Wonderful & Weird

PETER ARNO'S LADIES & GENTLEMEN--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

WE BUY OLD GOLD--George Price--Schuman ($2.95).

THE WILD, WILD WOMEN -- Virgil Partch--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($ 1).

Most American comedy zigzags its merry way between a spoofing irreverence and a spanking incongruity. At times, it darts down the side streets of satire; often it winds up in the zany alleys of fantasy. At its pithy best, the comic cartoon can do all these things at once. Three cartoon books by the pithiest practitioners of this minor art have appeared just in time to tickle the fun-loving Christmas trade.

Accent on Sex. At 47, Peter Arno is an old master. In Ladies and Gentlemen, he has put together a fat retrospective show (246 drawings, 1926-51) of what he regards as his best cartoons. With an accent on sex almost as bold as his brush strokes, Arno scores brilliantly as a social hiss-torian of cafe society.

By now, the members of his cast of caricatures are as familiar as faces in a family album: there is the lecherous, coupon-clipping U.S. edition of Colonel Blimp ("I'll tell you what I'd do if I were General Eisenhower. I'd do exactly what General Lee would have done if he'd been General Eisenhower!"); the nubile, doe-eyed golddigger who is mock-terrified in the clinches ("But where is all this leading us to, Mr. Hartman--Miami? Palm Beach? Hollywood?"); and the gimlet-eyed old biddy who adores baseball players ("We do sell them sometimes, lady, but only to other teams").

For more of the same, The New Yorker reportedly pays Arno at the rate of $1,000 for a full-page cartoon. As he makes clear in a short introduction, it is blood & sweat money. Always a deadline worker, Arno lashes himself through grueling 24-and 36-hour stints. Credited with inventing the one-line caption, Arno says: "I suppose it appealed to me particularly because my English grandfather . . . had taught me that brevity was the soul of wit--a surprising maxim to come from a lifelong reader of Punch."

Organized Chaos. Though not the highest-paid, George Price is probably the funniest cartoonist alive. With a line as lean as Arno's is broad, Price pilots a button-eyed, beak-nosed, slack-jowled crew of slovens through a maze of organized chaos. "I never saw two fighters more evenly matched," says one fight fan to another as two plug-uglies are hauled unconscious from the ring. During a six-day bicycle race, an announcer barks into the publicaddress system: "Mr. and Mrs. Herman L. Lembaugh, of 435 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, offer their only daughter, Ethel, to the winner of a five-lap sprint."

Cartoonist Price, 50, never went to art school. He gives young cartoonists tips on how to sell their stuff rather than how to do it. A typical suggestion: "Disguise your drawings by wrapping them so that the editor thinks he's getting a fruit cake. If that doesn't work, send him a fruit cake."

VIP Operation. Nutty as a fruit cake to all but his ardent fans is Virgil Franklin Partch II (pen name: VIP). Even when seen, a Partch cartoon can hardly be believed. "Guess Who," reads the caption under a domestic scene in which the not-so-little woman has sneaked up on her man from behind and blindfolded him with her bosom. Now 35, Partch has already drawn a man with as many as 19 fingers; he stamps out ugly, proboscidian heads as though he had gone berserk with a giant cookie-cutter. His special bugaboo: meeting his public. "They expect me to be weird, but I refuse, and they're obviously disappointed." But on the printed page he is still as weird as Price and Arno are wonderful.

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