Updike fans know that he first aspired to be a cartoonist and was enamored with Disney, especially. And he was a fan of Big Little Books as a little fellow. But in a post today on The Paris Review website, Jeet Heer contemplates why John Updike loved comics and concludes, “While Updike might have ceased cartooning, the visual language of comics was never far from his mind.”

Heer writes, “A full inventory of the impact of cartooning on Updike’s writing would require a much longer essay. It would include a discussion of a poem that features Al Capp (creator of L’il Abner); Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s resentful affection for the girlie comic strip Apartment 3-G; the superhero references in the later Rabbit books; the story “Intermission,” about a young writer of comic strips; the novel Marry Me, which features a character who works in advertising animation; and the essays Updike devoted to cartoonists such as Ralph Barton, James Thurber, and Charles Schulz. Such a discussion would also look more deeply at the visual potency of Updike’s prose and also his habit of limning vividly grotesque secondary characters (think for example of the story “The Madman”), a fictional practice that owes as much to the tradition of caricature as to the model of Dickens.

Here’s the complete article: “Updike: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan”