NEW YORK— Given the scale of the art scene in New York, it’s not surprising how often unplanned, or at least unannounced, themes run through all sorts of exhibitions and events that happen to be going on at the same time. I was delighted to see that R Crumb (a.k.a. Robert Crumb), one of graphic art’s true iconoclasts, had an exhibition open at David Zwirner last week. Presumably this was intended as a tie-in with the Whitney Museum’s “Summer of Love” show of psychedelic art, in which Crumb is featured, and which opens May 24, but it set me to thinking about current shows in which the influence of cartooning of one sort or another is evident.

At Morgan Lehman, there’s a wonderful, witty little show called “Other Achievements of Note,” by Philip Knoll, who is clearly influenced by Crumb and other cartoonists, and who I am sure will not mind me saying so. With typical attention to those of us on the very lowest rung of the collecting ladder, the gallery has produced a Knoll jigsaw puzzle in an edition of 100 at $100.

Farther south on Tenth Avenue, at Max Lang, there’s another remarkable example of cartooning by the young German/French couple Mrzyk & Moriceau. The spirit of the artists’ work is evident in their exhibition titles, which come from James Bond movies. For “A View to a Kill,” they have taken works from Max Lang’s holdings—including pieces by Haring, Picasso, Warhol, and Wesselmann—and added a few entertaining amendments. The results, such as the guy plugging in a Warhol Electric Chair, are often laugh-out-loud funny.

Rather different in tone—and, to be frank, rather less successful—is Dan Perjovschi’s installation, What Happened to Us, the latest offering in MoMA’s Projects series. This is the Romanian artist’s first solo museum show in the United States. He spent a couple of weeks drawing Sharpie cartoons on the east wall of MoMA’s atrium last month, responding on a daily basis to events in the news. The result, despite the frequently dark subject matter, is a real crowd pleaser. There’s even a free newspaper in which a number of Perjovschi’s drawing are reproduced.

Darker still, and stemming from a quite different sort of cartoon world, is Jim Dine’s new exhibition of painted wooden sculptures of Pinocchio at Pace Wildenstein. Dine was always the most pessimistic and introspective of the major artists of the Pop generation, and Italy’s magical wooden boy has been haunting his art for some time. In Dine’s hands, Pinocchio becomes a heartbreaking self-portrait, at once naive and tragic. In my opinion, Dine’s work has rarely looked stronger.

Is it just me, or do other people find something essentially cartoon-ish about Gilbert & George? They’ve always reminded me of Thomson and Thompson from the Tintin books. Anyway, there is definitely something darkly cartoon-like about the artists’ harshly contoured dystopian photo works. Though their huge retrospective doesn’t open in Brooklyn until the end of its world tour in October 2008, Gilbert & George were in town last week feverishly signing copies of their two-volume The Complete Pictures: 1971-2005 at Aperture, Lehmann Maupin, and Sonnabend. (Look for my interview with them on ARTINFO in the coming weeks.)

Finally, I wound up back at MoMA to see “Comic Abstraction,” the show that really should have provided the context for all of this other stuff, but doesn’t quite. Maybe that’s because the exhibition’s organizers wanted to maintain the thread of abstraction running through it, as if cartooning has a greater effect on mood than appearance. Or maybe it’s simply too small a show to carry the significance that was intended for it. Whatever its shortcomings, there’s some lovely work in “Comic Abstraction,” including Sue Williams’s Mom’s Foot Blue and Orange (1997).