A Facebook Page For Bill Woodman
Word this morning from Mike Lynch that Bill Woodman’s daughter has created a Facebook group in honor of her father, who passed away February 12th.
And…check out Mike Lynch’s recent post: “Sketching With John Klossner and Bill Woodman”
Read Ink Spill’s Woodman appreciation here.
________________________________________________________________
Video Of Interest: A Tribute To Leo Cullum
— Thanks to my New Yorker cartoonist colleague, Ken Levine for the link.
____________________________________________________________________
The Spill‘s Appreciation of Leo, originally posted in 2010 is below:
Leo Cullum: 1942 -2010
(Posted October 25, 2010)
Ink Spill has learned the sad news that Leo Cullum has died. Leo’s work first appeared in The New Yorker January 3, 1977 (his most recent drawing appeared in the issue of October 25, 2010). In Leo’s very first New Yorker cartoon a man in a bath robe sits at a kitchen counter that is crowded with live chickens — there’s even a chicken on the man’s head. The caption: “No, you’re not disturbing me, Herb. I’m up with the chickens this morning.” You could say that Leo came out of the box swinging, for he stayed true to this wacky sensibility for his thirty-three years at The New Yorker, contributing over eight hundred drawings to the magazine.
The New Yorker cartoon world was in a period of transition when Leo’s work began to appear in its pages. Although there had always been a number of cartoonists who wrote their own captions, The New Yorker had from its very beginnings a system in place of gag writers providing cartoonists with ideas. This new wave of cartoonists — including Jack Ziegler, Roz Chast and the current Cartoon Editor, Bob Mankoff — eschewed the gag writer arrangement, preferring to write their own. Citing Don Martin as an early influence, Leo fit right in with the new cartoonists, many of them weaned on Mad and comic books. His subject matter roamed far and wide, but if you take a close look at his New Yorker work you’ll notice he seemed to favor moments captured at the local bar, or at the office.
In person, Leo was unfailingly upbeat and polite to the core — a gentleman cartoonist. Cartoonists knew Leo was different than most: he had a “real” job — he was a commercial pilot for thirty-four years. He worked on his cartoons between flights and on his days off (when I first met Leo, his already wide smile grew wider when he learned that my wife and I lived in Rhinebeck, New York, less than ten minutes from the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, a fifty-year old ongoing museum dedicated to antique aircraft).
One of Leo’s cartoons — one of his very best — appeared immediately post 9/11 in the October 1, 2001 issue of The New Yorker — a time when when most of us couldn’t laugh or didn’t know if we should. In Leo’s cartoon, a man wearing an unattractive patchwork jacket sits next to a woman. The woman says to the man, “I thought I’d never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket.” This was a particularly generous gift from Leo, but of course there were many more before that, and plenty more to come.
___________________________________________________________
An Early Thurber Thursday
Just for this week…it’s Thurber Wednesday!
The Spill will be running a two part interview with a New Yorker cartoonist Thursday and Friday, so Thurber Thursday is here & now.
We’ve seen a number of Thurber book jacket covers on the Spill, some of them the UK Penguin covers that are immediately recognizable, whether the older design or the newer older.
I thought it would be fun to line up as many as I could find (the Spill library does not have a full set, so the ever-trusty internet was employed). I think they look great all together. I’ll be hunting around for more images, and will add them as they turn up.
![The Thurber Album by James Thurber (1961 1st Penguin [UK] pb 1606, NF)](https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/u5kAAOSwboViEBho/s-l225.webp)
_________________________________________________________________
Event Of Interest: Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast, Amy Hwang, And Emily Flake At The 92nd St. Y
Friday, March 25, 2022, “Roz Chast, Amy Hwang, and Emily Flake in Conversation With Liza Donnelly” — these four New Yorker artists gather at the 92nd St Y to celebrate Donnelly’s Very Funny Ladies. All the info here.
— above: l-r, Donnelly, Chast, Hwang, and Flake
Websites: