A Daily Shouts Excerpt From Steve Martin & Harry Bliss’s Wealth Of Pigeons
Yesterday’s Daily Shouts featured an excerpt from Steve Martin & Harry Bliss’s upcoming cartoon collection, A Wealth Of Pigeons.
Thinking about cartoonist collaborative efforts throughout The New Yorker‘s history, several others come to mind, especially the duo of Helen Hokinson and James Reid Parker, and later, Richard McCallister and Peter Arno. Neither however, was celebrated like Martin’s & Bliss’s. The idea of New Yorker cartoonists collaborating has come full circle in recent years, quite obviously no longer a topic swept under the carpet. For more on the subject here’s an Ink Spill piece from June of 2013, “Collaborating Cartoonists”
More on Martin & Bliss: from today’s New York Times, “They Are Also 2 Wild and Crazy Guys”
The piece includes this tidbit:
Martin has written comics before, in secret. Years ago, he used to ghostwrite punch lines and comic scenarios for a cartoonist, who published some of their creations, in The New Yorker. Martin never took credit for the cartoons, and he declined to name the cartoonist, who died five years ago. “I’d rather keep it a secret because it was private between me and him,” he said.
Mr. Martin, by giving us a time-frame, has let the ID of his previous collaborating cartoonist out of the bag. No New Yorker cartoonist passed away in 2015, but seven (or possibly eight*) did in 2016: William Hamilton, Jerry Dumas, Peter Porges, Frank Modell, Anatol Kovarsky, Michael Crawford, and Robert Weber. Of those seven (or eight), only one was still publishing in the magazine several years before their passing. I’ll leave it to cartoon sleuths to figure out who Mr. Martin’s earlier collaborator was.
*Stuart Leeds passed away sometime between 2014-2016. He was no longer published in the magazine during the 2000’s second decade.