From Moment Magazine, this short video from 2011 (posted May 2013): “Bob Mankoff on the Connection Between Humor and Creativity”
From Elastic City, “Elastic City Spring Benefit” Thursday May 23, 2013, 7:30pm – 10:30pm. One of the participants is Roz Chast.
and…
The website for Leah Wolchok’s “Very Semi-Serious” is underway, with some interesting items being added weekly.
Roxie Munro has posted on Facebook that The Society of Illustrators will host a memorial service for the late great Ed Fisher who passed away this past April. Mr. Fisher contributed over 700 cartoons to The New Yorker between 1951 and 2000. The memorial will be at the Society, 128 East 63rd St, NYC, this coming Tuesday (May 21) at 5.
If you pick up a copy of veteran New Yorker cartoonist, cover artist, and Talk of the Town contributor James Stevenson’s latest book, The Life, Loves and Laughs of Frank Modell, you’ll find a section wherein Mr. Stevenson recounts his “summer office boy” job at The New Yorker back in 1947, and mentions as well his beginnings at the magazine, nine years later, once he was hired full time.
In a New York Times op-ed piece from January of 2011 (“New Yorker Confidential”) Stevenson recounted how James Geraghty, then The New Yorker’s Art Editor turned to him after the hiring handshake and said, “You must not tell anybody at the office or anywhere else what you do.” Only Geraghty and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn knew what he was up to all day long at the magazine. What he was up to was creating ideas for some of the established cartoonists.
The subject of idea men (or the less appealing term “gagmen”) is of great interest to me –- my unpublished biography of Peter Arno goes into the subject in detail as Arno, though prolific in his earliest years, came to rely more and more on outside help as the years wore on. I plan on going into the subject here on Ink Spill sometime in the future.
Curious about the secrecy of Stevenson’s job, and many other things concerning his time at The New Yorker, I called him up the other day to talk shop. Among other things, I learned that Stevenson was among the chosen (Frank Modell was another) to guide a nearly blind James Thurber around the office. According to Stevenson, this was the time-period “back when he [Thurber] was working on the soap opera series” ["Soapland" was a five part series running from the issue of May 15, 1948 thru July 24, 1948]. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:
Michael Maslin: Why all the secrecy?
James Stevenson: I have a very clear vision of meeting Geraghty. I was working for Life magazine –- and I’d been selling ideas [to the New Yorker] — and he said come and have a cup of coffee. He described a career having an office at the New Yorker, and thinking up jokes, but I couldn’t tell anybody – it was a secret. And now it’s possible, but I doubt it, that he was just testing me. He liked to test people.
MM: The crowd of cartoonists that arrived at The New Yorker around the same time as you: Warren Miller, Lee Lorenz, etc.. seemed to arrive complete – you didn’t need to rely on idea men like so many of the previous generation; Helen Hokinson, Whitney Darrow, Jr., and George Price to name a few. Why was that?
JS: I think originally the New Yorker artists –- a lot of them -– might’ve come thru the Art Student’s League or something like that and they had a background in how to draw and how to do this and how to do that, and they would do handsome drawings but they might not be funny.
MM: I have a copy of the March 10, 1956, New Yorker in front of me – it contains your first cartoon published in The New Yorker. Going through the list of cartoonists in that issue, it’s an amazing group: Alain, Steinberg, Steig, Perry Barlow, Barney Tobey, Hoff, Kovarsky, Richter, and on and on. You must’ve rubbed elbows with many of them while you were there.
JS: Actually no, because I had this hidden career. I had an office for awhile across the hall from Geraghty. I didn’t much want to go into the [Art] office because pretty soon someone would ask questions. I was maybe more comfortable with people who were Talk reporters because they wouldn’t ask me anything related to what I actually did.
MM: In your new book about Frank Modell, you mention bringing a package up to Peter Arno’s apartment on Park Avenue at around three in the afternoon and that he met you at the door still in his dressing gown. You said that on the way home you decided you wanted to be Peter Arno. Did you start drawing like him?
JS: No, I just liked the life style.
Random House has just posted the cover for the follow-up companion to The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats will be released October 1st.
Well here’s something we haven’t seen since Lee Lorenz’s Essential Cartoonist Library series ended in 2000: a book about a legendary New Yorker cartoonist written by another legendary New Yorker cartoonist. James Stevenson’s new book, The Life, Loves and Laughs of Frank Modell (Frank & Ralph Press, 2013) is a wonderful tribute to Frank Modell, his long-time friend, and the New Yorker’s elder cartoonist statesman (his first New Yorker cartoon appeared in the issue of July 20, 1946). Frank, who is now 91, kindly sent a copy of the book this way. I read it through, then read it through again.
The book is part autobiography and part biography with reminiscences from Frank’s friends, along with a fascinating interlude by Stevenson about his early years at the magazine. Life, Loves and Laughs is chock full of color reproductions of Modell’s art, cartoons, covers and fine art, as well as plenty of photographs including a number taken by Stevenson of William Shawn, the New Yorker’s second editor.
The only catch with this book, and thankfully it’s a temporary catch – is that it is privately printed and momentarily unavailable to the book-buying public. However, Ink Spill has learned that plans are well underway to soon make it available to all. This site will post details, possibly as early as next week.
And…
For those who’d like a hefty dose of Modell while waiting for Mr. Stevenson’s book, there’s always Frank Modell’s classic 1978 cartoon collection, Stop Trying to Cheer Me Up!(below), available through most any online book dealer. And then there are Frank’s 1400+ New Yorker cartoons and 6 New Yorker covers, readily available to anyone with a subscription to the digital edition of the magazine or access to a library holding bound New Yorkers.
From Washington & Lee University, May 10, 2013, “Announcing the Winners of the New Yorker Caption Contest” – The New Yorker’s Cartoon Editor, Bob Mankoff spoke at W&L yesterday, and revealed the winning caption for a contest deigned for W&L.
From the Rogovoy Report, May 8, 2013, “New Yorker Cartoonist Gets Exhibit at Rockwell Museum” – an R.O. Blechman exhibition opens this Saturday, May 11, 2013.
and…
From dailyvoice.com (Wilton, Connecticut), May 8, 2013, “New Yorker Cartoonist Roz Chast to Speak at Greenwich Library” — (Ms. Chast’s work will also be exhibited).
From the New York Daily News, May 2,2013, “Uptown Talk: Humorist Felipe (Feggo) Galindo blends the cultures of Mexico and Manhattan in his artwork” — Mr. Galindo talks to New York’s hometown newspaper about his current exhibition, “Manhatitlan” and discusses his evolution as an artist.
Does the name Scudder Middleton mean anything to you? It meant a little something to me, but no so much…until recently when I decided to look a little deeper into his association with The New Yorker’s art department.
I’d seen his name on memos while sifting through the magazine’s archives in The New York Public Library, and recalled that Lee Lorenz, in his book The Art of The New Yorker, mentioned Middleton as an early artists hand-holder. Mostly though, Middleton was in my brain because of the following passage I remembered from Thurber’s Years With Ross:
In the early thirties, Scudder Middleton, then the official handholder, was emboldened one night at the Players Club to say to Ross, How am I doing at the office?” and Ross, emboldened by Scotch, snapped, “You’re fired!”
It is Middleton’s role, however brief, as artists hand-holder that has landed him here on Ink Spill.
Lee Lorenz, The New Yorker’s Art Editor from 1973 through 1993, and Cartoon Editor from 1993 through 1997, recently told me in a phone interview that the job of artists hand-holder back in the magazine’s earliest days was really no more than dealing with cartoonists who the Art Editor did not want to interact with. The hand-holder would relay the bad news to cartoonists that they hadn’t sold a drawing, or the good news that they had (along with instructions for required changes to the drawing before it was finally accepted).
Judith Lee in her well researched book, Defining New Yorker Humor wrote that archival material suggests Middleton acted as artist hand-holder while Katharine White was away in the Spring/Summer of 1929. As Ms. White did leave New York in the Spring of 1929 to obtain a divorce in Reno, the suggestion fits. It would seem that this moment also marked the beginning of Ms. White’s fade from her hand-holder duties. Middleton was the first of her assistants to be given the job (but not the first New Yorker staffer to have the job). With Middleton’s departure, hand-holding duties were turned over to another of White’s assistants, Wolcott Gibbs (Ms. White retained a working relationship with Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson and perhaps a few other high profile artists).
Middleton’s hand-holding days didn’t produce much to write about (I only came across one story of an interaction he had with a cartoonist – it’s not worth repeating here). What I did find interesting was his pre and post New Yorker history. Thankfully, Middleton’s New York Times obit fills out his days following Ross’s “You’re fired!”
After leaving The New Yorker, Middleton blossomed as an editor, working first at Stage, from 1935 through 1940, then at Tomorrow Magazine for a couple of years, then at New Movies (later renamed Films in Review).
A few interesting tidbits found among the New Yorker biographies, especially Harrison Kinney’s massive biography, Thurber, His Life and Times:
Kinney writes that Middleton, after assuming his new job at Stage, attempted to lure New Yorker writers away by offering them more money (a small irony here is that both The New Yorker and Stage were partially financed by Raoul Fleischmann).
Kinney also refers to correspondence between E.B. White and Thurber about a proposed jointly written play about Harold Ross and The New Yorker. White says in his letter to Thurber, the book would “…have to include Scudder Middleton…”
Lastly, it would be unthinkable to leave Middleton without mentioning that he was a published poet, with at least one affair with a Big Name. Edna St. Vincent Millay dedicated her poem “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” to Middleton, and said of him, he was “ a poet with the romantic profile of a matinee idol.”
Middleton died at age 70, February 26, 1959. At the time he was a resident of Boston. Here’s a list of his published work, all still available in one form or another:
Upper Night (Henry Holt & Co., 1927)
Streets and Faces (Little book Publishers, 1917)
The New Day (Macmillan Co., 1917)
Dining, Wining and Dancing in New York (Dodge Publishing Co. 1938)
To read more on The New Yorker’s Art Meeting, here’s a link to Ink Spill’s “Posted Notes” section. Scroll down to February 2012.
Here’s a link to a website devoted to the work of Charles E. Martin, better known to the New Yorker readership as CEM. Martin, who died in 1995 at the age of 85, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1938 (his first appearance was a cover). He went on to create nearly two hundred more covers for the magazine as well as just over four hundred cartoons. The website features a short film about his life.
(thanks to Liam Walsh for the link)
And in case you missed it: here’s Chris Weyant on Bob Mankoff’s weekly New Yorker blog speaking about the Daily Cartoon he created following the tragedy in Boston.
