“The humor is silly, even outrageous,” wrote Dr. Sarah Gordon, Georgia College professor emerita of English, in her introduction to the book.  “The same impulse that would later lead Flannery O’Connor to create the sharp-edged and often wickedly funny characters in her fiction drove her popular cartoons (mostly lino-cuts) in her years at GSCW…”

Gordon is the former editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review and former director of the O’Connor Studies Program at Georgia College.

The book includes a foreword by university President Dorothy Leland.

“It is a distinct honor for Georgia College to be the permanent home of the O’Connor Collection, including the cartoons originally published by Georgia State College for Women and now featured for the first time in this book,” Dr. Leland wrote in the foreword. “We are pleased that these cartoons can now reach a broader audience and further enrich Flannery O’Connor scholarship.”

The book cover features a graphic signature that O’Connor used, combining her initials, M, O’C and F (Mary Flannery O’Connor) to create a caricature of a bird.  While some of the cartoons were digitally enhanced for the publication, care was taken not to alter the art.

The cartoons originally appeared in The Colonnade student newspaper, The Spectrum yearbook, The Corinthian literary magazine and the Alumnae Journal.  Also included are cartoons that O’Connor drew earlier for The Peabody Palladium, the student newspaper of Peabody High School in Milledgeville.

The original cartoons are housed in Georgia College Special Collections, as part of its permanent O’Connor Collection, along with thousands of pages of typescripts and manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, films, letters, memorabilia and her personal library of more than 700 books and journals.