Cartoons on Strike

“Calling #543. #543. Please report to the imaging studio in Room 31A on the West Wing. Mr. Polar will be there to assist you on your pose.”

A thin man dressed in formal attire – a tie, much too short for his long torso, a blazer, much too wide for his wiry frame, and some pants that fit perfectly – stood from his chair in the waiting room, sighed, and shuffled instinctively toward the elevator lobby. He paused, then pressed ‘UP’. After a matter of moments, the man heard a ting sound – the signal of a rising receptacle – and paused, before stepping between the opened doors. The thin man stood in the right corner, staring blankly ahead. He didn’t look at the other cartoons. There were maybe three or four other cartoons in the elevator. Each was on [its] way to or from a panel shooting. There may have been a walrus, or a short, stocky man with crooked teeth, or a woman in a dress with reverberating eyebrows. This may have been their first day, or this may have been their last, or possibly somewhere in between; the thin man hadn’t a clue. He had absolutely no appetite for small talk in the morning.

The thin man’s name was Eugene Bic. Eugene was a cartoon, and just like every other cartoon, he was an employee at Inkblot Studios, Inc. in New York City, NY. Inkblot was the earliest, largest, and only outlet of cartoon images to the New Yorker. Every one of the magazine’s images was photographed at Inkblot Studios, and every third day or so, Eugene was called by the publisher to pose for a panel. Most of the time, the panels were never used by the New Yorker, discarded from its glossy glory like crumpled paper in a recycling bin.

Every cartoon posed at Inkblot studios. Well, that is, except for the others, the cartoons employed by Flixar Studios in Los Angeles, California. Eugene didn’t care much for those cartoons. They annoyed him to no end (Eugene once met a Flixar cartoon on the way to a lecture about the dangers of toxic chemical “white out”. The cartoon’s name was Patrice the Parrot. Patrice the Parrot had these bright red feathers and yellow beak, and every time Eugene asked him a question, Patrice the Parrot would repeat it with his high-pitched cacaw. Eugene told himself he shouldn’t have bothered with the parrot). Mostly, Eugene didn’t despise the Flixar cartoons. He was jealous of them. He was jealous of their triviality, their freedom, and their color. Eugene was just a black and white cartoon. He was white, and he wore black pants, a black suit jacket, black shoes, black belt, black tie, and a white shirt. In the winter, he might even put on a black sweater if it was cold enough. Eugene was a thin, pen-scrawled man in his mid-30s – his outer lines were just beginning to fade – but he longed for a drip of color. Chartreuse? Lavender? Burgundy? Even the slightest splash on his trousers would be nice.

Eugene came from a long lineage of cartoons – he was a Bic, after all. The Bic family paved the way for clever cartoons in the Depression era, poignant portraits in the post-war era, and clever cartoons once again in the Recession era. Eugene hadn’t posed in any of the aforementioned ages; instead, he posed, oftentimes, as a man of a bygone period, where doom, gloom, and such was a given. Otherwise, he was used as an addendum to a Hippopotamus or some other silly animal. Yep, Eugene had the pleasure of existing as quite the crestfallen cartoon.

The panels with Eugene’s poses would often accompany some artfully crafted jabber about the brutal irony of existence. Or perhaps some funny-sounding nonsense tackling the hilarity of intermarital clichés. Or, just plain-old war-era humor. The writing would always be in italics, too; humor can never be too straightforward. Of course, Eugene himself didn’t take part in the writing. He only posed, just like all the other cartoons. The writers – the impeccable beasts from above – they did all the writing.

Abruptly, the elevator doors swung open, and Eugene exited the receptacle. He walked willfully down a familiar hallway, turned, and opened the door to Room 31A. Another day at work had begun.

Mr. Polar was already sitting in the director’s chair when Eugene walked in. He took a break from licking his frozen fish pop – a breakfast tradition for Mr. Polar – to peer over his optical lenses at Eugene. Polar bears weren’t supposed to have vision problems.

“Mr. E. Bic. You’re late! Posing was supposed to start at nine, right on the dot! And my oh my, are your black shoes looking more faded by the day!”

Mr. Polar stared at Eugene’s shoes, then back down at his clipboard. Before awaiting a response from Eugene (Eugene did not have a response), Mr. Polar gave orders to the cartoons already in the panel. “Cartoons ought not come tardy for posing!” This was the motto of Inkblot Studios. It was in cursive right below the INKBLOT STUDIOS sign in front of the building to remind any cartoons posing for the day. Mr. Polar would always repeat the slogan to any willfully languid, late-arriving cartoons in his set.

Mr. Polar fashioned very specific signals for his panels. If he shook his head, it meant he didn’t approve of the setting. He would demand a new one: two chairs at an outdoor café, a TV and sofa in a living room, a few towels and umbrella at the beach. Two of the faded cartoons – too old to continue posing – would carry in a new backdrop and discard the old one. If Mr. Polar pointed at a particular cartoon, it meant that cartoon needed to fix its pose in the scene. If Mr. Polar closed his eyes and buried his face in his right hand, it meant that all the cartoons in the panel were dismissed for the day.

Eugene was instructed to join a set with a young woman cartoon and a cat cartoon. The young woman was not much older than 23, and the cat was also around 23, in cat years, of course. The woman had a frightful expression on her face, and the cat reserved a rather sinister smile, its tail curled around the woman’s left wrist. Eugene was told to stare blankly at the woman with his arms up as if to say “What did I tell you, honey? My cat hates you too.”

After much finger pointing on the part of Mr. Polar, the panel was finished, and it was sent to the writers to wrought out their witty writ. Eugene was done with his panel, and done for the day. Another day in Inkblot Studios was complete.

Eugene left Room 31A, and headed for the elevator once again. The woman and cat from Mr. Polar’s panel passed in front of his view, and disappeared into a room that looked much like a closet. Eugene, all of a sudden, had an inkling of suspicion.

It was not common for a cartoon to work two panels in the same day. Unheard of, as a matter of fact. Eugene, himself, knew this. Eugene was keen to the intricacies of Inkblot Studios’ selection process – he was a Bic, after all. The Studios, for fear of ethical smudging (a term that denotes unfair overworking of cartoons) positively prohibited double-posing of any kind. Eugene had, for once, reason to deviate from the norm.

Eugene stared at his faded shoes and paused, for the final time that day, before opening the room that looked much like a closet. It was merely a supply room, with rolled up backdrops, rescue paper clips, and safety tape. There was no sign of a cat. There was no sign of a woman. Where, Eugene wondered, did they both go?

Eugene flittered around the closet, knocking over supplies and making a general ruckus, before exposing a disposed backdrop from a previous Mr. Polar panel. Eugene recognized it as such, as he had posed in it just a few months ago. What was it doing in the supply closet, Eugene wondered? The panel depicted a Venetian Gondola sailing on a flooded road in New York, and Eugene remembered having to stand on the bow of the boat with a determined look on his face. There was much head shaking and finger pointing that day from Mr. Polar, and the panel ended up being discarded, or so Eugene thought.

Eugene instinctively crept toward the panel. The backdrop was covering something. Eugene just knew. He carefully peeled the panel from the wall – not a speck of dust fell off – and exposed a lounge, a viscid, tacky, secretive space with cartoony artwork on every wall: a frog with a crown and giant lips, a man with a silver poon for a hand, a female lamp shade, a child plugged in to a wall. There were red couches against the walls, too. The woman and the cat were on one couch, and Mr. Polar was on another, as was Tinnigold Tinkersley, the Chief Operating Officer of Inkblot Studios, and Reginald S. Snowman, the President of Inkblot Studios, and Fiona F. Fox, the Cartoon Publisher of the New Yorker. There was also a Rhino, and a pair of dancing donuts, and three men with matching top hats and mustaches. Eugene stared, quite in shock, at all the cartoons.

What transpired next, in a matter of moments, Eugene would never forget. It was not that his eyes had tricked him. Quite the contrary, he might say. Eugene had rather large eyes for a cartoon, and they were still quite able, even after his many years of posing. No, Eugene was quite certain of the scene he saw, for it shook him deeply, right to the depths of his ink stains. Never again did he desire even a dollop of color.

The cartoons on the couches, from the cat, to the lady, to Mr. Polar, the dancing donuts, and Fiona F. Fox, were exhibiting rather unfortunate behavior. They were giving themselves, as Eugene had heard whispers of, but never seen, the “white out” treatment. A sort of heroin dosage for cartoons. They first bathed themselves in color – wildly robust red or ghastly green – and pranced around devilishly in their new skin, before dousing themselves with “white out” to remove their color. All cartoons employed by Inkblot Studios were black and white, like Eugene Bic; some were driven utterly mad to escape from their monochromatic misery. No wonder, Eugene thought, the ones who controlled Inkblot Studios were the cartoons most corrupt. The cartoons of Inkblot Studios were, as Eugene put it, fighting the medium they were drawn into.