When time passes and the culture shifts, life moves on to the new normal: the cartoons of one era read nostalgically in another. “Are you DRUNK, Penny?” The genius is in how it takes its world for granted, which is normalising and unsettling at once. One says: “Sometimes one has to sacrifice material success to preserve one’s integrity.” The other one is frowning. In another Fleming joke, two middle-aged female friends are sitting side by side, drinking wine this time. Characters are caught in the act of their representativeness, their being typical – and they are relishing and exaggerating it, performing themselves to the nth degree, the men and the women too. What’s so funny about that? What is it that good cartoons do to bring that delicious, laughing, liberating squirm of recognition? One of their features seems to be that they are aimed not at the margins of a given culture but at the middle ground, the consensus, the “way things are”. The women continue to ignore him, chatting. “Thank you, no really, it’s nothing, really.” Smiling modestly to himself.
In the final frame, back in reality, he walks out of the kitchen with the bin bag. In the third frame he is suddenly centre stage in a theatre along with his bag of rubbish, in front of a crazily applauding audience – he stretches out his arms to his fans. He is still tying the bag, ostentatiously, in the second frame. They glance at him, but go back to their conversation. “I’m just taking the rubbish out,” he says in the first frame. T here is a lovely cartoon by Jacky Fleming, not in this book, where in four consecutive frames a man ties up rubbish in a black bin liner and takes it outside, while two women sit talking over mugs of coffee at a table behind.
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