Take my favorite in
her current retrospective, cannily entitled “Opening Shots,” at the Rosenfeld
Gallery. “The Proper Way” to take a urinalysis at work, it’s dubbed. Five
workers are relieving themselves against the façade of the corporate
headquarters. You have to look closely to see that the mythical firm has been
given the oligopolish name of OWNSALLCO INC; and you have to look even closer to
see that in the pediment over the main door is a caricature of Mr. Moneybags,
guarding his illth.
I asked her at the opening reception (where the normally
high-strung lady faked a high Victorian faint when one of her friends announced
he was actually going to buy one of her
original drawings) if it mattered if most PDN readers missed those subtleties.
“No. It’s there to be seen,” evidently being content to let the closer readers
get the bigger kicks.
It’s obvious she’s an English major (University of Denver, 1972) because, unlike most
cartoonists where what you see right away is what you get, she stacks layers of
meaning, just like the praised lit in English 101. In “Color Blind Society,” a
poke at the disaffirmative actions of the Reagan Administration, she deploys
five grinning yessie clones—all identically attired in this sartorial
satire—and their “color” lies in their shorts (white), ties (yellow), and suits
(black) and shoes (brown).
“Privacy” displays a gaggle of prurient anti-sodomists, each
with one eye on a bedroom keyhole and the other on their anti-Kamasutra, yclept
the “O.K. Sex Positions” manual. “The Heavier Load” teases the macho who
grouses about doing heavier work than his female mate by showing him toting a
heavy, full “$1 while the lady hoists only a light 63 cent” jobbie.
A delightfully ghoulish one shows a White House servitor presenting a little Khadafy kid’s head on
a dinner platter, to the President punning on the Ronbo’s request for the
Libyan loony’s head. It makes my day to see such foolish policies reviled so cleverly.
But it doesn’t please all the PDN readers. Her activist lawyer-husband John
Landau confided that editor Zack’s phone sometimes rings off the hook when
Signe gets off a really good shot.
When pressed about whether editorial cartoonists “make a
difference,” she withdraws to a posture of calculated diffidence: “We didn’t
put the troops into Nicaragua. We didn’t think up Star Wars.” Maybe so. But
nonetheless, she confesses to Kaethe Kollwitz’s being an intellectual mentor of
hers. And if editorial cartoons don’t smash evil, they damn well keep evil
umpires from calling all strikes balls.
And there’s fire in
“Strange Bedfellows,” in which the tobacco industry, the NRA and the ACLU all
waffle in their own ways about their not being “links” between their products
and patently ugly social situations.
Her marriage to Landau grew out of their joint anti-Viet
protests in 1974. He has opened his own law firm since they returned from San
Jose—specializing in immigration and military cases—conchies, hassled gays,
etc. He is also a fine house father, judging from the way I found him wheeling
two-year-old Claire through the Betsy Ross rocky garden area, to give Signe
room to breathe at her reception.
The cartoonist has memorialized carrying Claire with a
sequence of cartoons you’ll love, married or bachelor!
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, September 24 1986
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