Gross - Book Reviews

***** - Excellent
**** - Good
*** - Okay
** - Bad
* - Terrible
+ - Half-star

Cats Cats Cats: A Collection of Great Cat Cartoons
S. Gross, editor
Perennial Library (Harper & Row)
Fiction, Humor/Comics
***
Cats Cats Cats: A Collection of Great Cat Cartoons

DESCRIPTION: A collection of cat cartoons from many sources.

REVIEW: This is an older book, but even considering that, the humor is dated. Many of the comics feature the aging chestnuts of unfixed pets with unwanted kittens, throwing shoes at strays, and kicking the cat outside all night - the type of jokes that might have been funny in the 1950's; I'm delusional enough to hope that spaying and neutering are more mainstream these days, as is keeping cats safely indoors, and animal abuse has never been funny to me. Some of the cartoonists treat cats with such contempt that I wonder why they bother drawing them at all, or why Gross thought they'd be worth including in an anthology of cartoons aimed at cat-lovers. A few others take way too many panels to get absolutely nowhere. For all that, there are a few fun cartoons here. Overall, the dross outweighs the gold. It didn't hack me off enough for a Bad rating, but the general blandness and dated humor place it firmly at the low end of Okay territory. (I spared it the half-star deduction on consideration of the mentality involved: the kind of people who compiled this book and find it funny are simply incapable of updating their views.)

You might also enjoy:
Why Cats Paint (Heather Busch and Burton Silver, Fiction - A straight-faced parody of modern art profiling feline artists)
The Devious Book for Cats (Fluffy & Bonkers, Fiction - A parody guidebook for the domestic cat)
CATMOPOLITAN (Irene Hochberg, Fiction - A parody of COSMO magazine, featuring cats)
The Cat Manual (Michael Ray Taylor, Fiction - A rare translation of the secret manual all cats receive on entering adulthood)

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