Actually, We Bring You Art Every Single Week

Before you soak in the stunning imagery in this special issue of West, please turn back to page 5, if you missed it. That’s where one of my favorite pieces of art resides.

I am referring to Donna Barstow’s cartoon, Fault Lines. Some people will surely turn up their noses at the thought of a cartoon being called art.

“There are definitely skeptics out there,” says Andrew Farago, gallery manager at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. “But we’re treating it as legitimate” as any other form of creative expression.

Farago notes that monumental graphic novels, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor,” have helped the museum make its case. But even a blithe, single-panel cartoon such as Fault Lines meets my definition of art.

Better yet, it meets Degas’: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Each week, Barstow not only gets me to smile, she provides a peek into the absurdity of life here. She makes me see this place if not altogether differently, at least a bit more clearly. She is, in that way, both lighthearted and a light.

Perhaps the funniest part is that Barstow, who has cartooned for the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest and an array of other publications over the last 13 years, considers herself an artist second.

“The writing--the idea--has to come first,” she explains. “Otherwise, it’s just an illustration.”

Barstow’s ideas often materialize while she is walking at night through Silver Lake, where she lives. “The darkness helps me concentrate,” she says. “I’m not looking so much at what’s around then.”

My interest in where someone like Barstow finds her muse is not purely academic. My curiosity was piqued recently when I stumbled upon a book of cartoons being offered over the Internet (at www.laborart.com). Its eye-popping title: “Ricardo at Wartzman Factory.”

This 64-page collection of workplace humor was published in 1989 by Rick Flores, a union activist and artist. Flores, a longtime laborer at a General Motors plant in Indiana, had a heart attack and died two years ago. So how he came up with the name--my name--for his fictional factory may forever be a mystery.

His widow told me that he “just pulled it out of the air.” I’ve talked to a few of Flores’ buddies, and they have no clue why he went with Wartzman. My guess is that he spotted my byline in the Wall Street Journal, where I used to hang my hat, thought it sounded goofy and made it his own.

On the book’s cover, a robot is seen inside Wartzman Factory, flanked by three employees laughing so hard they’re holding their bellies. “The new robot wants to know when do we go on break at Wartzman’s,” the caption reads.

Barstow’s work notwithstanding, something tells me that my staff here at the magazine will find this one the most hilarious cartoon of them all.