What Am I Doing Here?

by Abner Dean, Clifton Fadiman (Preface by)

Overview

What Am I Doing Here? is a startling masterwork by one of the forgotten innovators of American comics.

In 1945, after more than a decade as a commercial illustrator—drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, and many other publications—Abner Dean invented a genre all his own: One might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. He used the elegant draftsmanship and single-panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turned them to a deeper, stranger purpose. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.

What Am I Doing Here?, Dean’s second book and perhaps his best, depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked but acts like they’re clothed—a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions. Through it all strolls (or crawls, or floats, or stumbles) Dean’s unclad Everyman, searching for love, happiness, and the answers to life’s biggest questions.

This NYRC edition is a jacketed hardcover with extra-thick paper, and features brand-new, restored scans of the original artwork throughout.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370507
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	96 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Abner Dean (1910–1982) was born and lived in New York City. He spent his career working as a commercial illustrator and, starting with It’s a Long Way to Heaven in 1945, published seven collections of his cartooning work, including What Am I Doing Here?, Come As You Are, and Cave Drawings of the Future.  

Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999) was a renowned essayist, critic, and anthologist, and was awarded the 1993 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Editorial Reviews

11/14/2016
This reissue of Dean’s 1947 book seems at first glance like a collection of New Yorker style cartoons, but his work is far more avant-garde. Dean’s world is inhabited by throngs of ordinary but naked people going through their slightly oddball routines. Within that world, he places one fellow who often asks the titular question, as well as uttering other phrases the spring from mundane origins, providing Dean the conduit for visual absurdity and comment. Though the format is single panel cartoons, the book is best read as a narrative chopped up and then mixed around into some random form. The phrases Dean uses, like “Not too many!” and “It’s all true” and “Let’s clean up the place” predate the work of Jenny Holzer in harnessing everyday language as art, but Dean takes it one step further, illustrating what the sentences mean in a world far from our own, yes connected by the appearance of a shared humanity. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A real mind-bender.” —Scott McCloud

"Mr. Dean is a great man. He has adapted a modern pictorial form to satire which has the flavor of Hogarth and Rabelais, the implications of Tibetan mysticism, and the hilarity of James Thurber." —Saturday Review 
 
“Beautifully drawn, thought provoking works of art...For Dean, the combination of image and text could stimulate a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses: delight, frustration, provocation, bewilderment, sadness, or illumination. “ —The Comics Journal
 
“Whether Dean’s conceptions are readily seized is a question for the individual, who should have a good time finding out.” —The New York Times

“[Dean’s] best have a disturbingly haunting quality that one rarely finds in the more realistic captioned cartoons of the New Yorker school, and in fact are ‘funny’ only to the extent of making one giggle hysterically.” —Northrop Frye

From the Publisher