Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World by Seymour Chwast and Steven Brower

I grabbed this from my library app for one simple reason: it was a new book (copyright 2025) by Seymour Chwast, who I am happy to note Wikipedia says is a famous American graphic designer and illustrator. (They swing immediately into the past tense when required.) Chwast is not just a designer: he's one of the titans of mid-20th century design, influential in massive ways.

Implied by what I just said is that Chwast is not young: he was born in 1931. Apparently he's still doing design work through his Push Pin Studios, and he turned to adapting classic literature into comics earlier this century, with Dante's Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court over roughly a decade, over a decade ago. I hadn't seen anything new in that vein for a while, and, given that Chwast is now in his mid-nineties, wasn't holding out lots of hope.

Charlie is not like those prior books, in a bunch of ways. Chwast only drew it; Steven Brower (another renowned ad man, a generation or two younger than Chwast) here provides the words. And, in keeping with the old maxim that the longer the title, the shorter the book, Charlie comes with the double-barreled subtitle Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World and a slim 32-page package.

Brower's text is in the first person, from the point of view of Chaplin, and tells a short, very focused version of his life story. After a page of Chaplin's childhood (mostly miserable and poverty-stricken), it dives directly into filmography, and stays in that mode to the end. Charlie covers Chaplin's major movies, on a mostly-superficial plot and audience-reaction level, but doesn't get into Chaplin's personal life at all. It doesn't mention any of his wives or children, and leaves a reader with the impression that 1952's Limelight was his last movie. (It wasn't; he directed two more after that and lived for another quarter-century.)

Chwast provides the pictures here, with various spot illos on every page. Given that he's credited first, it's possible that the illustrations existed - maybe even culled from a longer stretch of Chwast's long career? - and Brower wrote around them. They're mostly pen-and-ink, with a few full-page colored-pencils pieces, and mostly in Chwast's Push Pin style. It's not comics format; the style is closer to a picture-book, especially given the length.

So this is a small thing, and somewhat of an odd thing - likely why it was published by Fantagraphics Underground, their oddball short-book imprint, rather than by some larger entity in a larger way. But it does have some new (?) Chwast drawings of Chaplin, many of them charming and evocative, and it does provide a not-horrible potted look at Chaplin's major work.