It’s not a trick: this post about the October 29, 2018 New Yorker looks and feels and reads suspiciously like the Spill’s now defunct Monday Tilley Watch, but it’s not a Monday Tilley Watch…I think.
So often in the past 90+ years of The New Yorker ‘s existence, an issue dated October 29 (or 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, or 31) would bear a Halloween cover. Not this year, folks. But who doesn’t like pastries.
Just for fun, here’s a cover submission of mine that combines pastries and Halloween — it was probably submitted, and definitely rejected, in the late 1980s or early 1990s:
You’ll find more than twenty illustrations in this issue (not including the seven photographs accompanying the piece by Janet Malcolm). Four-and-a-half full pages are given over to illustration. You’ll find ten cartoons. There’s a Halloween cartoon (by a modern Spill fave cartoonist, Seth Fleishman) squeezed in at the top of page 32.
If you’re a leaf-peeper, or just like leaves in general, you’re sure to fall for Joe Dator’s brilliant desert island drawing (on page 41). There have been, of course, other brilliant New Yorker cartoons in the not-so-distant past; two that I can’t resist mentioning whenever I have the chance: Bob Eckstein’s 3-D Thanksgiving drawing and Robert Leighton’s Escher drawing. If you link to C-Span’s coverage of the recent Milford Readers & Writers Festival you’ll see a few more candidates by panelists, Christopher Weyant and David Borchart. This current drawing by Mr. Dator sits squarely in the Charles Addams branch of New Yorker cartooning (a branch notably climbed by P.C. Vey, Gahan Wilson, Zach Kanin…and Ed Steed, sort of). I would go as far as suggesting that if Mr. Addams was still with us, the magazine would’ve wanted to purchase Mr. Dator’s idea to hand over to Mr. Addams to execute. Yes, pun intended. (Here’s a Spill piece about the magazine’s history of buying ideas).
For the record (your honor), here are the ten cartoonists in the issue:
— Finally, still in the Halloween spirit, here’s a Boo!
Below: the missing Rea Irvin iconic Talk masthead switched out for a re-drawn version early last year. Read about that here:
