Richard Guindon – RIP
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Cartoonist Dick Guindon has passed away.
Richard Gordon (Dick) Guindon
December 2, 1935 – February 27, 2022
The Detroit Free Press reports:
Richard Gordon Guindon, 86, died the evening of Feb. 27 in Northport, Michigan, after a long illness with his son at his side.
Guindon’s six-decade career began at the university’s Minnesota Daily, where he penned a cartoon that was described as “social commentary a la Jules Feiffer with a bite.” In New York, he was a regular contributor to The Nation, Playboy, Esquire, Down Beat, and one of his favorite gigs, as an underground cartoonist for Paul Krassner’s The Realist. That led to syndication at the Minneapolis Tribune and later brought him to Detroit in the early 1980s.
Dick Guidon drew what may be The Realist’s most famous cover in 1962.
The image instantly became iconic.
More from The Freep:
In an earlier story, former Free Press Executive Editor Kurt Luedtke lauded Guindon’s artistic talents: “The truth about Guindon is that he draws unusually well; a lot of folks miss that, I think, perceiving him as a very funny guy with an offbeat sense of humor who’s a cartoonist. Study those panels for a while and you realize that his oblique take on life is just the beginning of a process that really ends with a masterful pen.”
above and below: Guindon from The Billy Ireland
He understood that his humor had a shelf life, and that many people were baffled by his jokes, which made him laugh. “You get calls from people asking to explain the joke, which I find absolutely flabbergasting, simply because that’s the easy part of the paper — what do they do when they get to the editorials?”
And then he reconsidered, adding,: “Nobody gets all of them. That isn’t really something I take any pride in at all. You’re trying to communicate. What happens is you’re stuck with your own sense of humor. I wonder if it’s a little too subtle.”
The Guindon comic made Allan Holtz’s Obscurity of the Day.
Here’s how Allan introduced Guindon:
I imagine I’m far from the first person to say this, but just in case
I herewith present the Holtz Prime Directive of Newspaper Comics Success:
Thou Shalt Not be a Success by Being Smarter than your Audience
Allan continued:
Well, Guindon is a prime example of brilliant writing that shot so far over Aunt Sally’s head she didn’t even hear the sonic boom when it passed. A tiny cadre of newspaper editors ran the feature, which was self-titled by Richard Guindon. It was a brilliant daily morsel of surrealist mind-candy that on its best days (of which there were plenty) would have had Salvador Dali horking Corn Flakes out his nose at the breakfast table.
Of course Guindon wasn’t obscure to Minnesotans and Michiganders.
Here’s cartoonist Jim Keefe appreciating Dick Guindon:
I grew up on Guindon – he’s one of my favorites.
His cartoons nailed the archetypal Minnesotan in a way that no one else has come close. The caricatures in the Coen brothers movie Fargo are the popular stereotype, but Guindon goes more to the core.
The Carp Chronicles by Richard Guindon ran from January 18, 1988 above)
to December 23, 1988 (below) in The Detroit Free Press. 
above: another page from The Realist
Rest in peace.
Next day add –
A couple of area cartoonists pay tribute to Guindon on the occasion of his death:
Jim Keefe and Paul Berge
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