Prices in Line

George Price (who drew that series of levitated men, floating up near the ceiling) has published a new book of cartoons. His latest collection is called Who's In Charge Here? (Farrar & Rinehart; $2.50), and its first printing of 28,500 was already sold out last week. The work includes no supernaturally levitated figures, but in one drawing an echelon of six flying fish completes a bank-turn above their tank in a pet store. The proprietor explains to a customer: "We don't sell them singly, Madam. It breaks up the formation."

Who's In Charge Here? contains altogether 159 of the delicate lunacies, the scenes of bizarre domestic confusion exquisitely rendered with a crow quill pen which have made The New Yorker's George Price one of the most popular of U.S. comic artists. One industrious hobby ist is shown completing a parlor-sized steam engine right in the parlor it is sized to fit. His wife wanly observes: "Some times I even wish he'd get interested in another woman." Another character, the father of a crowded and bewildered family, is at last able to explain to them the curio which has long adorned their mantelpiece -- "Professor Caswell tells me this damn thing happens to be a Ubangi symbol of fertility." Another woebegone figure, a chicken farmer, is discovering the literal truth of the description on his chicken feed, "Lay or Bust." The stubborn hens are exploding all over the place. There is an angry hound who, with a great ripping of one pants leg, yanks a man into a room where two ladies are seated ("I divorced him years ago, but our retriever keeps bringing him back"). And there are two contestants glaring at each other from corners stacked with magazines ("They're seeing who can collect the National Geographic for the longest time without a break").

He Looks Like His Work.

Slim, 42-year-old George Price looks most like one of his own harassed, slack-jowled characters when he is drawing them. He commonly throws his face out of joint trying to get their wacky crankinesses into line. Small-mustached, small and quick of eye, he looks normally like the art director of a small advertising agency. He was one once. Before that he inspected solder connections for General Electric.

Born in Coytesville, N.J., Price grew up near the late, famed water-colorist and graphic artist "Pop" Hart, and attributes his earliest and soundest inspiration to that master of the homely subject. Price has never been to art school. For his cartooning guidance he uses models, a big collection of his own candid sketches -- and memory. He prefers the last.

Price lives with his wife, three sons and a notable collection of personally refinished antiques, in an old Dutch house in Tenafly, NJ. The improbable pieces of furniture which clutter up some of his cartoons are often clearly visible in the neighborhood of Tenafly. Price thinks that Who's In Charge Here may not be as strong a book as his first and favorite, Good Humor Man. But, on the basis of the evidence, few of Price's admirers will be disappointed.

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