Kliban is back! Universal Uclick has announced they’re running Bernard “Hap” Kliban classic cartoons on GoComics. Starting this week they’ll run Kliban cartoons on Monday, Wednesday, Friday with a second feature called Kliban’s Cats to run on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Kliban is famous for his Playboy cartoons and his Cat cartoons. He died in 1990 at the age of 55.
Accomplished in three separate areas, Kliban may be most widely known for his cat drawings. He also maintained a major Playboy presence, cartooning for that magazine for over 30 years. But perhaps his most impactful work was as a single-panel and multi-panel cartoonist, manifesting a unique out-there sensibility in a time when there was precious little ground between newspaper comics and the underground. Credited with pioneering the deadpan third-person caption (“Ted, a handsome person, had little trouble with the pencils.”), a form wildly and widely popularized by Gary Larson, Kliban influenced and inspired many well-known cartoonists of today. His constructions – whether single-panel drawings (“Mental Floss”), multi-panel sequences (“Four Useless Motions”) or eight-panel image-poems (“Sheer Pottery”) – push fearlessly forward into unexplored territory.
Often imitated, but rarely bettered.
Kliban was one of the giants who really stood out and influenced the industry and raised the bar for a lot of “wannabes” . . a really original voice . . his style and humor was kinda like maybe another, but he definitely, had his OWN voice without a doubt.
I still drool over his work.
He was Farside before there ever was a Farside…a great who is relatively unknown to the wider community…I look forward to seeing more of his stuff that I missed…beautiful true cartooning at it’s best…great ideas and drawing…
SWEET! These are classics worth seeing in the funnies.