In Iowa: Sizzling platter, graceful plateaus and art

I still have it somewhere, I'm sure, most likely in a box in the basement - one of the kinder rejection letters I ever received - and there were many, mostly form letters.

This, too, was a form letter. But it also had a handwritten note in the margin - 'Keep at it,” of something meant to be encouraging along those lines. And better yet, it was from The New Yorker magazine.

I'd been laboring for a good chunk of years, nights and weekends, to land a comic strip with a syndicate. Over time, I developed five or six different sample storylines, one after another. In those days there still were eight or so syndicates, then fewer as they merged or threw in the towel.

And barring that, I'd have been more than delighted to get a single-panel cartoon in The New Yorker - the gold standard for cartoon sophistication.

Unless I'm completely misremembering this, which is quite possible, the cartoon that earned that anonymous but better-luck-next-time was of gunslingers fighting it out in a corral, not with six-shooters but by slinging stuffed bears at each other. The caption: 'Gund fight at the O.K. Corral” - named for the plush Gund bears that were advertised weekly in The New Yorker.

Well, all right, but it seemed pretty funny to me at the time. Give it a few minutes.

I later did some single-panel cartoons for an entertainment magazine in Columbus, until that publication collapsed, and later wrote and drew editorial cartoons for a business newspaper I edited in Michigan, among other projects.

I was thinking about this as I finished New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin's biography of another New Yorker cartoonist, Peter Arno. And just as the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art concluded its exhibit of art by Iowa native sons Grant Wood and Marvin Cone - this in the 125th anniversary year of Wood's birth.

And as those cartoony - well, some of them, and I mean that in a good way - Overalls All Over statues sprouted up all over.

See, Arno was not just a New Yorker cartoonist, Maslin contends. He was the New Yorker cartoonist. He was there in the beginning, in 1925, and for the next 43 years, and even after he died some of his work still turned up in its pages.

His cartoons were very funny and, for their time, slightly naughty. A night club chorus girl, bringing up the rear of a dance line, says to a disappointed-looking, well-heeled diner, 'Valerie won't be around for several days. She backed into a sizzling platter.” In another, military brass and emergency crew rush to a crashed plane as a civilian contractors walks away from the wreck, gleefully rubbing his hands together: 'Well, back to the old drawing board.”

One of my favorites shows an angry woman yelling at the man asleep in bed next to her: 'Wake up, you mutt! We're getting married today.” Imagine how that relationship will go after the honeymoon.

One more: A plane is about to crash into a mountain, and one of the passengers screams, 'My god, we're out of gin!”

But even better was the art - Arno could draw like nobody's business: perfect-pitch expressions on his characters, bold but graceful lines, and just enough detail to set the tone - in washes and exacting shadows. He set the bar for all cartoonists who followed in that magazine.

Arno also considered himself an artist, and Maslin writes that when he got older, Arno left the fast-paced, carousing social life of Manhattan for the idylls of upstate New York. He bought a 'gentleman's farm.” His life got quiet.

At one point, Arno wrote, 'I think I'm falling in love with a pheasant.”

Even if he was kidding, that kind of serenity and being at peace with a gentler world fits handily with Wood's a famous pastorals. Think of the calm rise and swooping fall of the hills and valleys he painted, almost like ocean waves or desert sands.

Can you imagine a quieter image? While I'd never in several lifetimes compare anything I've drawn to the complex, majestic work of Wood or Arno, I see what they were up to. Why their stuff is art, with a capital A.

It was hard work these guys did - whether rural paintings on canvas or humorous ink on stark-white paper. And they made it look so easy.

If they ever received rejection letters, no one cares now.