A Group: Nurit Karlin, Joe Dator, Charles Barsotti, Lou Myers
“A Group” is a Spill series pulling together work by New Yorker artists, just for the fun of it.
Photo: work above, clockwise from top-left: Nurit Karlin, Joe Dator, Lou Myers, Charles Barsotti
How incredibly distinct each one of these cartoonists styles is. But within that range are some similarities. Karlin and Barsotti excelled using the simple line, while the same can be said for Dator’s and Myers’s bold line.
Looking through Mr. Myers’s collection I was reminded that, altho he was also a long-form writer, his cartoons, at least as represented in this collection, were largely caption-free (I saw two with captions). When he did use words, they appear, sans word balloon, drifting in the airspace, not below the drawing (exceptions: I saw one cartoon balloon in the book, and at least one titled drawing).
Karlin was also a (mostly) caption-free cartoonist — one of the best ever published by the magazine. This original appeared in TV Guide (date unknown to me). Ms. Karlin, was, for short period of time, the only woman cartoonist published in The New Yorker.
Dator and Barsotti, in the tradition favored by the majority of New Yorker artists, combine words and “pictures” (as the drawings/cartoons were sometimes referred to in The New Yorker‘s earliest days). Both these drawings appeared in The New Yorker. Barsotti’s in the issue of January 7, 1980.:
i’ve always been extra fond of this drawing for several reasons beyond the fact that it’s a Barsotti drawing: it was a gift from Jack Ziegler, and because my step-father, whose name was Al, owned a tavern (in Newark, New Jersey). He’s shown here, behind the bar, a long long time ago.
The terrif Joe Dator drawing below appeared in The New Yorker, February 28, 2011. I’ll always be grateful to Joe for trading with me. My three zillion hours of watching gameshows as a kid played a huge part in my wanting this drawing.
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The A-Zs:
Lou Myers Born 1915, Paris, France, died 2005. New Yorker work: 1975 – 1989. Key cartoon collection: Absent and Accounted For (Workman, 1980).
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Joe Dator New Yorker work: August 28, 2006 — . Website: joedator.com
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Nurit Karlin (Photo taken at a Playboy holiday party, NYC, early 1990s). Born in Jerusalem, 1940. Died, Tel Aviv, April, 2019. New Yorker work: 1974 – 1988. Collection: No Comment (Scribner, 1978). For more on Karlin see pp 124 -130 of Liza Donnelly’s Funny Ladies : The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons (Prometheus Books, 2005).
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Charles Barsotti (photo above) Born, San Marcos, Texas, September 28, 1933. Died, Kansas City, Mo., June 16, 2014. Mr. Barsotti was briefly the cartoon editor of The Saturday Evening Post (from 1968 until its demise in 1969). The New York Times review of his 1981 collection “Kings Don’t Carry Money” led with the following:”Thurber lives, in Kansas City under the name of Charles Barsotti.” His deceptively simple line drawings of pups and kings, and businessmen have been a presence in The New Yorker for over fifty years. It is likely that Mr. Barsotti is the only New Yorker cartoonist to have ever run for Congress (an unsuccessful bid, in 1972, in Kansas). New Yorker work: 1962 – . Key collections: Kings Don’t Carry Money (Dodd, Mead, 1981), and The Essential Charles Barsotti, Compiled and Edited by Lee Lorenz (Workman, 1998). Website: barsotti.com/
Link to Ink Spill’s Charles Barsotti appreciation