Karandash

An elephant pink crawled outta the sink
and snuggled up in my bed
A purple mole’s in the goldfish bowl,
he’s trying to steal a drink*

Today’s post was originally planned as a panegyric to Larry Marder’s Beanworld, but I quickly realized that attempting to write about it was a bit like trying to dissect a joke. Here I am, then, doing a 180 degree turn to talk about a Soviet cartoonist.

Evgeniy Milutka (Евгений Милутка, b. 1946) was a teacher of Russian literature by profession, but his proclivities clearly lay elsewhere. After teaching in middle school for a few years, he officially switched to the career of a cartoonist in the early 1970s, and quickly rose to the ranks of the best known caricaturists in the USSR, in part thanks to his long-lasting (from mid seventies to mid eighties) collaboration with satirical magazine Krokodil (see Krokodil Smiles: Cartoons in the USSR).

I am most interested, however, in the new, kid-oriented direction his work took in the 1980s, namely the cartoons/comics published within the pages of Веселые Картинки (something like ‘funny pictures’ in translation), a literature-bent humour magazine for kids. Founded in 1956, it was still sort-of around (with some financial issues) when I was a child, and my grandfather, who was always very preoccupied with making sure I grew up knowledgeable and smart (sorry, grandpa?), was kind enough to buy me a subscription.

An issue from October 1986, with a cover by Milutka. It features the 8 ‘merry little people’ that were the mascots of this journal and whose adventures Milutka illustrated. This included **Karandash** (which in Russian means ‘pencil‘), the boy with the pencil nose; **Cipollino** (little onion), the boy with an onion head, from Gianni Rodari’s Cipollino, a tale that was so popular in the Soviet Union that we even have a Cipollino stamp; **Buratino**, the Russian Pinocchio; **Neznayka**, literally translated to ‘don’t know’, a favourite character from Nikolai Nosov‘s merry trilogy of fairy-tales; **Petrushka**, a character from Slav folk puppetry; **Samodelkin**, the boy robot whose name translates to something like ‘do-it-yourselfer’; **Hurvínek**, a character from a Czech puppet duo; and the only girl, **Thumbelina**.

The first thing that jumps out is that Milutka’s strips are really weird. Green elephants, watermelon men, mosquitoes capable of lifting a person, bats in a cavern made out of teeth, a giant spider wearing running shoes… a lot of it is most delirious delirium tremens. Milutka could aptly handle a variety of styles, but his basic, more recognizable modus operandi is extremely Slavic. The other interesting thing about his work, though you have to take my word for this, is how he squeezed in some distinctly unchildlike content into his strips. He was, after all, a caricaturist, with a keen eye honed by the sometimes subversive Krokodil.

Here is a selection from within the pages of Веселые Картинки from 1991 to 1996, which is pretty much the period I was able to follow in person.