Shoo Shoo, Sugar Daddy

PETER ARNO'S SIZZLING PLATTER (118 pp.)--Simon & Schuster ($2.95).

Where, oh where is that plump, goggle-eyed sugar daddy with the wing collar and the clipped white mustache, who always knew the one sure way to every bubble-breasted little golddigger's heart? "Still around, but dying out," reports Cartoonist Arno. "He got hit hard by the crash and all but vanished under a bale of taxes in the '30s. Nowadays you see all kinds of people in my drawings--cab drivers, boxers, doormen--people you never saw there before. Sign of the times."

Number eight in his caravan of cartoon collections, Peter Arno's Sizzling Platter revives the gawking, girl-crazy old hell-raiser for a few sad appearances. He still lassoes his prey with diamond necklaces ("You certainly know my Achilles' heel, Mr. Benson"), buys yachts ("How many does it--er--sleep?"), invests in mink ("She got it by going 'brrrr' in front of Bergdorf's"). But what may be his final fling finds him corralled at last by a barbed-wire surtax: while his stern better half sits guard near by, the fat, fading Park Avenue playboy casts a hungry eye toward a torch singer's double exposure--on television.

Of late years Cartoonist Arno, never timid in his technique, has broadened his brush stroke and simplified his situations ("I hate messing around with complicated backgrounds"). Some up-&-coming Arno types: the chinless, chestless little husband, and the ferocious, terrapin-eyed old girl of 50 who admires ballplayers ("We do sell them sometimes, lady, but only to other teams"). Arno likes best the gagless, slapdash sketches of clowns and nudes with which he has padded out his book, even hopes to hang them in a "serious" one-man show later this season. But he admits that he finds his fans (and the editors of The New Yorker, where most of his work appears) unrelenting. "They have to have a joke," he says sadly, "or they want no part of it." Platter buyers will quickly see why.

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