Topliss analyzes Arno and Addams

Any book featuring Charles Addams and Peter Arno will draw my attention. These two are, for my money, the greatest cartoonists this country has ever seen.

So I was excited to see in today's New York Sun a review (entitled "Sex & the Married Cartoonist") of The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, a new book by Aussie professor Iain Topliss.

Alas however, I suspect I will not buy the book, largely due to the article's grumbling about the dearth of cartoons that actually appear in the book:

The sparseness of the images is particularly unfortunate, since the drawings themselves make the strongest case for what, cautious academic language aside, is really Mr. Topliss's point: how much social criticism can be channeled into comic art.

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And on a related note:

Memo to New York Sun: The name of the book being reviewed does not appear anywhere in the online version of the review.