Scottish cartoonist Will McPhail draws very distinctive eyes - often a little larger, a little more prominent, a little more bulbous than you expect. The rest of his work can be expressive as well, as his urban-dwellers and random anthropomorphized animals lurch through their lives sometimes with a quiet dignity but often with limbs flailing wildly.
Those eyes are distinctive - large round white bubble with a precise black dot for the iris - framed in all of his different faces. (McPhail is a modern cartoonist; his people come in all sorts of skin tones, as long as those can be expressed in differing dilutions of ink.) Sometimes those eyes add a tone of incipient panic, or just worry - they're the eyes of people who have seen a lot, and know there's messier things to come. They also come in half-open varieties - the reader can see that they are large, but the lids cover half of them, for a hooded, often smirking look.
Great eyes for cartooning, in short.
Love & Vermin is the first collection of McPhail's single-panel cartoons, most of which appeared in The New Yorker. It's a little over two hundred pages, with nearly that many cartoons, divided into categories like My Brave Little Opinions, Vermin, Nonsense, and Love, each section with a short paragraph by McPhail about that work, more or less.
Look: writing about individual cartoons is silly. But let me describe one of my favorites, which has three great sets of eyes. A Piñata is hanging in a bare tree, facing away - we see one wide-open eye on the hanging creature. A small boy is sitting backwards on a chair; he's speaking, and has a matter-of-fact look. Behind him is a girl, about the same age, with a smirk and a baseball bat. The caption? "Listen. I'm a nice guy and I wanna help you. But my friend Suzie here. She's a little crazy."
Great cartoons are funny drawing combined with funny writing, driven by funny, unexpected ideas. McPhail hits all three, consistently, in the works here. Drawing cartoons is a weird, anachronistic, maybe quixotic goal these days, but he's damn good at it, and that should be celebrated. (McPhail is also good at longer-form comics, as last year's In. showed.)
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