Kalo--fact or fiction? A partial solution

adam louis stephanides

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Aug 28, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/28/96

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Armed with the back cover of _Palookaville_ #9, I looked
at page 37 of every 1951 _New Yorker_. No Kalo. It
occurred to me that Seth might have gotten the year
wrong, so I got the idea of looking up "Czechoslovakia"
(which is what the text on the page Seth shows is about)
in the _Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature_ for the
years surrounding 1951. What I discovered was that
page 37 of the Sept. 23, 1950 _New Yorker_ is identical to
the page Seth shows, *except* that the Kalo cartoon
Seth shows is replaced by a cartoon by somebody else.

This leaves three possibilities, as I see it:

1) Kalo is fictional.

2) Kalo is real, but never appeared in the _New Yorker_;
that part is an invention of Seth's.

3) Kalo did appear in the _New Yorker_, but for some reason
Seth wishes to create mystification on this subject.

--Adam

James Langdell

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Aug 29, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/29/96

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I'm clutching at straws here but here's another possibility:

4) The Kalo cartoon only appeared in a special edition of that
issue of The New Yorker to enable it to provide enough "Canadian
content" to permit its sale in that country.

--James Langdell jam...@eng.sun.com
Sun Microsystems Menlo Park, Calif.

Mikes4word

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Aug 29, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/29/96

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Wasn't it established that Kalo is fictional? ( I could be wrong)

adam louis stephanides

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Aug 29, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/29/96

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jam...@Eng.Sun.COM (James Langdell) writes:

>I'm clutching at straws here but here's another possibility:

>4) The Kalo cartoon only appeared in a special edition of that
> issue of The New Yorker to enable it to provide enough "Canadian
> content" to permit its sale in that country.

This is highly unlikely, for two reasons:

1) The caption to the Palookaville cartoon is not in the same style
of type as the New Yorker used for its captions at the time.
(It looks to me like the style of captions used by Esquire,
so possibly Seth copied the caption from Esquire; I say "copied
the caption" because...)

2) The more I compare the cartoon in Palookaville #9 to Seth's
acknowledged work (including stuff from before the Kalo storyline)
the more convinced I am that Seth drew it.

On the other hand, the cartoon on the back cover of #5 doesn't
look so much like Seth's acknowledged stuff to me. So maybe
that one is a genuine Kalo. Either that, or Seth for some
reason made a much greater effort to disguise his style in #5
than in #9.

--Adam

adam louis stephanides

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Aug 29, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/29/96

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mikes...@aol.com (Mikes4word) writes:

>Wasn't it established that Kalo is fictional? ( I could be wrong)

AFAIK, it was never established, only asserted.

--Adam

Detour Filmproduction

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Aug 31, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/31/96

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Mikes4word (mikes...@aol.com) wrote:
: Wasn't it established that Kalo is fictional? ( I could be wrong)

I'm guessing that Kalo was real, but the situations and backstory are
invented. That is, therre was a cartoonist named Kalo, and Seth (see,
there's our first clue..Seth isn't even his real name...) made up a
biography for him after only getting so far in his own research.

clark walker