Tag: Jack Ziegler

The Tilley Watch, The New Yorker March 18, 2019

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The Cover: This is Malika Favre’s seventh cover for The New Yorker (according to the Contributors info on page 4). An exceptionally decorative cover for “The Style Issue”… Read more here. 

The Cartoonists:

The Cartoons:

A very Charles Addamsy David Sipress drawing this week (that’s a compliment, of course).

Cartoon placement on the page has been mentioned here numerous times: happy to say that seven (i.e., half) of the  cartoons in the issue were given breathing room. They look great.

Tom Cheney’s Hell’s Auditors cartoon especially caught my eye (it’s on page 29). I believe that this is the fourth time New Yorker cartoonists have specifically word-played with the Hell’s Angels “colors.” Jack Ziegler had two, this beauty, published in The New Yorker, February 27, 1989:

And an earlier one, published in The New Yorker, December 17, 1984:

And then there was this one by yours truly in the December 25th, 1995 issue of The New Yorker:

A quick search of The New Yorker‘s database shows over a hundred of its cartoons have incorporated a motorcycle.  Sometimes the bike and biker are bit players, and other times they’re the focus of the drawing.  An awful lot of the cartoons concern folks getting speeding tickets from a motorcycle cop (and many of them show the cop in-wait behind a billboard). 

There are a small number of cartoons with motorcyclists wearing colors, but the usage doesn’t include mention of the Hell’s Angels. Ed Arno’s motorcycle gang wearing jackets that read “Inflation Fighters” (published April 2, 1979) is one example. 

To return to the great Jack Ziegler for a moment, he used the Hell’s Angels colors once again, but left their name intact in this fabulous drawing published in The New Yorker, November 13, 2000:

A long long way from the subject of Hell’s Angels, for those interested in trivia: the first mention of a motorcycle cartoon in the New Yorker‘s database is Al Frueh’s cartoon in the February 13, 1926 issue.  The  second cartoon with a motorcycle in the picture was published December 7, 1929.  It set off a bit of a in-house squabble, but that’s a story for another time (the artist was Peter Arno).

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Lastly, still no sight of Rea Irvin’s classic Talk masthead. Read about it here, and see it below:

 

The Wednesday Tilley Watch: Parker, Gerberg, Chast, Donnelly & More…

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Items of interest this mid-week:

Two reminders of upcoming events.

On January 29, the great illustrator Robert Andrew Parker (shown below), whose work has appeared numerous times in The New Yorker, will be featured at The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium. Details here.

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On January 30th, Long-time cartoonist Mort Gerberg will be in conversation with The New Yorker‘s cartoon editor, Emma Allen. The event is a celebration of Mr. Gerberg’s new book, On The Scene. Details here.





…From the west coast, news that a television series in in the works based on Roz Chast‘s highly acclaimed book, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

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…and from the east coast here’s a CNN piece by Liza Donnelly on her recent live-drawing assignment at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C.

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…there’s a new installment in the New Yorker‘s celebrity cartoon caption video series, Caption That Cartoon. This time it’s Adam Conover putting the caption marker to paper (I urge the magazine to ID the cartoonists whose work appears on these videos. Until they do I’ll provide IDs). In this episode the cartoonists are (in order of appearance):

Mick Stevens, Victoria Roberts, Jack Ziegler, Michael Crawford, Drew Dernavich, yours truly, Will McPhail, Frank Cotham, and Tom Cheney.

Above: Adam Conover looks over a Mick Stevens drawing in this screen grab from the video

Beginning To Take It Personally: The New Yorker Cartoon Album 1975- 1985

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The other day I wrote about the New Yorker Anniversary album: 1925-1975.  Following up on that, here’s a little something about the Album that immediately followed it, The New Yorker Cartoon Album 1975- 1985.  In the entire run of Albums, this one would have to rank #1 in understated covers. A bit of trivia (or maybe it’s not so trivial): this is just the second time an Album title referred to the magazine’s drawings as “cartoons” —  (the first was 1958’s New Yorker Album of Sports & Games: Cartoons of Three Decades. Non-purists might argue that the special issue Armed Services New Yorker War Cartoons with The Talk of the Town, published in 1945 was the first instance, but it was not an Album, nor was it, as you see in the title, purely cartoons).

Of note: 1975-1985 is the first Album since the early 1930s not designed by Carmine Peppe.  The design and layout is credited to a trio of New Yorker staffers: John Murphy, Bernard McAteer, and Joseph Carroll (who succeeded Mr. Peppe as head of the make-up department. Mr. Carroll was also a published New Yorker cartoonist, with one drawing, in the issue of January 16, 1984. That one and only appearance qualified him as a member of the Spill‘s One Club).

Of further note: this was the last Album published during William Shawn’s long tenure as editor of the New Yorker. It was published the year The New Yorker‘s ownership changed hands from the original owners, the Fleischmann family, to the Newhouse family. Mr. Shawn, who was appointed editor in 1952, was replaced in 1987 by Robert Gottlieb.

 

Admittedly, I have affection for this Album out of some self-interest: it was the first that included my work.  But it also included, for the first time in an Album, work by the wave I came in with — that included, among others, cartoonists such as Mick Stevens, Thomas Cheney, Peter Steiner, Richard Cline, Leo Cullum, Roz Chast, and Liza Donnelly. 

Truly exciting were the number of established cartoonists we kids found ourselves in the company of. To be included in this volume (and later Albums) with them was, and still is somewhat unbelievable. 

As with previous Albums, the cartoon choices are excellent.  The Album begins with an exquisite Robert Weber full page drawing (full page in the Album, and run as a full page in the magazine in the issue of July 2, 1984)…

…and ends with a classic Charles Addams drawing (a fellow is installing yet another of many locks — and bolts — on his door. At his feet is a semi-circle made by an active saw blade coming up through the floor). In between these two cartoon gems is an accurate reflection of the state of the magazine’s cartoon world in that decade.  As with previous Albums, the balance of work placement and selection is superior. There’s enough work by Booth, Steinberg, Koren, Saxon, Steig, George Price, Addams, Stevenson, Levin, Modell, Lorenz, both Martins (Henry, and Charles) to please anybody, but also well-represented are the large number of artists who flourished just out of range of the spotlight. 

Along with the publication of the Album was a touring exhibit of work.  I wrote about this Album and that exhibit a year ago, but in a slightly different context. You can see that earlier post here. 

 There was no official album a decade later (instead we were gifted Lee Lorenz’s Art of The New Yorker), and ten years after that was the The New Yorker 75th Cartoon Collection, which bears a cover opposite the understated cover of the 1975-1985 album.