The writer-artist (or artist-writer) is a problematic figure for
many reasons. A hybrid figure in either medium, literature or
drawing, he or she is suspect. The literary world, for its part,
often displays an almost aniconic idolatry in its repudiation of
image in favor of language; while the visual world, compelled to
reject figurative renderings as mere “illustration” in its
promulgation of the extremes of abstraction, often dismisses out
of hand the writer-artist, who actually dares to combine
figurative images with the additional blasphemy of the written
word. But whether they are called pictorial writings, as they
were by Austin Osman Spare, or American hieroglyphics, as they
were by Vachel Lindsay, or Illuminated Books or stereoscopic
printing, as they were by William Blake, the time has come for
us to finally recognize it as cartooning and be done with it,
and allow the cartoonist to assume a proper place in literary
and artistic history.2 Although surely not the first writer-
artist (after all, Egypti