“If I’m drawing a certain type of character, I try to get into the spirit of the thing – and my wife complains about the faces I make while I’m working. All cartoonists, I guess, are actors in a way.” — George Price to Jud Hurd, Cartoonist Profiles, March 1975 If you can find it, Jud Hurd’s Price interview
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Otto Soglow’s Little King: “He just happened.”
Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow & The Little King (IDW Publishing, 2012) Introduction by Ivan Brunetti Foreward by Jared Gardner What’s not to like about this handsome volume? If I had my way every cartoonist of note would celebrated thusly: beautifully reproduced work (both black & white and color), with a thorough and informed foreward. Mr. Gardner takes us
Read moreIn Good Company: a look at the cartoons in Al Ross’s New Yorker debut issue
The news that Al Ross passed away last week got me to thinking about his start at The New Yorker, way way back in the issue of November 27, 1937, when he was twenty-five years old. This morning I went to our cabinet full of bound New Yorkers, brought out the volume from late 1937 and began paging through
Read moreThe New Yorker’s Art Meeting: A Potted History
It’s tempting to believe that the structure of The New Yorker’s Art Department arrived fully formed in 1924 when Harold Ross, with his wife Jane Grant began pulling together his dream magazine. But of course, such was not the case. What we know for certain is that once the first issue was out, Ross and several of
Read moreBook of Interest: Conversations with William Maxwell
Barbara Burkhardt, who wrote William Maxwell: A Literary Life (University of Mississippi Press, 2005) has edited Conversations with William Maxwell (University of Mississippi Press, June, 2012. Maxwell, who joined The New Yorker in 1936, was originally hired as a hand holder for the Artists, taking over from Wolcott Gibbs, who had tired of the task. The job required Maxwell
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