Harold Ross’s Last Cartoonist: Dana Fradon

By the late 1940s, Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s legendary founder and first editor, had assembled either by happy accident or design (depending on which version of the magazine’s history you want to believe) a stable of magazine cartoonists unrivaled in American publishing.  Some have called that era of the magazine’s cartoons its Golden Age.  The guiding forces of the

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Astaire Cartoonists vrs Kelly Cartoonists

            Someone once said that the greatest difference between Fred Astaire’s dancing and Gene Kelly’s dancing is that you could see Gene Kelly’s sweat.  Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker in 1972 said, “Kelly isn’t a winged dancer; he’s a hoofer and more earthbound” which she compared to “Astaire’s grasshopper lightness.” Here are some

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Collaborating Cartoonists; Video: Charles Addams

    Collaborating cartoonists have been on my mind recently. Who are they, why do they do it?  Does it double the fun? A spate of collaborations in The New Yorker within the past year caused me to dig into the subject and ask a few questions. To begin with, here’re a few words on the subject, written sixty years

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