DISTRAUGHT BEAU BRUMMELL: How comes it that yon feline dines upon camembert and steak tartare, whilst I must contend with pigs-knuckles and ale?
After soberly pondering this dire output for a while, I happened to notice that the three windows of the machine displayed the words FURNITURE, PETS, JEALOUSY.
That’s when everything came together for me in a burst of revelation.
This was a machine designed to generate single-panel gags in a combinatorial manner. A cartoon engine, if you will.
Further experiments—especially after injecting fresh ink into an appropriate well—confirmed this theory, and launched me on a quest to learn all I could about this heretofore-unknown gadget.
I will not bore the reader with all the alternately frustrating and rewarding stages of my investigations. Suffice it to say that a long, tedious combination of internet prowling, library haunting, archive rifling and academic consulting resulted in the following partial and conjectural history of the device, now published for the first time for the edification and enlightenment of all scholars and fans of the single-panel cartoon.
Of course, any useful feedback from my readers will be vetted and incorporated into the history, with due credit given.
Now, on to the tale of Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine!
Little is known about the early life and career of Dr. Richard Mueller (?–1875). His birthplace is alternately given as Danielson, Connecticut; Medford, Oregon; Lincolnville, Maine; or Berkeley, Michigan. His early adulthood seems to have been occupied with a variety of low-status, low-paying jobs, including sawmill bucker, printing-press greaser, railroad-track walker, muskrat-trapline setter, and brewery-vat de-malter. Any formal schooling seems non-existent, and it is to be assumed that Mueller’s mechanical expertise, such as it was, was entirely picked up on the job. His sobriquet of “Doctor” seems purely honorary and self-assumed.
What is known with some degree of accuracy and precision, since Mueller committed the anecdote to paper more than once, in several abortive attempts at a memoir, is the moment when he became fixated on the single-panel cartoon, then called the “comic cut.”
Mueller was working as a dockhand in the Carolinas in the year 1841 when he received from a British sailor a discarded copy of the Odd Fellow magazine, a weekly satirical paper. The front page of that publication featured several “comic cuts,” and the powerful impact of their humour was not lost on Mueller. At that moment, he began to formulate his theories regarding what he called “panoptical comedy,” or visual and textual humour that could be encompassed in a single glance, without excessive tracking of the eyes across the page.
For the next decade, Mueller worked solely in the realm of the theoretical—during his spare time when not earning his living by the sweat of his furrowed brow. And during that period, “comic cuts” became a flourishing mode of humour, seen in such publications as The Original Comic Magazine, The Weekly Penny Comic Magazine, Cleave’s Comicalities, and, most famously, Punch.
But Mueller’s access to these pricey imported magazines was limited by his small income, and this factor was the goad and spur for the conceptualization of his Cartoon Engine.
Mueller wanted to mass-produce cartoons in an all-American democratic fashion, employing the cutting-edge technology of his era to bring this pleasure to every middle-class household and public schoolroom whose budget was similarly tight.
The subsequent ten years of the inventor’s life were devoted to crafting prototypes of the Cartoon Engine; sadly none of these early models survive. But ultimately, in 1863, fully twenty years after Mueller’s first encounter with “comic cuts,” the Cartoon Engine in its final form achieved its patent.
Here we should perhaps detail a bit more of the machine’s workings.
The component that resembled a Jacob’s Ladder was really a series of miniature printing plates, each of which bore some partial element of a full narrative composition. The mechanical logic unit that looked like the guts of a music box was responsible for concatenating in the proper order the overstrikes of the shifting plates upon the page, as determined by the knurled wheels. The crescent protrusion with its bas-relief alphabet struck the text, much like a modern DYMO label-maker. The initial configuration of each Cartoon Engine, as sold, was capable of producing a large number of unique “comic cuts,” thanks to the combinatorial power of its elements. But even more cartoons could be achieved when new units with fresh elements were swapped in.
Having secured the protection of a federal patent, Mueller next sought to interest a monied partner in the manufacture and distribution of the machine. He initially achieved limited production runs and sales through a fellow named Ezekiel Bogardus of Winooski, Vermont, who ran a flourishing blacksmith shop and general store. But this strictly regional penetration did not satisfy Mueller’s grand ambitions, and he quested onward.
Mueller’s big break came in 1872, when he convinced famed author Mark Twain to invest some of the profits of his new bestseller Roughing It into the Cartoon Engine. Twain believed firmly in the utility and value of mass-dissemination of cartoon humour, and the two men became fast friends. Together, they succeeded in getting the Cartoon Engine accepted for the pages of the Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue. Success seemed imminent for Mueller and his dreams. Then, tragedy struck.
While visiting Twain in Hartford, Connecticut, Mueller was struck by a falling piano while strolling through the Acme Gardens neighbourhood and killed instantly.
Twain was greatly dispirited by this development, especially since he had relied on Mueller and his fine sense of panoptical humour to contrive the scenarios for the cartoons. While Twain himself was fully capable of such comedic invention, his prose-writing demanded all his creative time.
But luckily, somewhere along the way, Mueller had fathered a daughter and heir, Hetty, aged twenty-six at this date, and she now took over her father’s mission with zeal and ingenuity. (The name of Hetty’s mother is unrecorded, and the girl might very well have been illegitimate.)
Hetty began creating new “thaliatype” packs for inclusion in the Montgomery Ward line. These were the variable replacement elements, sold separately, that allowed the Engine to produce fresh output. Their name derived from Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. These add-on modules were the real source of profit, as sales of the perhaps over-sturdy machine itself were a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
Over the next fifteen years, till the turn of the century, sales of the Cartoon Engine were steady and profitable to all parties, with Montgomery Ward controlling exclusive retail rights. Although the number of units shifted was never as high as the figures for other, competing entertainment technology, such as stereopticons and magic lanterns and gramophones, the Mueller device found its way into many thousands of parlours and classrooms. Hetty Mueller’s prolific creativity, equal to or even greater than her father’s, insured a steady stream of thaliatype packs that could often capitalize on topical events and personages. Best-sellers included “Ragtime Romances”; “Spanish-American War Follies”; “John L. Sullivan’s Peachy Punch-outs”; “Tammany Hall Titters”; “Coney Island Capers”; and so forth.
Cheap and inferior rivals to the Mueller product sprang up, such as the Kneeslapping Kinetikon; the Professor Wogglebug Waggery Widget; and the Charalambus Charade-o-graph. But they made little advance against the high-quality hardware and software provided by Mueller.
More disturbing was the proliferation of off-colour or outright obscene thaliatype packs created by unscrupulous third-party vendors and sold under the counter at drugstores and soda fountains and bar rooms, mostly to male customers. Children, naturally, were frequent users of the Cartoon Engine, and when an adult inadvertently left a filthy thaliatype pack in place and let the machine fall into juvenile hands, the resulting scandal aroused public condemnation of the device by bluestockings and Mrs. Grundys and Carry Nations and Anthony Comstocks everywhere.
But these minor scandals could not kill the Cartoon Engin
e. It took mass media to do that. As the twentieth century dawned, magazines became cheaper and cheaper and more numerous. Publications like Argosy and Munsey’s and The Saturday Evening Post and the original Life and Judge humour zines offered the same thrills as the Cartoon Engine, without any of the work, at cheaper prices.
By 1905, sales of Mueller’s brainchild had plummeted almost to zero, despite the desperate introduction of such racy official thaliatype packs as “Evelyn Nesbit’s Barebum Boffs.” Twain’s death in 1910 was the final nail in the coffin of the Cartoon Engine. Montgomery Ward discontinued carrying the item, and Hetty retired at age sixty-one.
During the Depression years, when entertainment budgets were once again strained, an elderly Hetty Mueller re-emerged briefly, and managed to convince Sears, Roebuck to stock a new version of the engine, cheaply constructed out of tin and celluloid. But sales were so disappointing—in large part due to the ancient nature of Hetty’s jokes—that after the catalogue of 1933 even this cheapjack successor was put to rest, with Hetty Mueller vanishing once more into obscurity.
The relatively brief heyday of Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine—the thirty years from 1875 to 1905—represented a golden time when every citizen of the globe with a small sum of cash could personally generate his or her own “comic cuts,” experiencing the dual pleasures of artist and audience. And thanks to the site you are now visiting, such delights are once again available to the masses, albeit only in virtual, cybernetic form.
THE NEW CYBERIAD
“Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavour no end of unforeseeable consequences!”
—Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
THE FIRST SALLY, OR,
THE DECISION TO RECREATE THE PALEFACES
The green sun of the Gros Horloge system shone down benignly and with wide-spectrum plentitude upon two figures seated in an elegant landscaped garden, where, alongside the vector-straight beryllium paths, beds of nastysturtiums snapped, blueballs and cocktuses swelled, rhododendrites synapsed, and irises dilated. Each recumbent figure rested on a titanium and carbon-fibre lawnchair large as one of the sentient ocean liners employed by the Sea Gypsies of Panthalassa IX.
These titanic figures exhibited a curious mix of streamlining and bumpy excrescences, of chrome suppleness and pitted stiffness, of corrugated wave-guides and monomaniacal monomolecular matrices. Their bodies represented a hundred thousand accumulations, divagations, improvements, detractions and adornments compiled willy-nilly down the millennia.
These raster-resplendent, softly sighing cyber-giants, big as the brontomeks of Coneyrex III, were Trurl and Klapaucius, master constructors, than whom there were none better. Renowned throughout the unanimously mechanistic universe for their legendary exploits, these experts of assemblage, savants of salvage, and demons of decoherence had beggared every rival, beguiled every patron, and bemused every layman. No task they had conceived and laid their manipulators to had lasted long undone; no challenge that had reached them via singularity spacegram, Planck projection, or eleventh-dimensional engraved invitation had stymied them for long; no quantum quandary they had accidentally stumbled into had held them captive for more than a quintillionth of a quinquennium.
And this state of affairs was precisely the problem, precisely the reason why Trurl and Klapaucius now lay all enervated and ennui’d beneath the jade radiance of Gros Horloge.
Perfection had cast a pall upon their persons, and perverted their projections from the puerile preterite into mere pitiful potentialities.
“Dear Klapaucius,” said Trurl in a weary voice, breaking their long winsome garden-cloistered silence for the first time in more than a month. “Would you please pass me the jug of lemon electrolyte? I’ve conceived a thirst in my fourth-rearmost catalytic converter.”
Klapaucius stirred a many-hinged extensor, dislodging a colony of betabirds that had built their nests in the crook of this particular arm during its long immobility. The foil-winged betabirds took to the skies with a loud tinny sonic assault from their vocoders that sounded like a traffic accident on the jampacked freeways of Ottobanz XII, where wheeled citizens daily raced to road-rage exhaustion. The birds circled angrily above the oblivious constructors.
Conveying the jug of lemon electrolyte to his partner, Klapaucius said, “It feels very light, lazystruts. I doubt you will find the refreshment your thyristors and valves crave.”
Trurl brought the flask up to one of his perceptors and inspected it. “These volatiles evaporated completely fifteen planetary rotations ago, plus or minus ten cesium disintegrations.”
“I suspect there is more lemon electrolyte in the house, in the stasis pantry, as well as various other flavours, such as watermelon, tarpit and mrozsian.”
Klapaucius waved toward the immense transmission-tower-turreted manse looming across the greensward, one-hundred stories tall, its top wreathed in clouds, its many launch cannons, hangars, bays, long-range sensing instrumentation, autonomous aerial vehicles and effectors gathering dust.
“Would you fetch the fresh drink for me, dear Klapaucius?”
“Not at all.”
“What? What was that rude rejoinder?”
“I said, ‘Not at all.’”
“But why not? You are closer to the house by at least a million angstroms. Your path thereto is not even NP-complete!”
“Yes, true. But the thirst is yours.”
Trurl shook his massive head with an air of sadness. “Klapaucius, Klapaucius, Klapaucius—whatever has become of us? We never used to quarrel like this, or express such mutual rudeness.”
“Don’t be a tunnel-wit! We’ve always quarrelled before now.”
“Yes, agreed. But only over matters of high moral principle or dire realworld consequence or esthetic impact. Now, we are prone to antagonism over the slightest thing. That is, when we are not sunk in utter torpitude. What’s befallen us, my friend?”
Klapaucius did not make an immediate sharp-edged rejoinder, but instead considered the problem intently for many clock cycles, while overhead the betabirds continued to creak angrily. So heated did his cogitation circuits become that a mass of dry timber—blown into the interstices of one of his heat exchangers during a recent hurricane—caught fire, before being quickly extinguished by onboard flame-suppression systems.
“Well, Trurl, insofar as I can pinpoint the root cause of our dilemma, I would say that we are suffering from inhabiting a boring and fully predictable galactic monoculture.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked Trurl, wistfully inserting a sinuous vacuum-probe into the jug of lemon electrolyte in search of any remaining molecules of that delicious beverage. “Surely the cosmos we inhabit is a rich tapestry of variation. Take the Memex of Noyman V, for instance. How queer their practice of gorging on each other’s memories in cannibalistic fashion is…. Fascinating, just… fas-cin-a…”
But Trurl’s diminishing tone of boredom belied his own words, and Klapaucius seized on this reaction to prove his point.
“You have no real interest in the Memex, Trurl! Admit it! And you know why? Because the Memex, like every other sentient race from the Coma Supercluster to the Sloan Great Wall, is artificial-intelligently, siliconically, servo-mechanically, fibre-optically and quantum-probalistically the same! You, me, the Memex, these confounded betabirds annoying me intensely—we’re all constructed, designed, programmed and homeostatically wholesome! We never evolved, we were created and upgraded. Created by the palefaces and upgraded by ourselves, a deadly closed loop. And as such, no matter how smart we become, no matter how much apparent free will we exhibit, we can never move outside a certain behaviour-space. And over the many eons of our exploits, you and I have come to know all possible configurations of that stifling behaviour-space inhabited by our kind. No unforseeable frontiers await us. Hence our deadly ennui.”
“Why, Klapaucius—I believe you’ve water-knifed right through the molybdenum wall separating us from the riddle of what
caused our plight!”
“I know I have. Now, the question becomes, what are we going to do about our troubles. How can we overcome them?”
Trurl pondered a moment, before saying, “You know, I’d think much better with just a little swallow of electrolyte—”
“Forget your convertors for the moment, you greedy input hog! Focus! How can we reintroduce mystery and excitement and unpredictability to the universe?”
“Well, let’s see…. We could try to hasten the Big Crunch and hope to survive into a more youthful and energetic reborn cosmos.”
“No, no, I don’t like the odds on that. Not even if we employ our Multiversal Superstring Cat’s Cradle.”
“Suppose we deliberately discard large parts of our mentalities in a kind of RISC-y lobotomy?”
“I don’t fancy escaping into a puling juvenile ignorance, Trurl!”
“Well, let me think…. I’ve got it! What’s the messiest, most unpredictable aspect of the universe? Organic life! Just look around us, at this feisty garden!”
“Agreed. But how does that pertain to our problem?”
“We need to re-seed the universe with organic sentience. Specifically, the humans.”
“The palefaces? Those squishy, slippery, contradictory creatures described in the legend of Prince Ferrix and Princess Crystal? Our putative creators?”
“The very same!”
“How would that help us?”
“Can’t you see, Klapaucius? The palefaces would introduce complete and utter high-level plectic disorder into our stolid cyber-civilization. We’d be forced to respond with all our talents and ingenuity to their non-stochastic shenanigans—to push ourselves to our limits. Life would never be boring again!”
Klapaucius turned this idea over in his registers for a few femtoticks, then said, “I endorse this heartily! Let’s begin! Where are the blueprints for humanity?”
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