Out front of the pack of New Yorker cartoon tales is E.B. White’s tinkering with a Carl Rose idea, helping it along to become one of the most famous captions in the magazine’s history. Tinkering with captions was one of White’s many jobs at the magazine, but until the other day I didn’t realize he had taken at least one shot at coming up with what he called a “drawing idea.” You can find the idea, in White’s letter to James Thurber, dated January 1936, on page 124 of Letters Of E.B. White (Revised Edition). I’ll paraphrase so as to not offend any copyrights:
A patient missing a leg sits in an examination room (the missing leg, severed, rests on the floor not far from the patient). The doctor, looking at x-rays, says [this is a truncated version]:
“Good news…at least it’s not broken.”
As far as I can tell, the idea was never executed by Thurber, or by any other New Yorker cartoonist. There is but one known [to me] instance of Thurber using an outside idea. Ironically(?) it was a Carl Rose idea, of two men sword fighting. One man, who has just cut off the head of the other, exclaims, “Touche!” Harold Ross deemed Rose’s version too graphic and thought Thurber’s bloodless people would be a better fit.
The drawing appeared on the cover of this 1984 UK paperback edition of Thurber’s The Years With Ross.
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Chast’s “Museumland”
From The Museum Of Modern Art Magazine, March 24, 2021, this graphic piece: “Roz Chast’s Museumland.”
Ms. Chast began contributing to The New Yorker in 1978.
Her A-Z entry:
Roz Chast (pictured above. Photo by Bill Franzen) Born, Brooklyn, NY. New Yorker work: July 3, 1978 – . Key collections: Unscientific Americans (Dolphin/Doubleday, 1982), Theories of Everything ( Bloomsbury, 2006) Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2014). Website: rozchast.com/
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Today’s Daily Cartoonist & Cartoon
Kendra Allenby on room fatigue. Ms. Allenby began contributing to The New Yorker in 2016.