About this item

What Am I Doing Here? is a startling masterwork by one of the forgotten innovators of American comics.In 1945, after more than a decade as a commercial illustrator - drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, and many other publications - Abner Dean invented a genre all his own: One might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. He used the elegant draftsmanship and single-panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turned them to a deeper, stranger purpose. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.What Am I Doing Here?, Dean's second book and perhaps his best, depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked but acts like they're clothed - a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions.