About B. Kliban

Also born of a New Year’s Day, one of my favorite cartoonists, B. Kliban (1935-1990). Fun fact: Kliban despised his given name Bernard so much that he had it changed legally to B. To friends, he was known as “Hap”, which was short for “Happy New Year”!

I was turned on to the peculiar joys of Kliban when I was in junior high, through the agency of my best buddy Matt (and his parents, both of whom transferred their tastes to him). Through him and them, I also discovered the pleasures of such diverse figures as Bob Dylan, Tom Lehrer, Vaughn Meader, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Bond. They never could get me to sign off on the Grateful Dead, though, and don’t you try either).

Anyway, this was just a couple of years after Kliban’s first book of collected cartoons Cat (1975) broke through. Matt and I used to love to draw cartoons together and we slavishly aped the Kliban style, which has been called offbeat, deadpan, dry, surreal, and (I would above all add) grotesque. He drew people with beady eyes, small heads, and enormous Mediterranean noses, men with uni-brows and way too much five o’clock shadow (as well as women with lots of facial hair). There was something Neanderthal about the way he drew people, and you often got the impression that there was just plain NOTHING going on in their brains, as they just sat there stupidly gazing into space. He drew bodies all lumpy and slumpy. The people generally had bad posture and plenty of body fat.

As I say, though, that first book Cat was all cat cartoons, and that one was his most popular. Kliban was able to spin it out into merch like calendars and coffee mugs and so forth, which is every cartoonist’s dream. Once he got his foot in the door, he was able to sell his weirder visions. Most of his cartoons, or a lot of them, had originally been published in Playboy, with which he had been associated since 1962. And indeed some of his cartoons did feature breasts. Kliban’s captions were always as intriguing as his visual imagination. Often they were more non-sequitur than ha-ha funny, which always delights me, even as it seems to bewilder and infuriate most others.

Kliban’s sense of humor influenced me tremendously. I only really knew (and know) his first four books. After freshman year in high school I started to get pulled away from cartooning by my interest in theatre. But you can get a real good sense of the Kliban style from the covers and titles of those four books:

1975

1976

1977

1978

I had great scorn for Gary Larson’s The Far Side when it debuted in 1979 because it had so patently ripped off Kliban’s formula. Larson was syndicated in the dailies, so everyone started raving about how offbeat he was, whereas, those truly in the know where hip to the fact that Larson was actually highly derivative. Larson has copped to his debt to Kliban, though. If I see a funny Larson cartoon, I will definitely say ha-ha instead of harumph.

Kliban put out an additional half dozen cartoon books after the ones I have named. His heart gave out when he was only 55 years old, depriving us of more.

As for his background: he was originally from Norwalk, CT, studied at Pratt and Cooper Union, and started out as a commercial artist in San Francisco. There is definitely a lot of the hippie underground comix vibe in his work, I feel, though I don’t know, the degree to which he was associated with that bunch, if at all. It does seem relevant though that R. Crumb also just uses the one initial. But maybe that’s just a cartoonist thing.