If it's true that society's intelligence as a whole is going to the dogs, then cartoonist Edward Steed hasn't gotten the memo. Forces of Nature collects about 150 of his cartoons, a lot of them thinkers, all of them witty, a number of them brilliant.
Steed is best known for his single-panel New Yorker cartoons, many of which are reproduced here. That magazine was also, of course, home to the work of Addams Family cartoonist Charles Addams, for whom Steed is a match in morbidness: he has built reams of jokes around the damaged, dying, and deceased. "It's what he would have wanted," says a clown at a graveside service after four clown pallbearers drop the casket and a clown corpse comes tumbling out.
Unlike Addams, who drew people with invitingly cushiony shapes and often set characters against well-appointed backdrops, Steed works in slim black lines against stark white. And whereas Addams kept his characters clothed, Forces of Nature offers a steady stream of shirtless, and occasionally also pantsless, men; one appears wearing bikini underwear while holding a banjo on a deserted club's stage and complaining, "This next song is about narrow-minded record executives and their reluctance to take a chance on anything a bit different." Some cartoons herein aren't macabre but absurd, as when a potato wearing high-heeled shoes is shamed for cheating by a judge at the World's Tallest Potato Contest. As anodyne as that perfectly executed joke is, readers shouldn't expect to see Steed's work in the funny papers anytime soon. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer