All's Fair in Love and War edited by Bob Eckstein

I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible. So I'm going to pretend it is. A beautiful story is always more fun than a lumpy truth.

Bob Eckstein had a great book idea: The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons. Recursive, funny, salable. He got the Princeton Architectural Press to publish that book - yes, I know, but every great story needs at least one plot point that doesn't make any sense - and it was successful enough that the mighty PAP wanted more of the same from Eckstein.

So Eckstein has done at least two more "Ultimate Cartoon Books," with who knows how many more potentially to come. The one I just read is All's Fair in Love and War, with the deeply traditional "war of the sexes" theme for its cartoons.

All's Fair collects 133 single-panel cartoons by a bunch of contemporary artists, each on a single page, each one about love and relationships and sex and heartbreak and lover's leaps and tunnels of love and all of those cartoony things.

Forty-two cartoonists are included, from Marisa Acocella to Jack Ziegler, notably including three cartoons by Eckstein himself. (If you can't include your own work when you edit a book, when can you include it?) The most prolific folks here are William Haefeli (10), Michael Shaw (8), Bruce Eric Kaplan (7), Alex Gregory (6), Sam Gross (5 and the cover), and several people tied at 5: Edward Koren, Robert Leighton, Michael Maslin, John O'Brien, Danny Shanahan.

I think everyone but Ziegler was alive when the book was published, though we lost both Koren and Gross this spring, and I may be forgetting someone else. But the point was clearly to include current cartoonists, since Ziegler was working up to his death in 2017 - this is work from the last maybe-twenty years (possibly stretching a bit earlier), but not a historical collection.

So we have more same-sex couples than a similar book of a generation ago would have - meaning some rather than none - some of them with jokes specifically about "gay marriage" but several just with same-sex couples, which is what you would expect in humor. (The set-ups look like the world you live in: couples are couples.) But, otherwise, this is mostly conventional material with some modern spins - couples in bed, on couches, or walking together; third persons hiding in closets; couples talking together; and so on.

They're mostly New Yorker cartoons, since that's where cartoons like this get published these days. We used to have a big ecosystem for cartoons on random subjects, trade magazines and consumer outlets, but that's been gone for twenty or thirty years at least. So they tend to be a bit arch, more than a little urban, and with an emphasis on wit and wordplay.

I like that kind of cartoon, and I like the work here: it's a bunch of good stuff by good creators, and it's nice to see that the ecosystem for single-panel cartoons, as endangered as it is, has not completely been eliminated yet.