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When people remember Frank Tashlin today, they probably think of him as a director/screenwriter: of the Jayne Mansfield vehicles
The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), or the movies
Cinderfella (1960) or
The Disorderly Orderly (1964), both starring Jerry Lewis. If one is an animation buff, he or she might also recall his work on Porky Pig and/or Daffy Duck Warner Bros. cartoons. However, Tashlin was a prolific mid-century print-and-film cartoonist.[1] Not only did he draw a daily comic strip (
Van Boring) and one-panel gags for magazines, he was influential in the field of animation.[2] His
The Fox and the Grapes short inspired Chuck Jones' Road Runner and Coyote series, and, as Columbia/Screen Gem's production supervisor, Tashlin plucked animators from the Disney picket line and let them loose to experiment: many of these men, such as John Hubley, would go on to carry the torch at UPA (whose limited animation techniques would, in turn, change the course of American cartoons).[3]
Tashlin also wrote and drew three children's books that could easily function as graphic novels for adults today:
The Bear That Wasn't (1946)
The Possum that Didn't (1950) and
The World That Isn't (1951). Two of these,
The Bear That Wasn't and
The World That Isn't, were hiding inside library binding at my local branch.[4]
The World That Isn't is a satiric, rise,-fall,-and-rise-again-of-man story, of the type that cartoonists still do today. Its pen-and-ink lines are controlled, flattened and simplified, with occasional tight curlicues.
Even Tashlin's crosshatch-strokes are short and even (though not to the point that they lose the touch of a human hand); the flume from a bomb explosion has the texture of cheesecloth. Though symmetrical, his humans are lumpy men of the gray-flannel-suit variety and bleakly grotesque, grasping women. (Women do come off as worse than men in this book, to the point where the imbalance can be off-putting.)[5]
He employs numerous sight gags, but they are not anarchic: they are of a piece with the action being depicted. People are often viewed from overhead, as if from a crane shot, overwhelmed and zigzagging about their gridded, urban environment. (One can't help but imagine Tashlin supervising and organizing an animation-cel assembly line, Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse B" tune playing in the background.)[6] This perspective, and the third-person narration, gives
The World That Isn't a removed mean-spiritedness.[7] What is beautiful in
The World That Isn't is its impeccable page layout and design: he uses spotted blacks sparingly, and with maximum impact. He also masterfully combines words and pictures, and isn't afraid to let the latter carry the story, though in Tashlin's hands, a blank two-page spread with a two-word sentence and an ellipsis is bona-fide comics.
The Bear That Wasn't is an earlier work; it's gentler. It's a man (or, as the case may be, bear) vs. society story about a bear who is systematically told he is not one, not only by people but by other bears, as well, until he believes it himself, going to work in the factory that was built over his cave until his instinct kicks back in and he reverts to his true nature (and Nature). (Tashlin's natural backgrounds, too, are just as balanced: they're just more spread out, less suffocating; only the Bear's cave, where he can be himself, is comfortably irregular.)
Tashlin's use of typography is integral to the book: he mixes fonts, using a larger sans-serif for emphasis or onomatopeia, such as when disbelieving "ha"s burst out of the mouth of the factory foreman, whose straight-lined body mimics the "ha"s capital "A" shape. (Given the children's book format, there are no word balloons.) Unlike
The World That Isn't,
The Bear That Wasn't has a protagonist, and a sympathetic one at that, the frowzy, pot-belied, fly-away-furred Bear. In contrast, the humans are all geometric patterns that interlock perfectly into the clockwork of factories and boardrooms (even the identical secretaries' derrieres are divided neatly by the backs of their chairs).
This carries over into body language: during their confrontation, while the Bear is slump-shouldered and curled inward, the foreman leans into him aggressively at a 45-degree angle.
The Bear That Wasn't was adapted into an animated short by Chuck Jones. In his interview with Mike Barrier, Tashlin revealed that the hated the adaptation. (According to the Big Cartoon Database,
http://www.bcdb.com/bcdb/detailed.cgi?film=2979 it was the last short cartoon that MGM made for theaters.)
There's something
sour about Tashlin's sensibility, which would become even more pronounced in his later work; in these two books, however, he's merely tart. Taken together, they shed new light on a less-explored facet of a prominent 20th century cartoonist. Though it seems as though Tashlin's trilogy (
The Possum That Didn't is the story of a possum whose smile is mistaken for a frown, so he's dragged to the city in the belief that that will make him happy) would be ripe for a one-volume collection, only the quite popular
The Bear That Wasn't — which, for some people, was a beloved childhood classic — has been reprinted.[8] It's available in an out-of-print-but-still-inexpensive Dover Thrift edition, and apparently it's going to be released in a new edition in March 2010 from NYR Children's Collection.
Notes:
[1] In Leonard Maltin's book
Of Mice and Magic, Tashlin's coworker, Al Eugster, remarked that Tashlin "would come in and do his animation in the morning and take the rest of the day off. He was a very fast animator. He had a daily one-panel cartoon, ‘Van Boring,' and he'd work on that in the afternoon."
[2] He left off the comic strip when his boss at his day job, Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros, wanted a cut.
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Interviews/Tashlin/tashlin_interview.htm[3] Maltin, Leonard (with research assistance by Jerry Beck).
Of Mice and Magic: McGraw-Hill, New York, 1980.
[4] Am I the only one who loves library binding? In my opinion, library binding can do much more for a book than uninspired or ugly cover design. Library binding is mysterious, elegant, uniform, pleasing.
[5] Tashlin's body of work has often been criticized as misogynistic.
[6] Fun fact: that Looney Tunes assembly-line music, i.e., Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse B," was first used in Tashlin's "Porky's Pig Feat."
[7] In my head, the story was narrated by John McLeish, who narrated Goofy shorts such as "Motor Mania."
[8] And by some people I mean the people who wrote that in their Amazon reviews.
http://www.amazon.com/Bear-That-Wasnt-Frank-Tashlin/dp/1590173449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258274352&sr=8-1Image credits:
The Bear That Wasn't [©1946 Frank Tashlin]
The World That Isn't [©1951 Frank Tashlin]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
