A Trusty Summertime Quartet
I’ve written before about the summertime New Yorker reading that awaits when my cartoonist colleague (and wife) Liza Donnelly and I make our annual trek to Maine. In that piece about summer reading I didn’t mention the quartet of older New Yorker magazines that also remain year after year in “Vacationland” (we continue working while here, so I suppose we might call it “Workland”).
These four issues (shown above) probably should have been brought back to the Spill archives in New York decades ago, and then placed in their appropriate stacks. It’s unthinkable now that I’d drive them southwest at summer’s end because they’re always fun to revisit them here in Downeast Maine. The issues, which coincidently cover the summer months, do not contain “famous” drawings or articles. They are fun to see because they are are reminders of a now ancient time before I got into the magazine. Two of the issues were published when I was a very little kid, and was into Batman comics, not Harold Ross’s metropolitan weekly. Those two issues (from 1961 and 1967) featured a number of artists I would come to greatly admire, and one, Peter Arno, I’d spend a good deal of time writing about. The other issues, from 1974 and 1976, came out during the time I was regularly being rejected (a seven year span that ended with my first sale in 1977). I likely studied those when they came out.
The issues contain work by so many cartoonists I would eventually meet — something that, to this day, is still unbelievable to me. The list is long, so I’ll just name a few: Steinberg, Addams, Gross, Ziegler, Modell, Stevenson, Fradon, Levin, Richter, Ed Arno, Reilly, Lorenz, Booth, Koren. Giants all. All my teachers, in a way. and more than that, all inspirational. I cannot think of any of these cartoonists without thinking of their cartoon worlds. I don’t need to think of a particular cartoon they did — just the “idea” of what they did, the enormous wealth of great drawing and great ideas they gave us. These four issues are a sampler of their gifts. As I go through each issue every year, the positive jolts continue: look at that full page Peter Arno! I don’t even read the caption, I just think about Arno’s command of a page. To use a modern term: he “owned” the full page. Look at Whitney Darrow’s draftsmanship, and Reilly’s — the energy, the style! Look at Alan Dunn’s way with a “scene,” look at Koren’s mastery of his characters and the space they occupied on a page. Look at Frank Modell’s ease with a line, and the humor he put down on paper. Henry Martin once told me that certain artists “draw funny.” Modell drew funny: you smiled just seeing his work. And Booth: what an amazingly funny, wonderfully drawn cartoon world he gave us.
I could go on and on talking about about the individual artists. Each and every one charges me. They’ve done it again, as they’ve always done, these masters of our field. I’m anxious now to get the ink of my Rapidograph pen flowing, and to the waiting blank pieces of paper.