A Wealth of Pigeons by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

A couple of days ago I read Number One Is Walking, ostensibly Steve Martin's memoir of his movie-making days illustrated by Harry Bliss. I tend to think Bliss had a lot more to do with page layout and panel flow than just "illustrating" that book, but it also is different than it's billed: the back half of it is a book of single-panel cartoons, presented only on right-hand pages, either to give the reader more joy or to bulk out the book so that reader doesn't see how short the memoir portion actually is.

Since I'd already read the second Bliss/Martin collection of cartoons, sort of, by accident, I decided I might as well read the first one. The library got it to me almost immediately, and so now I've read A Wealth of Pigeons, which first appeared in 2020.

Martin has been writing captions for Bliss for a few years now - their combined byline has turned up on work in The New Yorker and in Bliss's syndicated panel, Bliss. Wealth does have an introduction by Martin that describes how they started working together - basically, Martin wanted to try doing comics captions, and Françoise Mouly introduced the two of them - but the book never says if or where any of these cartoons appeared before.

So this could be a collection of their published work, from Bliss or The New Yorker or both. It could be entirely cartoons that didn't go into those two outlets. It could be some combination of those things - they don't tell us.

It is, like Number One, a book that only uses half of its pages. Cartoons appear on right-hand pages, with the left side resolutely blank, except for a very few two-pagers. (I found one while flipping through now; I may have missed one or two others.)

There are two kinds of cartoons here. Wait, let me back up. There are two ways that you can divide the cartoons here into two kinds. First, there are single panel cartoons with a caption, in the traditional style. Then, there are multi-panel comics pages, of a different tradition. The single-panels dominate, but there are maybe a dozen multi-panel stories, and, coincidentally, that leads into the other bifurcation.

The other way to divide the cartoons here in half is that most of them are gag cartoons with generic people - men on desert islands, dogs, cats, people in offices, ancient Greeks, pirates, realtors, farm animals, parents and children, significant others in love or conflict, pirates, and so on. A few - and, I think, all of those multi-panel extravaganzas but also a few single-panel gags - are Harry-and-Steve cartoons, about our creators.

The Harry-and-Steve material is also funny, but it's meant to be a humorous look at their process. It's not clear if these are also captioned and/or written by Martin, but Martin often comes across as a self-centered arrogant Hollywood type here, so I think he had at least serious input.

But the essential question is: is it funny?

I think so, but then I wouldn't have gotten this book if I didn't think their gag cartoons in Number One were funny. So I was pre-sold, I suppose.

If you're looking for a book that's mostly a collection of random gag cartoons but also has some quirky character stuff about the creators, one of whom is world-famous, and you would prefer that half of the pages are left blank as an artistic choice, you are massively in luck. If you can tolerate or are mildly interested in those things, the same on a lesser scale.