DMA#53: Drinking Your Own Bath Water: A Morning with Rich Sparks

There’s a cartoon early in Rich Sparks’s new book of a man my age, alone in a bath, lifting a spoon to his lips. No setup, no crowd, no scene. Just the act, and a title underneath:

“Youp.”

Where I’m from, that’s a diagnosis. My uncle Greg taught it to me as a child: “Mate, get a load of this bloke. He drinks his own fucken bath water.” (Australian for arrogant.) First cousin to tall poppy syndrome, that great national project of never letting anyone tout their own success.

I opened the book to that page first, and decided the next hour of my morning was spoken for. Which is roughly how the whole conversation went.

A book with no thread, which is the whole point…

The reason for the visit was Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings, Rich’s new collection, put out by our mutual pal Marty over at The Weekly Humorist. A book of single-panel cartoons is one of the hardest things in the world to assemble, and I say that as someone who has tried. There’s no narrative. No theme. No throughline to hide behind. It’s just a brain, decanted onto a few hundred pages, arranged so a stranger will smile no matter where they crack it open.

I got my copy in the mail the other day. I had mail to sort- urgent, adult, responsible-immigrant mail. Instead of opening my Jury Duty letter, I sat down with the book instead and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Morris watched me from the floor with the quiet judgment of a dog who knows the difference between work and joy and resents being excluded from the second.

Rich works out of Chicago, has been at it for decades, and turns up pretty much anywhere a cartoon can legally be printed- the New Yorker, Air Mail, the lot. The story goes that he got his start redrawing a Ring bell for service sign on the scale in the produce department of a grocery store, then quietly updating it every week until customers started coming by to see what it said. That’s the whole career in miniature, really. Couldn’t not do it.

“Getting a dog right doesn’t mean getting a dog funny.”

This is the line I came away with, and I suspect it’ll rattle round my skull for months. (it’s around the 40:47 mark).

We got talking about reference, because Rich draws his animals from photos. I thought he knew what a dog looked like. Then I spent months -months!— trying to work out the shape a dog makes when it leaps to catch a ball, only to discover that the real anatomy of a jumping dog is so deranged it looks like a printing error.

He personally lands, as you do, somewhere between the truth and the lie.