Print The weekend is young, and I’m feeling partial to patty melts and Bloody Marys (with gobs of horseradish, por please). I’m Carolina A. Miranda, arts and urban design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, with the week’s essential culture news — and chihuahua imitators. Our cartoon avatars The cartoon is endlessly malleable, able to serve as a staple of children’s programming even as it questions gender norms (e.g. Bugs Bunny) or functions as a proponent of U.S. foreign policy (may I introduce you to U.S. soft power ambassador Donald Duck?). Artist Paul Pescador is interested in cartoons for those reasons but for many others, too: their saturated color, their emotionality — cartoons are pure melodrama — and their ability to render bodies in inventive ways. “There is no more abstract version of the body than the cartoon,” says Pescador. “You shift a pencil line and you make something more curved, and you make it more feminine. It can make this remarkable change to how the body is constructed.”