Two Classifications Of New Yorker Cartoons
If you look at Wolcott Gibbs‘s Foreward in Charles Addams’s 1947 cartoon collection, Addams And Evil, you’ll find this interesting opening sentence.
Mr. Gibbs goes on to use Helen Hokinson as an example of an artist who contributed “straight” cartoons, and Addams as “nutty.” Mr. Gibbs describes Ms. Hokinson as a “social critic” with her “work simply…a remarkably acute editing and pointing up of the facts.” The “nutty” category, according to Mr. Gibbs, “is harder to define, since it is less a criticism of any local system than a total and melodramatic re-arrangement of all life.”
I’m not inclined to list cartoonists under “nutty” and “social critic” but you can play the game at home.
For much more on Mr. Gibbs, check out the late Tom Vinciguerra’s wonderful Cast Of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, And The Golden Age Of The New Yorker
Charles Addams’s Addams And Evil is available on AbeBooks.com. ________________________________________________________________________
Today’s Daily Cartoonist & Cartoon
Colin Tom, who began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015, on post hibernation partying.
More here on Mr. Tom via A Case For Pencils.