Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head

The cartoonist Kliban (full name Bernard "Hap" Kliban) has been a hero of mine for over thirty years. In the mid - 1970's my brother was working as a musician on cruise ships, sailing out of Miami. At the time I used to draw, for mine and his amusement, what I like to think of as a kind of proto-Spinal Tap cartoon strip about the life and times of a rock band, Ricky Stack and the Bonzos. As a gift upon returning from one of his trips my brother gave me a book of cartoons he’d spotted in a Miami bookshop which he thought I’d like. There was something odd and unfamiliar about the shape of the book, which was about eight inches by five, landscape format. The drawing on the cover showed a man sitting unaccompanied at a restaurant table. People, as I later learned, are quite often alone in Kliban’s world. The man’s manner is expectant. His napkin is fastened around his neck and he clutches his cutlery at the ready. A waitress, none-too-bright-looking, it has to be said, is serving him an extraordinary plate of food of gargantuan proportions. The book’s title takes the form of a wise old proverb, only it was one I’d somehow missed up until that point. It was the first of many pieces of sage Klibanian advice I’d take to heart and dispense to others over subsequent years. It was this : "Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head" .

I opened the book to find the "Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head" theme revisited and expanded upon in a more obviously instructive manner.