High Bar: The New Yorker’s 1979 Anniversary Issue
On a recent podcast, I mentioned my tendency to avoid using “best” — you know: best cartoonist, best cartoon, best cover, best pizza, etc., etc.. (I also avoid using “worst”). With that in mind, I won’t go as far as saying the 1979 anniversary issue of The New Yorker is the best of what the magazine had to offer in that period, but I will say that after looking through the issue it seems to me to be a high bar issue for cartoons. It’s William Shawn era New Yorker art at its finest.
Here’s the entire Table Of Contents (you’ll see that the non-cartoonist section is packed with some of the magazine’s biggest guns).
I wish I could show you each cartoon in the issue, and show them in the order they appear, and how they appear on the page. The first two drawings are by two giants of the art form: William Steig, and Robert Weber. They (the artists and their work) set the tone for the entire issue.
There’s an art to placing cartoons on the page, and there’s an art to placing certain cartoonist’s art on opposing pages. Here, with just the first two drawings in the issue, we see how it’s done (I’m sorry I had to blur the text to avoid copyright issues. Hoping this link will take you to the unblurred pages).
When cartoons are squished into a small space with little breathing room, or, oddly enough, run too large, undoing the graphic balance — the negative effect (on the reader) is immediate. From looking at decades and decades (and decades) of the the magazine, it’s obvious that placement and sizing were carefully considered. Cartoons weren’t used to fill a space — they weren’t secondary to the layout. They were the essential graphic element of each page.
In this issue there’s a flow and placement that works page after page for every one of the twenty-seven cartoons (27!). The cartoons themselves, for me, show each artist at his or her best, with not a clunker among them.
Here, for instance, is Mischa Richter giving us a master class in the captionless cartoon:
And how about this Frank Modell drawing. Perfection!
One last drawing to show — a personal favorite, by Barney Tobey:
I’ve only shown you five of the twenty-seven drawings in the issue. Find a copy (or use The New Yorker‘s archive if you subscribe) and you’re in for a treat with the other twenty-two drawings. Booth awaits, as does George Price, Arnie Levin, Charles Addams, Lee Lorenz, Charles Saxon, Ed Arno, Nurit Karlin, Jack Ziegler, and on and on. This is a textbook issue — I certainly thought of it as such back then when I was just approaching my second year at the magazine. __________________________________________________________
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