Edward Steed’s Posthuman Comedy

Ivan Kreilkamp “blasts through ordinary perception” in Edward Steed’s “Forces of Nature: A Book of Drawings.”

By Ivan KreilkampOctober 30, 2025

• Comics

EDWARD STEED’S PUBLISHER Drawn & Quarterly trumpets him, not without cause, as “the greatest single panel cartoonist since Charles Addams.” If you read The New Yorker, where Steed began publishing in 2013, you have probably been seeing Steed’s work there for years, whether or not you ever started noticing his authorship and looking out for his new work in every issue, as I did. Steed’s cartoons, gathered into the brilliant collection Forces of Nature: A Book of Drawings last year, combine Addams’s mordant, very dark visual jokes with George Booth’s domestic squalor (silently witnessed by too many cats and dogs) and Roz Chast’s comedies of modern urban anxiety. Like these predecessors, Steed uses a minimalist black line on unadorned white backgrounds to produce hilarious, concise comic puzzles whose philosophical implications you may find yourself pondering long after the first LOL.

Steed’s approach to cartooning typifies what literary scholar Mark McGurl has defined as “posthuman comedy,” an aesthetic mode in which a traditionally human-scaled perspective is overwhelmed by awareness of the “vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman world.” Ever since the birth of the novel, McGurl writes, “artistic seriousness” has been associated with realism—and realism, in turn, with “a reasonable-seeming correspondence between representation and ordinary adult perceptual experience.” But posthuman comedy provides a countertradition that includes artworks “willing to risk artistic ludicrousness in their representation of the inhumanly large and long,” works “that set themselves the task of scaling our vision dramatically up or down or both, blasting through ordinary perception to the most surprising vistas we can imagine.” McGurl offers, as one exemplar of such counterrealistic art, the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories aimed for what the author, in one of his letters, called an “aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast […] abyss of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions.” In Lovecraft’s weird tales of Cthulhu and suchlike monsters, McGurl argues, human beings, faced with the unimaginable vastness of all that is inhuman, grasp their own trivial and frightening insignificance.

If posthuman comedy aims to “blas[t] through ordinary perception” in order to “scal[e] our vision dramatically up or down or both,” Steed’s cartoons emphatically fit the bill. Many of his jokes rely on jolts or surprises of scale or perspective that undermine human/nonhuman distinctions or ask us to consider how the world would appear from an other-than-human perspective. In one cluster within Steed’s collection that I think of as his “homunculus” cartoons, we see characters who have shed or lost, or perhaps never possessed, the usual human skeleton, rendering them disquieting piles of flesh. These barely human lumps are faintly Lovecraftian beings, dropped into the cheerful pages of The New Yorker. Steed renders the premise of a “lost” human skeleton literally in a cartoon of travelers waiting for their bags at an airport luggage carousel. The viewer’s eye goes first to an unexpected item rotating on the carousel: along with the usual suitcases is a large, fully-articulated skeleton. Then we notice, among the waiting travelers, one of Steed’s homunculi, with what can just be distinguished as two legs and two arms flopping loosely from a mass of flesh, topped by a potato-like head with a melancholy expression. It’s left to our imaginations to ponder what produced this scenario: is this the manner in which the man always travels, checking his skeleton as baggage and then rejoining it at the end of the trip, or did some travel mishap lead to this situation—perhaps the airline did not allow his skeleton as a carry-on? His glum look suggests to me that it may not, now, be a simple matter to recombine his bones and flesh.

Some of the other “homunculus” comics depict the male body within ludicrous, failed attempts to achieve desired standards of attractiveness. These grotesque forms can sometimes be read as embodiments of the actual truth of the male self, one that is usually concealed or otherwise disguised. A princess makes eyes at a strapping knight in armor, taller than she, who begins to take off his helmet and his armor—finally to reveal, improbably, a tiny, naked, grinning homunculus. His stubble-flecked bald head is now somehow well below the princess’s shoulders, and his tiny penis dangles uninvitingly. In another comic, a glum woman in a housedress accompanied by two companions enters an apartment that is filled almost entirely by a heap of flesh, topped by an evilly grinning face punctuated with prominent bushy eyebrows. “He’s still quite handsome, despite what happened,” she is telling her friends. On a closer look, we can detect two tiny residual legs poking out of what is otherwise a formless human puddle. The woman’s remark recalls Diane Arbus’s statement regarding her attraction to the people she called “freaks”: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” This man, “still handsome,” glories in his terrible state. Like the seemingly attractive knight who turns out to be a four-foot-tall bald lump, he offers a hilariously extreme instance of male self-regard in the face of all evidence.

Another self-reflexive cluster of Steed’s comics concerns the process of creation. In a still-life studio session, three similar-looking bohemian painters—intensely concentrating men with mustaches and berets—focus closely on their depictions of a skull, propped on a stool in the center of the room. Next to them, similarly scowling with aesthetic absorption, a living tree is also painting: not the skull, but the stool on which it rests. A beret perches on the top of the tree. As is often the case with Steed’s work, it may take a moment to grasp the joke here: all four of these artists are painting symbols of death, but to a tree, the memento mori is the wooden stool rather than the human skull.

Sometimes Steed’s creative artists are divine ones. In one cartoon, God is looking over the animals he has made: a fish, a cat, a bird, a turtle, and so on. Next to him, smiling with an imploring gesture, is an eager angel who has produced his own crazily misshapen creatures: what appears to be a kind of hedgehog, with one foot; a three-legged lump wielding a single crab claw; a grinning squid-like thing with hair; and … a platypus. God is saying, with irritation, “Okay, fine. I’ll use one of yours.” Many Steed comics could be titled with the Yiddish proverb, “Man plans, and God laughs,” but the God who interferes with human plans here can sometimes seem simply depressed. In “The Adventures of God,” a smiling man on a seashore gradually prepares a picnic lunch over several panels, until a huge hand descends and idly flicks him over the horizon. The final panel shows a downcast, obviously bored God (some adventure!). Creators often get tired of their usual creations, and they sometimes make demented or horrific things simply to entertain themselves. This is one explanation for the persistence of horror as a genre.

Two more comics about art and creativity. In one, a little fable of creative failure, two men are sitting in the waiting room at the patent office. One man, smiling with self-satisfaction, has brought with him an upright vacuum cleaner. Next to him, crestfallen, is another man with the device he had hoped to patent, also designed to clean floors: a pig in a harness with blinders and a jerry-rigged holster holding up a broom on either side of his body. Any artist can sympathize with the pained realization represented here—that someone else has solved exactly the same problem that you had tackled but with infinitely greater intelligence and success. In the other comic, an artist’s spouse brings him a snack and a cup of coffee as he works in his studio. The artist, though, is a large banana who is painting one of a series of portraits, all of frowning bananas. “Just because I paint sad bananas doesn’t mean I am a sad banana,” he complains. Steed asks us to imagine: If a banana or a tree could paint, what would they see, what would they depict? And then: What irritatingly reductive assumptions would loved ones and other observers then inevitably make about their art?

We can conclude our examination with two cartoons that evoke, especially vividly, the posthuman comedy of “blasting through ordinary perception to the most surprising vistas we can imagine.” In one mise en abyme image, two architects in an office scrutinize a miniature architectural model of a city block. As one of them peers with one eye into a model building’s tiny window, the other says, “That’s where we are right now.” In the window behind them is framed an enormous, uncanny eyeball. In another cartoon, a couple—probably prospective homebuyers—are exploring the top floor of a mostly empty house. Dominating the floor is the top half of an enormous grinning giant—the Brobdingnagian counterpart to Steed’s various small homunculi. As the woman heads out, the man comments casually, “This explains the penis we saw downstairs.” Talk about risking artistic ludicrousness in the “representation of the inhumanly large and long”!