ON THE ONE HAND / ON THE OTHER HAND

A two-part compilation of Blechman’s erudite essays and intellectual illustrations.

The author’s artistic mastery is on display twice over in this two-volume set: One collects a range of comics and artworks, including Blechman’s brilliantly unassuming covers for Story magazine. The other offers a generous selection of texts about animation, art history, and life as a commercial illustrator in New York City. In a pleasantly meandering style, Blechman writes and draws like a well-read, jaunty academic. His illustrations—often a single page, drawn in an “inquiring,” jittery pen—manage to crack open literary and religious mythologies with the perspective of a scholar who knows his subject so intimately that he’s earned room to play. In “The Power of Positive Thinking,” a struggling writer learns he can keep getting published as a critic if he churns out fluffy praise. “Our Daily Bread” tells of the economic success of an abbey of monks, renowned for its bakery and centuries-old recipes. In “Apologia,” Blechman discusses an ancient writer who penned a memoir “about the most celebrated heretic in Judea” and was later crucified. “But during the Spartacus uprising,” he writes, “6,000 slaves were crucified….So please,” he writes under a shrugging, smiling figure, “let’s put a single crucifixion in perspective.” In his essays, Blechman seeks his place among his peers. There is a story about Saul Steinberg’s widow and another about Steinberg’s assistant. Blechman lauds the great David Levine, whose cross-hatched caricatures adorn the New York Review of Books, and writes with back-patting reverence about professional peers like Jules Feiffer and Tomi Ungerer. These texts are warmly accessible and boast a delicate balance of admiration and kinship, and they leave no doubt about Blechman’s place among this pantheon of iconic illustrators. Some readers may not yet know the “90-goddamn-years-old” Blechman, and a biographical introduction is sorely missed in this collection, but it’s a thrill to piece together his story by contextualizing him among his subjects.

A charming, mixed-media portrait of the artist.