Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Mutt's RondaVooo


Yeah, here's where I want to drink: Mutt's RondaVooo, a cozy saloon in the rear corner of the imagination of cartoonist Norman Pettingill. Click the image to enlarge, Sarge.

Pettingill, a self-taught artist who slaved over his craft mostly in obscurity, has been recently revived by Fantagraphics with a new plywood-bound book of his works.

I had never heard of the man until Dockery hipped me to him about 15 minutes ago, but I'm already obsessed. There's something Wolvertonian about his greasy alcoholic style, but also very Joe Coleman and yes, very J.T. Dockery. According to the Fantagraphics website:

Norman Pettingill was an avid trapper and fisherman from Northern Wisconsin, and a self-taught artist. In 1947, at the age of 51, he created hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings and marketed many of them as postcards, printing and distributing them himself. His cartoon drawings were relatively huge and his postcards, therefore, had to be uniquely over-sized at 7” x 10”.

By merging his fascination with nature and backwoods culture with his wild sense of humor, he depicted an out-of-control hillbilly wonderland of talking grizzlies, dancing morons, nightclubs, giant mosquitoes, tumble-down shacks, pipe smoking grannies, flying skunk fur, google-eyed drunks, hilarious hunting mishaps and moonshine soaked fishermen!


- - JSH

2 comments:

J.T. Dockery said...

To be fair, I never heard of him until about 15 minutes before I hipped Holland, when L.A. artist (author of graphic novel "The Blot"), Tom Neely hipped me.

Unknown said...

Some elements of Mutt's are fondly reminiscent of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon in the wonderful worlds of Spider Robinson--where Tuesday is Punday Night, the Lady Slings the Booze, and Time Travelers [are] Strictly Cash.
http://callahans.wikia.com/wiki/Time_Travelers_Strictly_Cash

Thanks for hipping the rest of us TG's to Norman Pettingill!

"Shared pain is lessened.
Shared joy is increased.
Thus we refute entropy."
--Spider Robinson