— Photo courtesy of Anne Hall Elser
Sad news has come this way via Mike Lynch that the great cartoonist Bill Woodman passed away on Saturday. Between 1975 and 2003, Mr. Woodman published one hundred and forty-five drawings in The New Yorker. In his retirement years, in Maine, the state where he was born, he spent much of his time painting. His last New Yorker drawing appeared in the issue of January 6, 2003; his first, shown directly below, appeared in the issue of November 10, 1975.
A loopy happiness emanates from Woodman’s drawings — the prevailing zeitgeist, a friendly zaniness. You see it in so many of his drawings, including the drawing featuring a penguin on a trampoline (shown below); the drawing of bank robbers caught up in the bank’s stanchion line ropes — and a lovely drawing of bears playing a salmon-themed pinball game. Mr. Woodman, to me, was in the school of Jack Ziegler, Arnie Levin, and Dean Vietor — art infused with absurdity. It’s the kind of work that immediately and happily invites the reader into the cartoonist’s world.
When I interviewed Mr. Woodman in 2016, he told me that his beginnings of wanting to be a cartoonist went back to when he was about ten or twelve years old and his Uncle Vinny introduced him to Charles Addams work in The New Yorker. When I asked him for other early inspirations, the dialogue went like this:
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Michael Maslin: Can you talk a little about how you became a cartoonist? Whose work did you admire?
Bill Woodman: I read all of the comic strips in the paper. So far as illustrators, I liked Remington.
MM: You’re the only cartoonist who’s ever said to me that Remington was an inspiration.
BW: Yeah, when I was a kid –- I was like twelve or thirteen years old, we had a public library there in Bangor, Maine –- and at the top of the stairs there used to be a big portrait of an Indian, and it was by Frederick Remington. I always thought it was pretty impressive. I had an uncle who was in the antique book business, and he had a book on him –- it was dated back in the 1890s. It was all out west, cowboys, calvary, Indians, and all that stuff– pretty good.
Left: An early Woodman inspiration: Frederic Remington’s “Sign of Friendship” which hung for 42 years in the Bangor Public Library.
MM: I’ve looked at some of Remington’s work and what struck me about it which seems to carry through to your work is the energy in a lot of his drawings and paintings.
BW: Yeah — it’s spontaneous stuff, when you look at it.
MM: A lot people think of your work as spontaneous.
BW: Some of it, I guess. I don’t know. Yeah, probably — it’s doodling.
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Of Woodman’s “doodling,” the late great Jack Ziegler had this to say:
Bill Woodman is a great cartoonist and one of the funniest “draw-ers” of all time, right up there with George Booth. Back when we used to hang out together, he allowed me the privilege of looking over any number of the obsessive sketchbooks that were always within his easy reach, usually right there in one of the overlarge pockets of his surplus Air Force overcoat.
They were filled with casual observations, preliminary ideas for cartoons, and reprimands to himself about why he wasn’t coming up with any good ideas on any particular day. Each page was chock full of bits and pieces that were wry, engaging, and all just plain funny to look at. I never had a better time looking at anything in my life.
There has been, sadly, just one cartoon collection by Mr. Woodman, Fish & Moose News: Cartoons By Bill Woodman (Dodd Mead, 1980). It is of course a must-have for anyone’s library. In 2018 he collaborated with the cartoonists Mike Lynch, Jeff Pert, David Jacobson, and John Klossner on the book, Lobster Therapy And Moose Pick-Up Lines.
Here’s a personal favorite, from The New Yorker January 2, 1978:
For much more on Bill Woodman, please visit Mike Lynch’s site here.
To see more of Bill Woodman’s work, go the The New Yorker’s Cartoon Bank site here.
To visit Bill Woodman’s website, link here.
My thanks to Mike Lynch for all his assistance regarding Bill Woodman, not the least of which was hand carrying my questions to Woodman back in 2016.
My thanks as well to Anne Hall Elser, who was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker.
Excellent tribute to Bill Woodman. Insightful discussion of his work. Thank you, Michael.
Very nice tribute to Bill. As you know, he was part of the post-lunch pub-crawl a few of us went on each Wednesday after our weekly visit to Lee Lorenz’s office. We often showed our weekly batches to one-another and our joy or it’s opposite concerning OKs and rejects. Bill’s comments were generally very helpful , especially for me, a comparative newcomer at the New Yorker at the time.
Mick