Faunatoons

“Mark Addison Kershaw, however, in response to his editor’s constant badgering for ‘bits of text to insert before your cartoons begin,’ said . . . nothing, as per usual; content, as he was, to let his bear, his penguins, his cat, bird, and salamander speak for themselves.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Addison

By Mark Addison Kershaw

“Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. ‘There’s a unicorn in the garden,’ he said. ‘Eating roses.’ She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. ‘The unicorn is a mythical beast,’ she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips.”—James Thurber, “The Unicorn in the Garden”

ATLANTA Georgia—(Weekly Hubris)—February 2020—Editor’s Utterly Unnecessary Introductory Note: In 1960, James Thurber said, “My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.” One month earlier, in that same year, the cartoonist said, “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” Mark Addison Kershaw, however, in response to his editor’s constant badgering for “bits of text to insert before your cartoons begin,” said . . . nothing, as per usual; content, as he was, to let his bear, his penguins, his cat, bird, and salamander speak for themselves.