Uncanny Cartoons
HEY
People sometimes say my stories are like cartoons. Like in the blurb Nick Mamatas wrote for my first novel, he describes it as "if China Miéville wrote Saturday-morning cartoons." Now I love China Miéville and I love Saturday-morning cartoons, so when I first received that blurb I was like hell yeah, this rules.
But not everyone loves cartoons.
Sometimes when people say a piece of fiction is cartoony, I think they mean the work is immature or childish or unserious. Which bums me out. Because cartoons aren’t necessarily immature or childish or unserious. I mean of course, they sometimes can be. But so what? I’m not sure how interested I am in art that tries very hard to be serious. The world is serious enough.
Just because a work of art is not particularly serious does not mean it’s not saying something important.
THE FORAGED STRANGE
A lot of my favorite stories are stories I could see being described as cartoony. Maybe it’s just a shorthand for stories that are succinct and absurd and exciting and a little over the top. They make me feel how I felt when I first started getting excited about writing and I was reading everything I could get my hands on by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme. And maybe that feeling is the same feeling I felt when watching cartoons on TV and playing with He-Man and Go-Bots and Inhumanoids figures.
Here are a few “cartoony” stories I love:
“Future Snacks” by Lincoln Michel
“Ponies” by Kij Johnson
“Blood!” by Oliver Zarandi
“Show For Myself” by Claire Hopple
“No Matter Which Way We Turned” by Brian Evenson
Please feel free to recommend further cartoony reads in the comments. Or don’t!
RICK’S SCHTICK
I expect people will say my next novel, SKULL SLIME TENTACLE WITCH WAR (coming in 2024 from Anxiety Press), is cartoony. That’s okay with me! Cartoon influences like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and The Far Side had just as much of an influence on my writing as literary influences like Joy Williams and Russell Edson. Also I’m cranking up the cartoon-ity by including illustrations. The first way I started telling stories was through drawing, mainly in the margins of my school notebooks. My style hasn’t changed much since then but whatever, if that means you can tell it was drawn by human hand rather than generated by an A.I. art machine, so much the better.
Ok if you’ve got so much time on your hands you’re still reading this why don’t you help me out, forward this thing to someone, or subscribe, or something! Buy one of my books that’s already out there, you can find them linked here. Or treat yourself some other way, I don’t know, you know what you need better than I do – go for it, you deserve it. You really do! Yeah.
OK BYE!
xoxo
Rick