By Shaenon K. Garrity
My apologies for this column being short on words and long on pictures, but I have some pretty awesome pictures to share. Way back in the mists of time, I wrote a couple of LiveJournal posts (
this one and
this one, as a matter of fact) on Anne Cleveland, a cartoonist active from about the 1930s to 1950s who drew a number of cartoons about her alma mater, Vassar. As a Vassar girl myself, I was fleetingly familiar with Cleveland and even owned a couple of booklets of her work (and that of classmate and cartoonist Jean Anderson) published by the college.
For a school that sniffs haughtily over its lorgnette at the notion of lowering itself to teach "commercial art" of any kind, Vassar has a decent roster of graduates in the comics industry. Jen van Meter, Nunzio Defilippis, and Christina Weir are all Vassar alumni. Greg Rucka and I not only took the same Senior Composition class, nine years apart, but with the same professor.
So who was Anne Cleveland? Hardly anyone remembers. In addition to drawing cartoons about Vassar life, she published
It's Better with Your Shoes Off, a lovely and very out-of-print collection of Gluyas Williams-esque cartoons about Americans living in Japan. A Vassar girl, a cartoonist, and a proto-weeaboo; could I choose a more perfect role model? I think not. And so, this summer, when I returned to the Vassar campus for the first time since graduation, I tracked down all public evidence of Anne Cleveland.
This was actually pretty easy. I stayed at the Alumnae House (Vassar graduates are Default Mode Girl), which has tons of Vassar-related art on the walls, including art by Cleveland. In my hallway was this painting of the Daisy Chain, a charming and moving if somewhat unfortunately-named tradition wherein the sophomore girls carry a garland of daisies in the seniors' graduation ceremony.
See, the seniors are sad because they're leaving Vassar, the greatest place on earth, and going out into the real world where they'll have to marry and get jobs and never have lesbian sex again (incidentally, this is the entire plot of
The Group). The sophomores are happy because they're gearing up for Junior Year Abroad and soon will be wasting even more of their parents' money. I went to Dublin!
The Alumnae House also had the originals of a few Cleveland cartoons.
It was hard to get a good photo, but this is the original art for this cartoon:
I also looked up Cleveland in the yearbook. And here, if you'll forgive more blurry digital camerawork, she is:
Cleveland was the editor of her senior yearbook, so I suspect she's the one who wrote the witty little text pieces for each class. I do dearly love that arch 1930s turn of phrase. (Click for full-sized image)
Incidentally, what of Jean Anderson, Cleveland's fellow cartoonist and sometime collaborator? I honestly have no idea, but there's a room in Main Building dedicated to her, with a plaque and everything.
But that's not all! As I vaguely recalled from my undergraduate days, the Alumnae House pub is entirely decorated with murals and paintings of college life by Anne Cleveland. Here I am soaking in the glory of it all.
And here's my husband Andrew doing the same, on the other end of the table.
The pub décor was beautifully maintained; in fact, I think the place had been renovated since the last time I saw it, a decade or so ago. Thank you, wealthy alumnae of Vassar College, for contributing, however inadvertently, to the preservation of cartoon art! Thank you, Meryl Streep! Thank you, Phoebe from "Friends"! Thank you, that lady who runs the Oxygen Network!
Inspired, I continued the grand Vassar cartooning tradition on my tablecloth.
Truly I am making both my alma mater and my impoverished parents proud.
As a final note, I checked the college library and was pleased to see that the selection of comics and comics-related writing has expanded considerably from my day, when it was basically just Maus. The Vassar library even has a copy of
Manga: The Complete Guide, by my good friend and fellow Comixology columnist Jason Thompson.
When I applied to Vassar so very long ago, I submitted my personal essay as a comic strip and wrote about my passion for comics. One of my mother's proudest moments for me (she has to take 'em where she can get 'em) was when the college president, on orientation day, announced that the incoming Class of 2000 included a cartoonist. I drew a comic strip for the school newspaper and picked up a bug for strip cartooning that hasn't stopped biting. In the annals of cartoonist alumnae, I rank well below Anne Cleveland, who was frankly pretty damn good and should have been far more prolific. But it makes me happy to think I'm continuing, in my unsteady way, a fine old school tradition, one of those smiling sophomore girls carrying the garland forever into the future.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
