Forces of Nature

Some people strive to attain a particular career goal, some stumble into it by accident. In the case of Edward Steed, he almost seemed destined to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker; the 37-year-old British export to the Big Apple wanted to draw for the venerable publication, he did it, and he continues to do it to this day. While some pieces in Forces of Nature: A Book of Drawings, his first published collection, are original to the book and others are drawn from his work for Esquire, it retains the sensibilities and style that are both unique and distinctive to him and instantly makes readers think of the magazine more famous for its cartoons than any other.

Steed’s work is immediately recognizable in a way that is remarkably refreshing. His particular style of scratchy, ink-heavy lines and incongruous body types is alone enough to give his one-panel gags depth and distinction. One in particular, where a man in a track outfit hauls around a long pole at a fancy party and grouses to his partner, “I feel like the only pole vaulter in here,” gains extra laughs not only because the awkward absurdity of the situation, but also because he looks less like an athlete than a schlub who hangs out not at stadiums but at off-track betting parlors.

Just as relevant are his faces. Steed doesn’t so much draw people as he does malevolent gremlins in human form; they maintain the appearance of normality, but their mad eyes and leering, sinister grins give them away. It is this, combined with his attraction to the grotesque and violent couched in ordinary social interactions and banal occurrences, that makes for comparison to the great Charles Addams. He also, and appropriately, cites the Scottish illustrator John Glashan, who also featured dark, spattered ink over rough lines, as a major influence.

But Steed is his own man, and his work, while the culmination of a very specific set of styles and approaches, is very much his own. There is not much to say about a collection of gag strips; they are not meant to cohere, to build a narrative, or to progress, but rather to provide quick and satisfying amusement and enjoyment whenever and however you dip into them. Forces of Nature, which begins well with gorgeous endpapers consisting of a vast landscape of his sour-faced and ill-intentioned little goblin-people, starts the reader off with a perfect encapsulation of his trade: a street peddler sells toothy press-on smiles to a succession of bored and alienated passers-by.

Read all at one sitting, Forces of Nature can be overwhelming, an overload of bleak hilarity that never lets up until the last brutal entry (a man holding a revolver to his head, about to decorate a blank piece of sheet music with his brains). But taken in little sips, instead of binged, they are perfect cocktails – perfectly crafted, powerful, and made by an expert in his art. The New Yorker gag cartoon is a singular kind of comics, the sort that we rarely see anywhere else these days; it is so precisely itself that it has become a kind of self-referential target. But Steed has infused it, both figuratively and literally, with new blood, and this is a collection that can sit proudly next to the best of its forbears.

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