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

Read more

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

Read more

P.S. Mueller: Snatching Steinberg…and Thurber, Steig, Day, Soglow…

Continuing Ink Spill‘s series of New Yorker cartoonists talking about important cartoon connections in their lives is P.S. Mueller on discovering Steinberg’s work.  Mr. Mueller has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1998.   “1958 Zorro Meets Steinberg” and photograph courtesy of Mr. Mueller.   1958 Zorro Meets Steinberg In my adult mind I think of Saul Steinberg as an

Read more