Tilley loading

    Above: a glimpse of the first New Yorker cover. Ever since Tina Brown broke the sixty-nine year string of unbroken appearances by Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley on the anniversary issue in 1994 by running R. Crumb’s Eustace Elvis, there’s always been, for me, some nail biting in early February about whether the real Eustace will show up on

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Posted Note: Happy 87th

With The New Yorker’s 87th birthday just around the corner (the very first issue was dated February 21, 1925) I thought it would be fun to muse about the magazine’s present cartoon universe. What New Yorker cartoonists do so well and have done so well over eight decades is knee-jerk to their time. The New Yorker’s hands-off system, begun by

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The First New Yorker Cartoon

As the 86th anniversary of The New Yorker approaches,  I’ve played a bit of New Yorker Trivial Pursuit, thinking about the first issue, and wondering who had the very first cartoon in the first issue of The New Yorker. Once you’ve made your way past the famous Rea Irvin Eustace Tilley cover, and have turned the first page (with its

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