Foreword to Revised CARtoons by Andy Singer

By Jane Holtz Kay

Stop that car! Follow that cartoon! Or, to invoke Andy Singer in the first edition of this book: follow that CARtoon. And so he did, to the joy of followers who, like me, relish the chance to actually see the car culture lambasted in his viciously delicious caricatures.

The images didn't send the world into under-drive but enough followers grabbed a copy to exhaust the supply. So here we are again. As car gluttony does ever-enlarging mischief (think Iraq oil war and CO2 emissions), Andy and Carbusters follow their sell-out first edition to continue to spread the word.

The inspired images of the first edition, plus a few additions, display this delightfully mean-spirited take on the voracious appetites of car gluttons with Andy's sometimes surreal, sometimes sarcastic sense of humor-- as dark and bold as his art. His mordant, mischievous outlook takes on the enemy and reminds us that you can hoist the car by its own petard. And enough readers agreed to encourage us to offer more of the same as the ever expanding vehicles and roadways in the traditional "first world" nations but equally in their industrializing "peers."

Considering the surreal-cum-comic implications of the fact that America's car population is increasing at six times the rate of its human one and you wonder why it doesn't inspire either humor or horror (or both) on all fronts. Consider Detroit's latest ---the so-called "clean car," a laughable oxymoron for the car's takeover of the landscape and shooting of greenhouse gases into the air. Don't look at this book as a horror show or comic book, however. The words and statistics that fill its pages are informative and useful, a true-to-life tale amplifying Andy Singer's art.

I came upon Andy and his cartoons though a mutual friend in the anti-car culture, a growing body of folks who range from environmentalists to every-day would-be walkers. Andy had acquired his early anti-auto impulses from reading what Robert Moses The Powerbroker did to maul New York, and he could see plenty of the same even in Boston. The walkable American city, the so-called Hub, is a sometimes kick-tire community where you can get around on two feet or two wheels or two rails. But here, too, being car-free is a minority choice.

Visualizing, or envisioning, as the New Age hawkers call it, is a powerful tool. And our car culture invites it. As the automobile becomes more implicated in climate change, one activist describes driving as throwing a one-pound bag of carbon out the window every mile. This collection of comic art shows the ever wider visual and verbal range of opposition. "The Road to Hell," as Andy captions one drawing, is "Paved." And almost four years since this book made its way into several countries and continents, the need is even greater.

The cartoonist who penned the words to this music and the Car Busters organization, a delightfully peripatetic crew of anti-car crusaders, who support its ongoing life in this second edition, deserve 90-mile-an hour applauseŠor should one say 3-mile an hour accolades (the rate of the pedestrian) to keep us from what Andy calls "CARmageddon."

With quotes and statistics, this book continues his journey through Autoland and nimbly displays our travails with this devilish instrument of toxins and pollutants, of sprawl and ecological disaster. Anyone who cares about the fate of our warming, asphalted earth where vehicle-spewn greenhouse gases ravage the climate, will savor and, hopefully, find inspiration in this splendid CARtoon attack, renewed for an enlarging audience.

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