POSTED NOTES: free-wheeling thoughts on New Yorker Cartoons and Cartoonists. 

Also:  The New Yorker's website (link appears below) contains twenty-nine archived posts that appeared on the magazine's blog, "Cartoonist of the Month" in February 2008. Link:www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/michael_maslin/search

 Bernie Schoenbaum and The Age of Innocence

    The passing of Bernie Schoenbaum this past week has led me to think about his time at The New Yorker.  I only met Bernie once -- it was a memorable ride in a van from mid-town Manhattan south to the Chelsea Pier studios on the lower west side. Tina Brown (then The New Yorker's editor) had oganized an Arnold Newman photo shoot to celebrate the magazine's first Cartoon Issue. A small fleet of vans ferried cartoonists from their mid-town hotel  to the shoot.  My wife, Liza Donnelly, and I were directed to a van occupied by Sam Gross, Ed Fisher, Bernie Schoenbaum and his wife. It was a rollicking ride -- the cartoonists couldn't resist making fun of my need to sit in the front seat and stare straight ahead lest I become carsick. I took a chance and looked back just once only to catch a glimpse of Bernie bouncing with the ride, one arm raised, holding onto a strap.  He was smiling.

   The New Yorker began publishing Bernie in 1974, the same year Jack Ziegler began his career there. William Shawn was editor, and Lee Lorenz had just succeeded James Geraghty as Art Editor. Bernie and Jack's work seemed to come from two different universes: Bernie's from our own and Jack's from some place far far away. Jack's work opened up the New Yorker to a zanier humor -- he was our Groucho Marx, arriving at the scene armed with absurdities.  Bernie's work picked up on the zeitgeist Donald Reilly, Frank Modell, and Lee Lorenz  (to name but a few) had established some years earlier; a northeastern  knowingness - not smug or smarmy; a world of guys in tweed sports jackets, soft plaid hats, and bad haircuts. There was a like-ability to Bernie's work.  His soft lines and washes were easy on the eyes. He had his absurd moments as well.  In a memorable drawing of his in the New Yorker (January 28, 1978) a man sitting idly in front of his television set in a book-lined room is startled by a book that's hopped off a shelf. The book says to the man, "Read me."

   His earliest New Yorker work was mostly captionless ( this is something I learned recently when going through his body of work for the magazine).  It's no easy thing to do captionless cartoons -- only a few of the magazine's cartoonists made it a large part of their worlds.  Otto Soglow, most famously with his Little King, Steinberg in his own Steinbergian way, Charles Addams (who told Dick Cavett in 1978 that he preferred doing captionless cartoons), Nurit Karlin, and most recently, John O'Brien. After a couple of years Bernie moved mostly to captioned work but he continued to sprinkle captionless drawings throughout the rest of his thirty years at The New Yorker.

   Bernie's subject matter was the fodder of his peers: businessmen, married couples, (city) street life, guys at bars at the end of a workday, people coping with modern conveniences.  If you go back and look at Bernie's work you get a feel for a slice of the times, a particular era before snark and Gawker ( Bernie's obit made it to Gawker). Along with his peers, Bernie provided us with a portrait of what now seems an age of cartoon innocence.

 -- May 20, 2010

Thurber's Unbaked Cookies

   Twenty something years ago when my wife and I moved into our home, I tacked James Thurber's New York Times obituary on my office wall, just to the left of where I work.  During creative lulls my gaze sometimes drifts over to the obit, scanning the headline, "James Thurber is Dead at 66; Writer Was Also a Comic Artist."

   "Writer Was Also a Comic Artist" ( italics mine).  How wonderful that the Times recognized Thurber's art, right there in the headline.  Though Thurber may be most remembered as a writer ( "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") his art was no less a gift to us than Charles Addams' work or Steinberg's or Hokinson's or Peter Arno's or Steig's or ________'s (you fill in the blank).

   Unlike those other giants of the field, Thurber took a lot of heat for his art; his drawing style appeared less finished than the work of his peers.  It looked as if it was done in a hurry.  Shadows and shading weren't part of his cartoon world, nor was there a dutiful representation of human anatomy.  Thurber's people had limbs that flowed in graceful lines from shoulder to hand without the hint of an elbow, and from hip to foot without suggestion of a knee. His people's eyes were accomplished with a dot and a slash, similar  to the style a child uses when he or she first learns to draw.

   New Yorker historians remember that Harold Ross, the magazine's founder and first editor, initially didn't care for Thurber's drawings. When Thurber first submitted them to The New Yorker, Ross said to him, "How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?"  It wasn't until Thurber and his friend and colleague E.B. White had a hit on their hands with their 1929 publication, Is Sex Necessary? that Ross caved, demanding to see a previously rejected Thurber cartoon: "Where's that goddamn seal drawing, Thurber?"

   Once Ross became a reluctant believer, Thurber's drawings became a fixture in the magazine ( but sadly, much less a fixture on the cover, with just a half-dozen to his credit).  As readers today speak of a Booth dog, back then it was ( and for some, still is) the Thurber dog they pictured in their mind's eye.  There was also the Thurber woman, glowering and towering over the Thurber man, the meekest sort of fellow, beleagured, and misunderstood.

   While Peter Arno's couples were, most times, in sly cahoots with eachother, Thurber's were conflicted.  Thurber, mining the humor found in the battle of the sexes, made the cartoon personal ( it's important to remember that he, unlike many of his colleagues, wrote his own captions).  Those "unbaked cookies" as Dorothy Parker so famously described Thurber's people, were knee-deep in angst, just like the rest of us.

   Like the very best cartoonists working for The New Yorker ( then and now), Thurber brought the personal to his work; he wasn't churning out gag cartoons ( i.e., illustrating comic drawings with joke captions) -- he brought some of himself onto the page.  Looking at any Thurber drawing, I "see" Thurber in it -- I'd go as far as saying I can feel his humor as well. Addams' work has the same effect on me, as does Arno's, Steinberg's and Ziegler's ( to name but a few).

   With Thurber's 115th birthday near -- he was born December 8th, 1894 -- it's time to pull The Last Flower off the shelf as well as The Thurber Carnival (if you don't have a copy, no worries! They're both still in print).  Behold, once again, or perhaps for the first time, his comic genius.

Suggested reading, viewing:

Online:

Thurber's New Yorker work can be found at  The New Yorker's Cartoon Bank: www.cartoonbank. com

On Youtube:  a 1953 animated version of "The Unicorn in the Garden" : www.youtube.com/watch 

Books (all of Thurber's books can be found online):

There are a number of Thurber biographies.  Two favorites, both still available wherever new & used books are sold online:

Thurber: A Biography  ( Dodd, Mead, 1975) by Burton Berstein

Thurber: His Life and Hard Times ( Henry Holt & Co, 1995) by Harrison Kinney

A Thurber bibliography: James Thurber: A Bibliography by James T. Bowden ( Ohio State University Press, 1968)

Video:

Adam Van Doren's documentary film, released in 2000,  Thurber, The Life and Hard Times is well worth searching for. 

Visiting:

 The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio is a must -visit for Thurberphiles:  www.thurberhouse.org/

-- November 29, 2009

Instant Office

 A while back, on The New Yorker’s website, I wrote about and posted photographs of my office -- the desk I use, and the stuff that surrounds the desk ( www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonists/2008/02/the-madhouse.html ). What I failed to mention in the piece was that I have an alternate work space ( actually two alternates, but that’s for another post).  When summer arrives, just before it’s too hot and humid to turn on the air conditioning,  my office becomes a less inviting place to be.   The painted plywood floor becomes sticky,   and the walls packed with books, records and whathaveyou really do seem to close in on me.

That’s just about the time I pack up my essential work materials (a rapidograph, a thin stack of copy paper to draw on, and an old hardcover Hammond Atlas I’ve had since I was eleven years old) and take them about twenty feet away to our living room where I settle into one of the armchairs near the room’s front windows. I place the Hammond Atlas on my lap, and the blank paper on the atlas.  Instant office.

  It is in almost everyway different than my usual office space.  There’s no privacy – it’s the living room after all.  Dogs and cats wander through, as do family members.  There are numerous windows ( my office has just one, and it’s behind me);  the lighting is from an old standing lamp instead of a desk lamp, there’s no music, and when I look up from what I’m working on I see open space before me, instead of a window-less wall three feet from my face.

Being in the middle of everything raises the distraction level into the danger zone.  It shouldn’t work well at all – it should be a disaster, but somehow it doesn’t mess up whatever it is that helps me progress from a blank piece of paper to a page filled with (I hope) promising scribbles.   In this case, for a few weeks in early summer, change is good.

 -- July 18, 2009

Surprise

In my last posted note, back in late April, I mentioned that  I didn’t have an early copy of Thurber’s  Fables For Our Time.   This past Sunday, while browsing in the dollar annex of my favorite used bookstore I spied the words “James Thurber” on an otherwise obliterated spine.  Pulling the book down off  the shelf I realized  it was a copy of Fables – not a first edition, but the Blue Ribbon Books edition that came out three years after Harper’s originally published the book in 1940.   The only oddity connected with this edition, according to Bowden’s Thurber Bibliography, is  “The page number of p.5 accidentally deleted.” – and so it is on my copy.  

What made this Sunday afternoon find particularly fun was discovering a sheaf of newspaper clippings tucked inside the book.  I’ve come across clippings before -- usually a New York Times book review – but judging by this pile of clippings  the book’s  previous owner was clearly heavily invested in Thurber.

A clipper myself,  I sometimes eye the cases of filed clippings in my office and wonder what it’s all for,  especially in this computer era where so much is archived.   This Thurber clip cache reminded me  that while so much material is archived and easily accessible on the computer, so much more is not.  Especially old newspaper articles. 

Here’s a list of some of the clippings found inside the book:

From The San Francisco Chronicle, “James Thurber Confesses to ‘Boring From Within’”, July 25, 1954. Thurber  responds to a  negative review of The Male Animal.

From The San Francisco Chronicle, “An Interview with James Thurber”, August 3, 1958.

From The Royal Gazette (I’m assuming this was published in Bermuda), “Amongst The Personalities”, April 5, 1957.

From The Denver Post, “Incomparable James Thurber Writes of Old Friends, Times” , June 22, 1952.
 
From The Denver Post, “Thurber the Leprechaun”, October 5, 1952.

The obligatory New York Times review:  in this case it's of The Wonderful O, “Hw It Wuld Be Withut It”,  May 26, 1957.

Also from The New York Times, “State of Humor in States”  by Thurber, Sept. 4, 1960  in which Thurber poses the question: “Is there a national sense of humor…?

Additionally, the pile included:

A program from Central City, Colorado’s “Central City Festival” where  A Thurber Carnival  played in 1960 ( with original cast members, Paul Ford and Peggy Cass).

And lastly, two cut-out drawings, each from Thurber collections:  the central drawing featured on the front cover of The Thurber Carnival and  the central drawing featured on the cover of Alarms & Diversions. 

Pictured below: the book and some of the clippings    

June 2, 2009

  Home At Last: Thurber & Nugent’s Male Animal

    The collection of Thurber books in this home has been incomplete on many levels for many years.  It’s a patchwork collection: some first editions, some with dust jackets, some signed, some later printings, a lot of paperbacks. The biggest hole in the collection, until a few days ago, was the absence of an early copy of The Male Animal,  Thurber’s 1940 collaboration with his friend, the actor, director and writer, Elliot Nugent.   I say “early copy” because we long ago purchased a copy of the standard soft cover playbook, but it doesn’t contain the Thurber drawings appearing in the Random House hardcover, nor does it sport the Thurber drawing of a dancing couple found on the hardcover’s dust jacket .

    So why, until recently, wasn’t this volume on our Thurber shelf with its team mates?  The quick answer is that I’m fond of stumbling across books in used books stores.  Nothing beats scanning a humor section and discovering a long sought after  -- or even better; an unfamiliar title.  I do have my limits though – in this case I waited thirty-nine years to intersect with a copy of  The Male Animal.    It took all of a few seconds to order a reasonably priced copy online.

    Until our Male Animal arrived this week, I’d seen just one hard cover copy of the book:  in an exhibit of Thurber drawings in Cornwall, Connecticut, where Thurber permanently set down roots in 1945. 

    The book, laying flat on a shelf in a glass case, looked, to me, like the odd bird it was.  Odd, because it was a collaboration – his second and last ( his first was the legendary 1929 effort with E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?).    Also strange was the cover design, which, to be honest, looks a bit uninspired, compared to all other Thurber cover designs.  It resembles a flyer for a play more than anything else, and as The Male Animal is a play, perhaps the cover suits.

    Flipping through the book, my first thought was ‘if only the illustrations had captions” – they seem as if they were headed that way as most of the drawings have an character with an open mouth ( in the cartoon universe it is gospel that the open mouth    indicates who’s speaking in a cartoon)   Still, the illustrations  have a great deal of energy,  drawn in the deceptively off-handed Thurber way that caused some to dismiss his work, and caused others to consider him the cartoon world’s Matisse.

    As is my habit when I get a new used Thurber book I go to Edwin Bowden’s wonderful James Thurber: A Bibliography  (Ohio State University Press, 1968) and look up the book.  Usually I’m looking to see how many first edition copies were printed ( 3000 – 4000 in this case) as well as how it fits in chronologically with Thurber’s other books.  The Male Animal was preceeded by one of his very best books, The Last Flower and  followed by Fables for Our Time.  Seeing the latter title,  I suddenly realized we didn't have an early edition.  We have paperback editions, and a handsome later hardcover edition, but not one copy of the slightly oversized first edition  from 1940.  And so, the hunt begins -- but I'm not going to wait thirty-nine years. 

 April 23, 2009

 Sweating the Details:  That Was the Cartoon That Wasn't

   The most talked about New Yorker "cartoon" of 2008 wasn't a cartoon, it was Barry Blitt's now infamous July 21st New Yorker fist-bump Obama cover.  Such is the confusion out there that the Blitt cover is now routinely labeled a cartoon.  I know: it's a small thing to worry over, but hey -- when there are so many difficult and complex problems in the world to fret over, explore, and ( ideally) resolve,  why not get something this simple right? 

    So, taking the enormous personal risk of being seen as having way too much time on my hands, here's the skinny:  A New Yorker cover is a New Yorker cover, it's not a cartoon.  A New Yorker cartoon is a New Yorker cartoon -- it's not a cover, unless the Editor decides to buy a cartoon and run it as a cover.  At that point it is no longer a cartoon ( and the reverse is true; the Editor may buy a cover idea to run as a cartoon, in which case the cover idea is no longer a cover idea, it's a cartoon). My New Year's resolution, if I had one ( and I don't) is -- as the cops say on TV --  to try to make this right.

 January 1, 2009

On a Bench with Steinberg

In the fall of 1978 I was fresh out of college, living in a two room walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village just a few doors west of Ray’s Pizza. I’d recently moved to the city with the dream of becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. After receiving an avalanche of rejection slips my work was finally accepted, and by November of 1978 the magazine had published four of my cartoons.

My apartment was in a four story building loaded with talented neighbors: writers, an editor, a graphic designer, an artist, an historian. Among this crowd was the celebrated New Yorker writer, Donald Barthelme; he lived just below me, on the second floor. The day I moved into the building, Donald was the first person I ran into. At the time I’d no idea who he was, and that he wrote for The New Yorker ( my focus then was mainly on the magazine’s artists ). All I remember from our meeting was that Donald’s last name seemed oddly fascinating. Bar- thel - may – it rolled off the tongue.

On a Fall afternoon – I believe it was a Sunday – I was in my apartment when I heard Donald yelling up to me from the building’s courtyard. I raised one of the large old windows overlooking the garden below, stuck my head outside, and looked down. Donald was looking up. “Michael, Steinberg is coming over for dinner tonight – would you like to join us for drinks afterward?”

“Steinberg” was, of course, Saul Steinberg, the legendary New Yorker artist. A retrospective of his work had just completed its run at The Whitney Museum. In April of that year, he was the subject of a Time cover story – this was certainly one of, if not the most celebrated years of Steinberg’s career. He was now 65, into his thirty-seventh year at The New Yorker. The idea of meeting Steinberg was at once impossibly unsettling and electrifying. Although I’d been taking my weekly batch of cartoons to the magazine’s offices in mid-town for nearly a year, I’d never run into any of The New Yorker’s cartoonists: Steinberg would be my first.

Evening came, and from my apartment I could hear the sounds of dinner conversation in the courtyard. Eventually I made my way down to the garden apartment belonging to the my ground floor neighbors, the Sales ( Faith, the editor, and Kirk, the historian and biographer).

Steinberg was out in the courtyard, sitting on a bench at an old wooden picnic table. Donald made the introductions, and directed me to sit next to Steinberg. Steinberg spoke “ with his hands” – a lot of arm movement, his hands fairly drawing in the air. It wasn’t difficult to imagine his drawings floating all around us, like bubbles.

After some time, he turned to me and asked what I did. I told him I was a cartoonist, for The New Yorker. “My latest drawing appears right before yours in this week’s issue.” (my drawing was on page 50, his illustration for The Sporting Scene was on page 51). Hearing this, he fell silent for a moment. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased, annoyed, or just didn’t care. It was, well, awkward.

Soon he was back to where he’d left off before speaking to me. He held the spotlight the rest of the evening. I admit I can’t recall a single thing he said that evening, other than his asking what I did. In truth, I don’t think anyone in his company really wanted to do anything but listen, and watch. Sitting to his side for those few hours, turned slightly to my right, seeing his profile, watching him draw in the air, was like watching the sun rise over and over and over again.

September 11, 2008

Uncontested

What's become perfectly clear is that the public has settled in with The New Yorker's Cartoon Caption Contest. In the last few weeks, in a number of conversations about cartoons and The New Yorker, the subject of the contest has never failed to surface. It has nearly replaced the standard questions asked of cartoonists, such as "You can make a living outta doing that?" and "Do you do the drawing and the caption?" Lately, the first question is: "What do you think of the Cartoon Contest?" Once we're past that, the questions concern the mechanics of the contest itself.

The readership is stirred up, and involved...in cartoons. I was asked the other day what advice I could give to a fellow who wanted to submit ideas -- all I could think to say was what I sometimes think to myself when I begin working: "Good luck."

April 21, 2008


No Waiting

Occasionally, bordering on never, I think about all the elements -- the cartoon elements -- that moved me to draw the way I draw. It's tempting, but inaccurate, to say it's all because of James Thurber. Seeing his work did make a huge difference in the path I took, but before Thurber there were many many influences -- probably some I don't even remember.

Nearly every modern cartoonist's biography includes MAD magazine as an early inspiration, and nearly every bio mentions comic strips and comic books. Well before I first saw The New Yorker I'd spent perhaps a dozen years with my nose stuck in MAD and in comic books. What interests me is the force with which The New Yorker single panel -- and this is where Thurber comes in -- yanked me away from comic strips and comic books.

The New Yorker cartoon -- at its best -- delivers an entire story at once -- there's never a wait. As I read more and more contemporary "comix" I realize that the jolt of the single panel ( as executed by Thurber) is what initially attracted me to The New Yorker cartoon. This isn't to say the single panel form is better or worse than contemporary comix -- it's just different. My kind of different.

April 13, 2008


  Just Once

For awhile now I've been aware that there was a very special group of New Yorker cartoonists: those whose work appeared just once in the magazine. There must be as many reasons for the solo shot as there are contributors. As a cartoonist who was once a solo contributor ( until I sold my next drawing) I can relate somewhat to the mixed feelings following that first sale. I'm fascinated by the idea of what stood ( stands?) in the way of the that second sale.

A couple of days ago I began studying The Complete New Yorker discs from Disc #1, giving all my attention to the cartoonists. In 1925 alone, I counted eleven solo contributors ( one of those, Bertrand Zadig, also contributed one cover -- his only cover for the magazine). Until coming across these cartoonists I'd always thought there were perhaps no more than half a dozen solo appearance cartoonists in the history of the magazine. Finding nearly a dozen in the magazine's first year was an eye-opener.

Here's a list of those whose work appeared in 1925, and never appeared in The New Yorker again:

Kenneth Bird ( Fougasse), Oscar Cesare, D' Egville, W. E. Heitland, Robert Keith, C. F. Peters, M. Towie, Arthur Watts, Wilton Williams, Lawson Wood, and the aforementioned Bertrand Zadig

March 31, 2008


  The New Yorker Book of ______ Cartoons

A semi-completist could -- and might -- be driven to distraction by the explosion of varied titles in The New Yorker Book of _____ Cartoons series ( fill in the blank with almost anything: dogs, slippers, tractors, chinchillas, etc.).

Thinking I’d try to keep up with the titles, I once asked the Cartoon Bank if they’d send me a copy of each new release. I was told, politely, “it’s just not practical” -- I didn’t know it at the time, but there were already 70 titles in print; only the Cartoon Bank knows how many there are now.

At last count I’ve managed to gather 24 different collections; such a long way to go til I rest.

March 13, 2008

 The Jersey Connection

I’m guessing that the state of New York has more home grown New Yorker cartoonists than any other, but it may surprise some that the runner-up is The Garden State, New Jersey. Besides producing its share of musicians ( Sinatra, Springsteen), and actors (Nicholson, Travolta), nearly a dozen New Yorker cartoonists, including this cartoonist, were born and raised there.

They grew up in towns like Chatham, Princeton, Belmar, Newark, Bloomfield, Hackensack, Elizabeth, Hampton, River Edge, and Coytesville.

I’ve a theory that being in the position of forever playing second banana to New York, brings out the wise guy, and girl in Jerseyites. It’s just a theory.

Here’s a list of those born in the state just west of Manhattan (I’m betting there’re more):

Charles Addams

Whitney Darrow, Jr.

Chon Day

Alan Dunn

Joseph Farris

Arthur Getz

Lee Lorenz

Gus Mager

Marisa Acocella Marchetto

Mary Petty

George Price

Christopher Weyant

March 12, 2008