Happy Hour

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Flipping through Happy Hour, Edward Steed’s sophomore collection of fizzy, brain-tingling cartoons, I wondered: What even is a cartoon? In Steed’s hands a cartoon veers off the…

Flipping through Happy Hour, Edward Steed’s sophomore collection of fizzy, brain-tingling cartoons, I wondered: What even is a cartoon? In Steed’s hands a cartoon veers off the charts, more like a sick riddle wrapped in Dadaism and spiced with melancholy.

The British cartoonist first appeared in The New Yorker in 2013 after reading the magazine on a plane to the United States and thinking, “I can do this.” Former cartoon editor Bob Mankoff describes Steed as a “once-in-a-generation talent”. Steed is indeed fresh, freakish even, among the current gang of brilliant contemporary cartoonists that includes Liana Finck, Zach Kanin and Roland High. Yet he represents a throwback of sorts to the twisted drawings of William Steig, Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson.

Steed’s line looks like it was scratched with a protractor needle into tin. His people have bald heads on neckless bodies, his begrudging, repugnant faces exhibit agony, anger and perversion. At first blush Happy Hour feels like a schoolboy’s filthy textbook scribbles, with everything – sex worker tennis players, evil archbishop penguins, a dominatrix whipping little whack-a-mole men – looking as if it were done in one take. On close inspection, Steed’s perfect use of mise en scène has been well thought through, delivering a just-right rush of bleak nonsense. A considerate librarian shoots himself with a silencer.

Steed hasn’t lost his edge. If anything, compared with his first collection, Forces of Nature, Happy Hour is more unhinged, bawdier. There’s a marked increase in large, lumpy, amorphous man-mutants. (A doctor, assessing a happy, potato-like man with one leg, says, “Frankly, I don’t think he’s even trying to get better.”) Even Steed’s “straight” cartoons (a thief evades police cows by jumping over a cattle grid) seem grittier, as if he’s sandpapering our brains.

Like the line of dinky creatures marching out of a crack in an apartment wall – to which a repairman says, “There’s a tear in the very fabric of…

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