Airtoons

There's only one thing I like to steal.

As a remarkably law-abiding person with a track record of generally "doing the right thing" (or, as some would have it, "wimping the fuck out"), this is a shocking confession. But on at least two occasions, I've stolen air safety instruction cards, because I like to look at the cartoons.

There's something hilarious and hypnotic about the colorful instruction cards airlines use to teach passengers about air safety. They're droll, yet morbid, featuring amusing little colorful happy people behaving with perfect presence of mind as their 747 ditches into the Atlantic. Moments later, we find our cartoon protagonists clinging to immaculately clean and buoyant seat cushions as they await their inevitable death.

The fascination exuded by these cards is not limited to small children and the occasional online journalist. New York Web designer Taber Buhl found the cartoons appealing enough to scan 'em in, add captions and then publish the resulting comics on his web site, airtoons.com. That was a year ago, as of this February, and his site has met a warm public response, including occasional reprints in the virtual pages of online humor juggernaut Modern Humorist.

Buhl, however, is not exactly a traditional humorist, and it shines in the way his site uses language. "Mostly I think it comes from my weird assed childhood," Buhl said in an e-mail interview. "I was a weird kid. You should see the kind of stuff I wrote on my dad's word processor back when he had hair."

His method is simple: He blends the occasional dollop of ghetto-style profanity with a thick paste of dry, urbane wit to make sometimes laugh-out-loud funny captions.

The resulting cartoons tend to look a little like this:

As with any artistic enterprise, the quality varies, and when airtoons err, they tend to err toward the gutter. Is it funny to draw a cock onto a cartoon of a guy gripping an airplane door? Maybe. Appropriate to the site? Yes. In good taste? No. In the cartoons where off-color humor works, it's hilarious as hell, but in those where it doesn't, it tanks.

In a lucky break for the naturally squemish, journalistic intervention resulted in the creation of a "clean" incarnation of the Airtoons site.

"A guy from the Washington Post said he wanted to write up Airtoons in his article but his editor wouldn't let him talk about it because of the content," Buhl said. "So I whipped up a clean version just for him (and all the kiddies out there who are too scared to click "Dirty.") Which was probably a mistake since now it's kind of like two web sites to maintain."

Both versions of the site are nicely laid out, crisply designed and easy to navigate. The site's text-based universal navigation bar clearly lays out your various options, and its judicious use of white space and nicely formatted fonts makes it a pleasure to interact with. Extras like polls (Which would you prefer? Falling 30 feet or eating a dead bird?), reader mail, and a picture of the day mark this site as a true work of love and craft.

From a purely literal standpoint, Airtoons stand out — they're interpretations of iconographic safety instructions printed by corporations to teach their customers how to prepare for death on an airplane. From a humor standpoint, they're solid gold.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)