weren't bound so tight; Dean's penchant for double-page spreads with major information in the center of the image means that I nearly had to break the binding to see many of the cartoons properly. (His 40s books, in my experience, are generally bound loosely enough, whether intentionally or due to their advanced age now, that they can lay open relatively flat, which is my ideal in a book of art.) More or less avant-garde in their day, his drawings (and their meditative captions) can seem a little obvious or sophomoric now, but the beauty of his rendering, and the generosity of his imagination, is still well worth luxuriating in for an hour or two every so often.
This NYRB (I guess New York Review Comics is the imprint) reprint is nice and solid, but I wish it weren't bound so tight; Dean's penchant for double-page spreads with major information in the center of the image means that I nearly had to break the binding to see many of the cartoons properly. (His 40s books, in my experience, are generally bound loosely enough, whether intentionally or due to their advanced age now, that they can lay open relatively flat, which is my ideal in a book of art.) More or less avant-garde in their day, his drawings (and their meditative captions) can seem a little obvious or sophomoric now, but the beauty of his rendering, and the generosity of his imagination, is still well worth luxuriating in for an hour or two every so often.
February 28, 2010
Leonard Rifas recommended What am I Doing Here? for my Picture Books as Sequential Art Class because it is a picture book for adults. The book consists of a set of surreal illustrations with poetic statements that you might overhear in conversation as captions. Notably in the introduction, Clifton Fadiman insists “This book is a real book, not a collection of cartoons.” An example of one of these vignettes: a picture of the main character, a naked man, in a phone booth floating above a dark sea has the caption "Tell me a story." The phone booth contains a setting sun and a potted plant and he is speaking into the old style phone with a separate mouth piece and ear piece. The man looks happy; unlike he does in most of the pictures. The different vignettes work as a whole, resonating with each other and creating a vision of the world that is familiar, but also it seems, intensely personal to the artist. I loved this book so much that I had to buy a copy online when I realized I wanted to keep the one from interlibrary loan forever. It is mysteriously moving, insightful, and fascinating. I keep finding new "favorite" pages.
March 20, 2017
Dean's comics are alternately self-congratulatory and self-depreciating (which is something I fully understand, but I try to avoid the extremes of "I'm better than everyone else" I caught a whiff of from this book), with decent enough art, but - and this is where it truly lost me! - a nasty undertone of misogyny. More than a few of the comics were themed around lying to, using, and discarding women one after the other, and while you can make the argument that it's an older comic, that doesn't mean I have to be tolerant of it. Hardly an 'Everyman' I can relate to.
May 23, 2016
Profound and moving picture book with words. Had me sobbing uncontrollably.
January 30, 2017
Absurd, nihilist comics... from the 1940s
May 15, 2019
Quite an interesting book, mostly of drawings, about life. Loved it.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews