a short history of america

Like someone said on the letter's page of the Guardian today, amidst all the obsessing over Robert Crumb, the controversial American cartoonist who is featured in the paper every day this week, there's a "far funnier and more challenging cartoonist" syndicated into the paper every day - the peerless Garry Trudeau.

I don't see Crumb as a great visionary or genius (any more than I did Hunter Thompson), but - having nodded in agreement when I read the letters page - I thought the Crumb cartoon in G2 today, when I got to it, was breathtaking. It's spread over two pages on the Guardian website, and deserves more than a moment's glance; I spent fifteen minutes poring over it. In eight frames he has crafted a static 'Short History of America', chronicling the incursion of rail and road into the American landscape and the slow, choking stranglehold of the city. His wires, snaking across the sky, are a marvellously intrusive web.

Part one is here.

And part two is here.