Nicolas Bentley - How to Scrape Skies
Here's a book called How to Scrape Skies (subtitled The United States Explored, Rediscovered and Explained) written by George Mikes, with illustrations by Nicolas Bentley. The book was first published in 1948; this Penguin Books edition is from 1966. For some reason there's a warning inside the book that says "Not for sale in the U.S.A." I gather Mikes was, in general, something of a piss-taker regardless of his subject. Apparently he wrote several volumes highlighting the cultural differences between various countries. He didn't seem to be a vicious satirist - his work in How to Scrape Skies is pretty obvious and middlebrow - but at the same time there are some uneasily honest observations of race issues going on here. Of course, I didn't actually read the whole book, because I found it unreadable in the same way that every daily newspaper is unreadable. But it's clear from these samples that the pictures are possibly even more inflammatory than the text, especially out of context. Anyway, it's a 60-year-old book; I'm not gonna sweat it. Bentley's drawings are just great.
These two illustrations are the author's attempt at mocking the American comic strips, which he claims are "neither comic nor strips." He may have been having a go at the pretentious "educational value" of strips (a claim, he says, American newspapermen made for the medium) but he ends up looking foolish himself, missing entirely the reality of the daily comics (circa 1948). This sample strip of his creation only reveals his own pretensions; what mainstream newspaper cartoonist of the time would even think of using Pythagoras as a character? Even the most literate writers like Walt Kelly tended to mouth their ideas (however big or small) through the humbler denizens of their black & white worlds. Mikes here instead bleeds disdain for the two "commoners" and their "low" concerns and everyday vernacular. At least Kelly would've taken a knock at the authority figure or fake intellectual.
