The Monday Tilley Watch takes a glancing look at the art and artists of the latest issue of The New Yorker
The Issue: This is the second of four planned special issues celebrating The New Yorker‘s 100th anniversary.
The Cover: Seeing this week’s oval-centric cover, I immediately recalled some of The New Yorker covers contributed by the late great Pierre Le-Tan. Of the eighteen covers he contributed to The New Yorker (between 1970 and 1987), a good number of them featured the oval in a major way. I’m showing you this week’s cover first, so you have an idea of what I’m talking about. Interesting too that the 2025 cover shares a viewpoint angle similar to Mr. Le-Tan’s work.
Cartoonists and Cartoons:
Thirteen cartoons, fourteen cartoonists (Barry Blitt has a Sketchpad). Two duos (the Spill counts duos as one cartoonist). No newbies. The longest active contributing cartoonist is Roz Chast, whose first New Yorker drawing appeared in July of 1978.
Always great to see work by two New Yorker cartoon giants who passed on to that big drawing board in the sky: Edward Koren and Sam Gross.
This week’s cartoons (presented in a slideshow)
The Rea Irvin Talk Watch:
You haven’t seen the above perfect Rea Irvin Talk design in The New Yorker since May of 2017 (It had been in place for 92 years). Back in 2017, someone decided to have a contemporary illustrator redraw (yes, redraw) Mr. Irvin’s design and begin using that as the Talk header. The Spill continues to hope that the original design returns. Until it does, the Spill also hopes that Mr. Irvin is credited in the magazine for the design. Read more here.