Enniscorthy and Cartoons
- Jon Nelson
- Oct 12
- 3 min read
Oh, as to details, the music of the opera, though rotten, is superbly rotten. The costuming and staging is splendid. And all the singing is powerful. The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. . . . The story lines, although the world is conforming itself to them, are silly. People coming out from seeing and hearing the opera Armageddon II have the Sweeny look on their faces. There are disturbing photographs of such emerging crowds, in Europe for a year now, and at this Chicago opening the other night, to prove this. Sweeny is a pleasant-looking, cheerfully ugly man. Sweeny, millions of times duplicated, is not. He is not the face that the whole world should wear.
Old newspaper cartooning in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny fascinates me. Part of that comes from my love of early cartooning and the loss of the newspaper cartoon as an art form—one of the few art jobs where someone could punch a clock for decades and still reach a wide American audience. Like much of Lafferty’s work, Three Armageddons is about memory—its fragility, and how easily it can be manipulated or erased. In his detailed twentieth-century timeline, Lafferty includes cartoonists—men and images already fading from public memory. By placing them alongside high art and major historical events, he creates a unique aesthetic effect, one I’ve never encountered in any other writer.
In The Three Armageddons, cartooning becomes a metaphor for the creation and control of reality itself. Enniscorthy Sweeny is a cartoonist at one point, but more importantly, he is a god-like figure who “draws” the world around him. He alters people like you and me. He changes events with the freedom of an artist who has become a kind of demiurge. The book’s world runs on cartoon logic. Characters are larger than life, stubborn giants. Events break the laws of physics and probability. A heavyweight champion is knocked out by a thin reporter.
And think about the aesthetics of cartooning. Lafferty blends horror with absurd comedy. He fills the story with slapstick violence. Grotesque murders and end-of-the-world events are told with a surreal, farcical tone that makes them both frightening and ridiculous.
At the heart of it is a kind of critique, one focused on how we understand the past. In this story, cartooning is shown to have as much power as history in shaping what people believe. The Three Armageddons timeline deliberately places the debut of comic strips like Mutt and Jeff alongside presidential elections and major scientific discoveries. These comic strips help define the age. That idea is central to the "Armageddon Cults," groups of people who choose to believe in and live inside the paranoid, comic-strip-style realities that Sweeny creates. By using the yellowed pages of old newspaper cartoons, Lafferty shows that what we accept as real is often just the dominant story being told—whether it's from Smithsonian or the little man riding Spark Plug.
Title | Creator |
Rudolph Dirks | |
Charles W. Kahles | |
Bud Fisher | |
Fontaine Fox | |
Sidney Smith | |
“The Bungle Family” | Harry J. Tuthill |
Billy DeBeck | |
Frank Willard | |
Al Capp |
