Word: kliban
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...Kliban, cartoonist...
...prodigious number of Americans have become smitten with cats. Others continue to bad-mouth felines. Are cats stouthearted companions or unresponsive curmudgeons? Or are they, as Cartoonist Bernard Kliban suggested in his bestselling album Cat (1975), merely whimsical meat-loaves? While the fur flies in this battle, one cat gives folks a humorous peek at both armies in the controversy. The most famous feline to express this perplexing relationship between man and pet is Garfield, a comic-strip cat. His creator, Cartoonist Jim Davis, has three books on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, a first...
...associate man with suckling, warmth, mother's milk and childhood learning play. While the adult feline is obsessed with reproduction, territorial battles and mousing, we remain large toys and surrogate mothers who possess such miracles as wall can openers, crinkly cellophane and electric blankets. Nor do cats, like Kliban's cartoon meat-loaves, respond with interest to human grownup preoccupations. They pay no mind to politics, opera, opinion polls, fuel-stingy autos or nuclear proliferation. They remain unimpressed by est, Kiwanis, cocaine and PBS. Felines yawn equally at the reputations of Mick Jagger and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Cats...
...sensitive ears are precisely tuned to discern the scrabble of paws beneath the ground. It even has its own self-cleaning service: cat saliva may contain a deodorizing detergent-like substance. Asleep, a cat may resemble a throw pillow or a Kliban-style meatloaf, but, awake and hungry, the average feline, one of the most highly evolved predators in the natural world, is capable of dispatching a dozen mice at a brief sitting. Alarmingly, it tends to dawdle before administering the coup de grâce. Behavioralists believe this happens because cats are programmed by a primitive, vestigial stalking mechanism...
Davis' spiritual ancestor in the cat cartoon game is Bernard Kliban, 46. He started all the madness. Back in 1975, Kliban, a very private Marin County, Calif., comic artist who once owned four felines and lost three of them in a divorce settlement, published Cat, an album of tiger-striped, round-eyed feline meatloaves. Originally a portfolio of cat drawings done to amuse himself, the resulting volume has gone through 26 printings and sold almost 1 million copies in the U.S. alone. From Canada to Japan, Kliban products are now a multimillion-dollar business. Says Kliban...