Boy, teenagers are a surly lot! I should know, I was a surly teen myself.
I grew up with my grandparents who in many ways resembled Archie and Edith Bunker from the famous TV series. My grandad was a lot bigger and meaner than Archie but he had a similar attitude about life. During the whole time I was growing up he never said a kind word to me. He either yelled or maintained an icy silence. My grandmother was kind-hearted, sentimental and a little bit ditsy, just like Edith. She did like kids and lavished loving attention on me even when I was a surly teen and probably didn't deserve it.
Now I was a cute, obedient kid when I was young but somehow I turned into a surly teenager. I communicated with my grandparents through an inch-wide crack in my bedroom door and showed signs of being insufferably bored and restless whenever they tried to talk to me. I ascribe it to hormones but who knows what the real reasons were? Maybe I felt justified for being rebelious because my grandfather was such a Type-A and my grandmother was so suffocating.
Fast forward to the the present. I have college-age kids of my own who were in their turn surly to me (the kids in the photos aren't mine, I got the pictures from the internet). Don't get me wrong, they're not like that now, and they were never as bad as I was, but when they were 16 I only knew them as eyes who appeared through a crack in their bedroom doors and said, "Whaddaya want?" It's a shocking example of karma. I snubbed others and later became the snubbed.
Anyway, here's the really interesting part. When I grew up and my grandparents had passed away I found out the truth about my grouchy grandfather. It turns out that he was all worn out from working a lifelong job that he hated in order to provide a home for my Dad and his brothers and sisters. He just wanted a quiet retirement. He was always grouchy even when he was young, but he raised his family well and they all became effective adults. When I was dumped in his arms as a baby he was crest-fallen. He could have sent me to an orphanage, I'm sure he thought about it, but he didn't. Out of a sense of duty he kept me and it made all the difference.
Now my grandfather didn't like kids, not even cute ones like me, but he really didn't like surly teenagers. It must have really grated on him that I did minimal chores, resisted any kind of responsibility, kept all the money I made from kid jobs, ate his food, wore the clothes he bought, hogged the TV, snubbed him at every opportunity, and never once thanked him. He didn't like me but he persevered through this abuse every day because he thought it was the right thing to do.
As a consequence I grew up in a nice neighborhood, went to a nice school and had nice friends. It could easily have been otherwise. The grouchy, icy-kid hater I grew up resenting turned out to be a massive benefactor. Sounds like the kid and the convict in "Great Expectations" doesn't it?
So there it is: I owe everything to an irritable grouch who didn't like me, and he died before I could acknowledge it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep for worrying about it. My message to surly teenagers and ex-teenagers is....buy sleep insurance by forgiving your parents their faults. Forgive them 100%, meaning that you'll never again even think of their past mistakes. You can get mad at them for what they do next week but never again for anything they did in the past. You simply don't have the perspective to see those past events objectively. Forgive them, thank them, help them if they need it, then carry on with your life unburdened with surliness.
A day at the art museum with Uncle Eddie! We don't stand on formalities here, let's plunge right in!
Here's (above) Gainsborough's "Blue Boy." Cartoonists love it because it's the ultimate depiction of a sissyfied Lord Fauntleroy-type. The painting wasn't based on the Fauntleroy novel, and the boy in the novel wasn't a sissy, but the public remembers him that way and who am I to dispute it? Anyway, this painting and I have history.
Here's (above) the Venus di Milo, beloved by cartoonists everywhere because they're always trying to think of dirty things her arms might be doing. Of course Venus isn't the most revered scupture. That honor belongs to the plaster hood ornament-type figure that you always see on pedestals in the homes of the cartoon rich. I wonder if that scupture ever really existed. It looks a little like a famous black Donatello (or is it Cellini) figure but that's not quite the same.
On this wall (above) we find "Whistler's Mother," another cartoonist favorite. Boy, she keeps a clean home! It always strikes me as funny when people sit with their shoulder against a wall even if it's in a reataurant. I mean the natural thing is to sit with the wall at your back. How odd it is to press yourself against a man-made cliff with all the pictures on one side diminishing in railroad perspective infront of you.
Last but not least, Grant Wood's "American Gothic." You can laugh at this picture but it'll be around when all of us have turned to dust. There's something so primal and funny about it. It's how every adolescent regards his parents, how every writer regards his editors, how every employee regards his boss. If you're a painter, and all you want is to be remembered, then pick a primal emotion and depict the ultimate distillation of it.
Boy, teenagers are a surly lot! I should know, I was a surly teen myself. 
Fast forward to the the present. I have college-age kids of my own who were in their turn surly to me (the kids in the photos aren't mine, I got the pictures from the internet). Don't get me wrong, they're not like that now, and they were never as bad as I was, but when they were 16 I only knew them as eyes who appeared through a crack in their bedroom doors and said, "Whaddaya want?" It's a shocking example of karma. I snubbed others and later became the snubbed.
Here, so far as I can tell, is the origin of the modern comic strip. Caveat: take this with a grain of salt; I'm no expert on the subject and I might have over-simplified things.
Success always breeds imitators and Daumier's imitator was a guy named Cham (example above). Cham got his foot in the door by offering simplified Daumier-style drawings in a series for the same price that Daumier got for just one picture. Cham might have been a weasel but he did help to popularize the idea that cartoons should tell a story using multiple pictures.
Cham was so successful that he inspired a German named Rodolphe Topffler to try his hand. Topffler used Cham's serial panel technique but drew the characters in what he called the "outline method," a technique that didn't require Daumier's painterly tones and shadows. I don't know if Topffler was an aristocrat but he seemed to want the public to think that he was. His outline method was executed in a deliberately crude style so that it would appear that he just dashed them out for his own amusement and had no thought of making money with them.
Back in France, Dore saw what Topffler was doing and approved, only he thought the outline method worked better if the characters were a bit more realistic and were carefully inked. Dore wasn't very fond of the serial picture method. He preferred big, Jack Davis-type crowd scenes like the one above.
Back in Germany Wilhelm Busch (example above) combined the best ideas of all the artists I just mentioned: Daumier's belief that cartoons could be fine art, Cham's multiple panel idea, Topffler's outline technique and Dore's clean-up theories. Busch was the first artist to make a good living exclusively by doing funny panel cartoons. People say he was the first truly modern master of the comic strip. After him comes the great German-American newspaper artists like Dirks, the creator of "The Katzenjammer Kids." You know the rest.
