It’s silly to rate cartoonists, but around here, as anyone who follows Ink Spill knows, James Thurber is the #1 New Yorker cartoonist. Thinking about him on the eve of his birthday (he was born in Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894) I stood in front of the Thurber
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Rea Irvin’s Last New Yorker Cover
If you read The New Yorker you are very familiar with at least one of his covers: his first one. Mention The New Yorker and one of the images that comes to mind for most people is Eustace Tilley, the
Read moreHarold 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
Read moreAnatol Kovarsky at 94: Still Drawing After All These Years
At 3 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in late June, my wife and I, wearing our cartoonist historian hats, were welcomed into an apartment in a pre-war building along Manhattan’s west side. We made our way through a short hallway to a foyer lined with paintings. There were paintings on the walls, and paintings lined
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