{"id":4832,"date":"2013-07-29T11:07:48","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T15:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=4832"},"modified":"2013-07-29T11:07:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T15:07:48","slug":"chaval-forgotten-controversial-french-gag-cartoonist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=4832","title":{"rendered":"Chaval: Forgotten, Controversial French Gag Cartoonist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently at a library in Durham doing a comics talk and noted that the “books for sale” shelf there had a bunch of comics collections from the 1950s. Most of the collections were of were New Yorker<\/em> cartoonists whose work I already owned–Arno, Darrow, etc.–but one book caught my eye and I bought it:\u00a0Simon & Schuster’s\u00a0The Best Cartoons From France<\/em> from\u00a01953.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of good stuff in the book, but the work that really stood out to me was by a cartoonist going by the name Chaval. His linework seems to me to be pretty directly influenced by the then-popular New Yorker<\/em> cartoonists, Peter Arno in particular. An easy go-to analog for his offbeat sense of humor might be Charles Addams, but some of his gags have an almost Far Side<\/em> quirkiness to them.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t find much information about him in English online other than this post<\/a>. Chaval was apparently quite well known internationally during his heyday and popular enough in his native France to merit a retrospective in 2008–a retrospective that was marred be revelations of the artist’s Vichy-era anti-Semitic cartoons.<\/p>\n

Here’re all of the Chaval cartoons from 1953’s\u00a0The Best Cartoons From France<\/em>:<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently at a library in Durham doing a comics talk and noted that the “books for sale” shelf there had a bunch of comics collections from the 1950s. Most of the collections were of were New Yorker cartoonists whose work I already owned–Arno, Darrow, etc.–but one book caught my eye and I bought … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[45],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-1fW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4832"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4836,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832\/revisions\/4836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}