Michael McClure, San Francisco poet, novelist and playwright, has created a new form, the “Gargoyle Cartoon”—a short, mad, whimsical, funny, incisive one-act play. This series of eleven plays includes Spider Rabbit, The Meatball, Apple Glove, The Cherub, The Authentic Radio Life of Bruce Connner and Snoutburbler, and six others. John Wasserman, in the San Francisco Chronicle, says McClure is “doing to words what avant-garde musicians are doing to melody.” The characters are creatures: ogres, trolls, worms, giant snails, and meatballs. The hybrid comic-monster illustrates McClure’s biological view of man’s major problem—acting in contradiction to his true animal nature.
Gargoyle Cartoons has been performed in Berkeley and in Philadelphia. Martin Gottfried, reviewing the plays in Women’s Wear Daily, wrote: “While kidding hippie and pop culture McClure also reflects it— writes from the inside of it—and there is no other writer who does it so well, so delightfully, so poetically or, for that matter, at all. His grasp of American pop myths and an American abstraction is extraordinary. He is a poet of the visual as well as of the verbal, funny and terribly serious, and in these plays in superb form.”