The Underground Sketchbook

by Tomi Ungerer

The for-adults collection of humorous comics by the award-winning children’s book author―whom Maurice Sendak called a "marvelous cartoonist"―in a newly designed edition. Director Jonathan Miller, from his introduction to the 1964 edition: "Ungerer illustrates a world where things are coming apart, where the old unquestioned entities are at best provisional arrangements, loosely thrown together and never to be relied upon." The humorous comics and illustrations collected in Underground Sketchbook are as timely now as they were then, if not moreso. This is a powerful dose of visual ingenuity, moral outrage, and bemused disgust at the human comedy. Two-color illustrations.

Genres: Art, Comics, Erotica

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2020

About the author

Jean-Thomas "Tomi" Ungerer was a French illustrator best known for his erotic and political illustrations as well as children's books.

Reviews

[Cail Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up a couple times over the last two weeks and it just didn’t really grab me, although the drawings are very evocative and not at all like his picture books. it feels like a cross between Tim Burton’s drawings and the loose line work of Saul Steinberg.

[Austin Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ideas in Ungerer's work presented here are full of depth and complexity, and his simple style gives them a directness with the observer. There are no extraneous details, no distractions. Much like the subjects in The Underground Sketchbook, the observer must come face-to-face with the crudeness and hopelessness in the world brought upon by an ideology and one's own wicked pursuit of happiness through Ungerer's lens, a world that is black-and-white and bleeds red. The veil of romantic perception is not simply lowered, but snatched, and in this motion Ungerer shows us the darker side: A lady holding her child's hand in the vice of a lobster claw, a woman binding a man to a pillar with a umbilical cord still linked to their baby, A man constricted by a snake that has metamorphosed from a cord plugged into the wall. Ungerer constantly reminds us that the objects of our desire and the lifestyles we choose can cause us tremendous pain and sorrow without our realization of the cause (or with our realization, denial). We sometimes are so taken by our romanticized perception of the world, we fail to see the red dripping from the tightly sewn veil.

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent sociocultural commentary on the radical movements of the 60s- women’s sexual freedom, war, and suburban malaise.
Excellent introduction by Jonathan Miller, who writes that Ungerer “explore[s] the mysteries in simultaneously stripping down work to its most primitive while telling the most sophisticated stories”

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know Tomi Ungerer as a children’s illustrator. This is not for kids! It’s full of dismembered bodies and bodies fused with machines in an Akiralike Cronenbergian fashion. The only color besides black is Red, red blood ominous red lipstick, red lobster claws. This book has a good introduction by Jonathan Hiller that describes the dissolution of bodies within Ungerer's work & how they depict the scrambled times of the 60s, and that the literal dismembering of bodies during the holocaust fried everyone’s brains. The drawings are often comical but also pretty bleak and/or gruesome. Marriage is depicted as stigmata, a couple nails their hands together on a table. Another man sits at a table with several nails hammered through. I wish I'd had more time to look at each image.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the ideas are what the kids might call cringe but the line work is sublime.

[Dan Burt · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars.

[Ruth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I just don't get these?