What Am I Doing Here?
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
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 own: 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This reissue of Dean's 1947 book seems at first glance like a collection of New Yorker style cartoons, but his work is far more avant-garde. Dean's world is inhabited by throngs of ordinary but naked people going through their slightly oddball routines. Within that world, he places one fellow who often asks the titular question, as well as uttering other phrases the spring from mundane origins, providing Dean the conduit for visual absurdity and comment. Though the format is single panel cartoons, the book is best read as a narrative chopped up and then mixed around into some random form. The phrases Dean uses, like "Not too many!" and "It's all true" and "Let's clean up the place" predate the work of Jenny Holzer in harnessing everyday language as art, but Dean takes it one step further, illustrating what the sentences mean in a world far from our own, yes connected by the appearance of a shared humanity.
