'Inappropriate and angry and truthful in some odd way'

You have to love the Sunday Times ...

In today's "Possessed" column, David Colman talks to Daniel Clowes about one of the cartoonist's prized possessions: a Napoleon Popsie doll he found 14 years ago at a junk shop.

A gem from the golden age of novelty — the late 1950's through the early 70's — Popsie dolls are weird, hand-painted wooden figurines, once sold in gift shops and drugstores. They speak, cartoon style, in word balloons: when their heads are pressed down, a sign pops out. A woebegone cracked egg cries, "Help!" A sickly green man smoking three cigarettes (and holding two more) swears, "Gonna quit tomorrow."

"All of these figures have an aggressive quality to them," Clowes tells The Times. "There's some kind of distorted screwed-up anger, some postatomic angst that got blunted over the years, like the artist was trying his best to be cute, but underneath something crawls out that's inappropriate and angry and truthful in some odd way."