SKITZY

Drawn and Quarterly reprints a 1955 tale in pantomime by Don Freeman: Skitzy (100 7x9-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $19.95) in which Floyd W. Skitzafroid is unhappy and keeps his wife awake nights by tossing and turning in bed. By day, however, he is either (1) painting in his studio in Greenwich Village or, simultaneously, (2) in an office uptown, where he works as an accountant. Freeman gives us a visual hint early on about the schizophrenia of his protagonist — both on the cover and early in the narrative, where he shows him splitting in half on the subway as he commutes to work. One half goes to his studio; the other, to the office. Employing a model named Susette, the artist produces a painting of a nude woman eating a cluster of grapes entitled “Grapes Susette” that he sells for $100, which he spends buying a necklace for his wife. She, in turn, presents him with a painting — “Grapes Susette,” that she bought for $800! Seething at the economic injustice of it all, Floyd tosses and turns all night again — until he has the idea of opening his own gallery to sell his paintings, thereby uniting both the artistic and commercial aspects of his personality. This cautionary tale, drawn in a slap-dash, breezy manner, unfolds one “panel” (or picture) to a page, telling the story in an economical way possible only in the cartooning medium, which permits “splitting” the character’s personality in both visual and narrative terms, thereby depicting different activities as if they were taking place at the same time. Freeman, who died in 1978, produced Skitzy while otherwise creating children’s books, publishing the book himself; today, as D&Q demonstrates, he would have found a publisher. And now, he has. A short biography completes the volume.