John Cuneo's Good Intentions

John Cuneo is an illustrator: he's done a bunch of New Yorker covers, worked for Esquire, and so on. But, like any artist, there's work that he wants to do that doesn't fit into what clients want him to draw.

So he's had a series of books collecting his other work, over the past twenty years: nEuROTIC, Not Waving But Drawing, Coping Skills. And, just last year, most recently, John Cuneo's Good Intentions.

His style is familiar, and the older book titles vaguely so, but I can't prove I ever read any of them, or point to a specific time I saw a Cuneo illustration. (That's the curse of illustrators: they're hired to provide distinctive and visually interesting work entirely to support something else. Cuneo has done a bunch of celebrity caricatures, as seen on his site, which I expect originally accompanied various profiles.)

So this was probably the first time I saw a bunch of Cuneo work - and definitely so a bunch of work I knew was by Cuneo. Good Intentions collects eighty or so color drawings, in three themed chapters: In the Wild, In the Studio, and In the Home. More than half of the drawings are captioned, but they're not quite cartoons - the captions are wry, descriptive, allusive, narrative.

And, of course, most of the drawings are about sex, one way or another. (That's what "personal work" means for artists, isn't it?)

They're not sexy, though: Cuneo draws mostly lumpy, middle-aged people, with a few more pounds and wrinkles than they'd like, and his loose line and watercolors can give their skin a mottled look, too. His women tend to be slightly more attractive than his men: their faces are grotesque only occasionally, while men are caricatures around half the time. But there's a lot of flesh in this book: tits and ass and dick, often engaged in activities with other people. Again, it's not particularly attractive tits and ass and dick, so don't go here if that's what you're looking for. (You're on the internet: attractive tits and ass and dick are always only a click away, photographic, hand-drawn, or AI-generated.)

So this is an odd book. It's not quite funny - it's not trying to tell jokes. It's amusing, and quirky, and definitely making commentary about modern life and types of people and things like that. It's not unlike a book of cartoons; it's just not aiming for a laugh reaction. And it is quite polymorphously perverse, which could be a bonus or a detriment, depending on the reader.