`Stuff and Nonsense'

Out of brute curiosity I’ve been reading and looking at A.B. Frost: An Anthology, a collection of proto-comics that predate by a decade Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, usually judged the first comic strip. I had never heard Frost’s name before last week though I recognized his scratchy, Ur-American style, reminiscent of E.W. Kemble’s in the first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Frost was born the year Moby-Dick was published and died one year after The Jazz Singer.

In 2003, Fantagraphics published an omnibus volume bringing together Stuff and Nonsense (1884), The Bull Calf and Other Tales (1892) and Carlo (1913). Artistically, Carlo is Frost’s triumph, especially the long sequence in which two oafs tie tin cans to Carlo’s tail and the mutt careens across the landscape. In one panel, a startled draft horse wearing blinders has run through a loaded clothes line, and Frost turns him into a noble Pegasus.

Frost is best when wordless. The Stuff portion of Stuff and Nonsense is without captions, but Nonsense is a collection of illustrated limericks, the lowest of poetic forms except for the first-person sensitive lyric. No one, I’m afraid, comes from Nantucket: There’s no smut in Frost’s limericks. Without exception, the drawing outshines the poeticizing. In one picture a Gabby Hayes-like salt sits fishing on a dock. In the next, we see only his feet upright in the water. Here’s the accompanying limerick:

“There was an old codger who said,
`Quite enough of the hard life I’ve led.
As it’s nearly high tide
I’ll commit suicide.
I’ll be far better off when I’m dead.”

As I read Frost’s poems, another limerick came into focus. I, who daily forget passwords for online accounts and the names of my neighbors, remembered a topical limerick I wrote more than 40 years ago. I even remember the trouble I had settling on appropriate punctuation. Here, from memory, it is, c. early 1967:

“There once was a man named Rand
Whose intelligence deserved a hand.
He thought he cured cancer,
They gave him the answer:
The court, the vaccine they had banned.”

The obscure topicality calls for footnotes. In 1966, a businessman in Cleveland, James Rand, claimed to have developed a cancer vaccine from animal blood and human cancer cells. The Food and Drug Administration asked for a restraining order against Rand’s vaccine and in February 1967 the U.S. District Court in Cleveland banned its manufacture and distribution.

What I remember are newspaper photos of cancer patients and supporters picketing the federal courthouse. What I don’t remember is why I wrote the damn thing. It was set in Cleveland, my hometown, and the story was broken by a reporter at the Plain Dealer, so it was local news, but why did I find it compelling enough to write about? And why did I remember it, down to the finicky punctuation, like a Dylan lyric from the same era? Memory is capricious, yes, but cruel.