The Conciseness of the One Panel Cartoon

“A Wealth of Pigeons” by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin will soon be released.

[Steve] Martin, who collaborate[s] with New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss, calls cartooning comedy’s last frontier. “It was a completely unique experience,’ he said. “It’s the precision of one thing. This is a one-second link between the picture and the words, or something with no words, you know?”

“It’s very concise,” said Bliss.

CBS Sunday Morning interviews the cartooning team of Steve Martin and Harry Bliss.

“The one complaint,” [interviewer] Rocca said, ” is that it’s called ‘A Wealth of Pigeons,’ but there are no pigeons in it?”

Martin explained: “We had a cartoon we were going to draw called ‘A Wealth of Pigeons,’ and the premise was you’d have, you know, a person in the park feeding the pigeons, and then there would be these very wealthy pigeons at the feet. And that was the joke. And suddenly we just thought, ‘What an interesting title.’”

The other thing not found in the book? Politics.

WSGW Michigan supplies a transcript of the Sunday Morning show.

   
images © Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

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