Out To Sea

So I was in Barnes and Noble recently, and the manager there, who's an old acquaintance of mine, clued me into the fact that they were clearing out a number of books. (I tend not to read the big sale signs when I'm in a store, or I would have figured it out for myself.) One of the books on discount was Send Help!, "A collection of marooned cartoons," as it says on the cover.

As advertised, the book is mainly a series of cartoons about being stranded in the stereotypical "desert island." You likely know the sort, a small, roughly conical bit of land sticking up out of the ocean. It's completely covered in sand, with a single palm or coconut tree at its center.

But the book also touches on the history of the trope, and I was surprised to find that there were "stranded on a desert island" cartoons from the 1930s and 40s that could just as easily been published yesterday. It's one thing to be told that the central themes of island cartoons, like death, relationships or business as usual are timeless. It's quite another to see it for oneself. It's a reminder that some problems, even those that seem quite simple, are often insoluble in practice, and that the way people think of them hasn't really changed in the past nearly 100 years.

I hadn't really paid much attention to humor cartooning, outside of the occasional New Yorker caption contest. I think I should change that, because there's a richer history there than I realized.