Cartoons draw new image of O’Connor

Georgia College’s recent publication, “The Cartoons of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College,” has proven that O’Connor was not only a writer, but a cartoonist as well.

The limited-edition book, edited by professor of English and editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review, Bruce Gentry, provides a glimpse of a side of O’Connor, which most people are not aware.

“The cartoons are instructive, there’s plenty of criticism of other human beings in the cartoons, but you can also see Flannery working to try to look at school life from the point of view of all of her classmates,” Gentry said. “She was trying, I think, to be sympathetic in her slightly eccentric way. She’s not just looking at people and finding fault with them, although there is satire, it’s like here’s another side to somebody you thought you knew.”

O’Connor created the cartoons for The Colonnade through the process of linoleum cutting, where an image is produced on a sheet of linoleum with a knife or gouge.  The process can be time-consuming, but it appears O’Connor was able to turn out the cartoons in a prolific manner.

“There was a time when the student newspaper came out every other week, and then there were times when it came out every week, there are dates when the cartoons are a week apart.  The cartoons appear to be responding to things happening on campus so I don’t think she had a big stockpile of them and just dribbled them out,” Gentry said.

Students familiar with linoleum cutting are surprised to find that O’Connor was able to be so prolific using the medium.

“I know enough about the technical aspects of linoleum cutting that I find it impressive to be able to do one once a week and still do it well,” junior rhetoric major Sam Cole said.

Still others are amazed that O’Connor was able to juggle such a responsibility along with her academic duties.

“That’s such hard work, I can‘t imagine doing that along with an academic workload,” political science and history major Samantha Clarke said.

O’Connor’s prolificacy is another side of the author that strays far from her usual reputation.

“You can’t revise linoleum blocks, which was completely against her character.  There’s a shift from first draft is the only draft, to I’m going to became famous as the big reviser,” Gentry said.

Special Collections worked carefully to scan the cartoons, which were on 70-year-old newsprint, onto a disk.  The cartoons were then sent to the printing office of the University of Georgia.

President Dorothy Leland was instrumental in the production of the book and even wrote a foreword to the book as proof that Georgia College still finds O’Connor more than relevant.

“It’s a statement of the school’s ongoing promotion of Flannery.  Schools have collections of writers, but quite often they stockpile it and don’t do anything about it, and that’s not what you see Georgia College doing with Flannery O’Connor,” Gentry said. “I think her alma mater is doing right by her, this is the university announcing publicly that Flannery is very important to us.”