Of all the duties Wolcott Gibbs attended to during his thirty-one years at The New Yorker (and his duties were many: editor, writer, theater critic), his relationship to the magazine’s cartoonists (or “artists” as the magazine calls them) is probably the least examined. When Gibbs began at The New Yorker, working under Katharine Angell (later, after marrying E.B. White,
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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
Read more“What’s So Funny About Red?” Color Cartoons in The New Yorker
I’m betting that a good number of The New Yorker’s readers (you know, those folks who go to the cartoons before looking at anything else in the magazine) have noticed something colorful going on with the cartoons. Four out of the first five issues of the new year have a color cartoon (the cartoons in the issue of January 24th
Read moreThe 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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