Fave Throw Back Photo Of The Day
It’s going to come as no surprise to habitual visitors to this site that the Spill would find the above photo fascinating. What you’re seeing is just a glimpse of the black binders in The New Yorker’s library. Every New Yorker writer and artist’s work is collected in these (scrap)books. The last time I popped into the library, The New Yorker was in its Time Square location (the 3rd of its residences). This photo was taken at that address. Here’s the 2013 Spill post (with map) about the magazine’s moves over the years.
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Latest Cartoon Pad Podcast guest: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
New Yorker Cartoonist co-hosts Bob Eckstein and Michael Shaw speak with Hilary Campbell about her soon-to-be-released Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir Of True Crime Obsession (Andrews McMeel). Ms. Campbell began contributing to The New Yorker in 2017. Visit her website here.
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The Tilley Watch Online, October 18-22, 2021
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists who contributed to newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Ellis Rosen & Tom Chitty(a duo effort), Adam Douglas Thompson, Kim Warp, Zoe Si, Colin Tom.
Daily Shouts: Colin Stokes (The New Yorker‘s assistant cartoon editor) with Eugenia Viti
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50 Years Ago In The New Yorker
The New Yorker time machine automatically kicks in here at the Spill on overcast chilly Saturday mornings. So here’s a quick look at just a few of the drawings in a 50 year old issue of the magazine, dated October 30, 1971. This would’ve been one of the issues I was studying closely while dreaming the seemingly impossible dream of someday becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. By October of ’71 I’d already been rejected numerous times by the magazine’s art editor, James Geraghty. Remembering what kind of work I was sending in then, Mr. Geraghty would’ve been off his rocker to bring any of my work to the weekly art meeting with editor, William Shawn. It would be another six years before my first New Yorker check arrived in the mail (Lee Lorenz was bringing selected cartoons to Mr. Shawn’s office by that time).
Looking through this issue, I’m not surprised by the superior work. Look at this incredible drawing by Edward Koren …
And then this one from Al Ross. Looking at this minutes ago, I laughed out loud. I may be stepping fairly far out on a limb here, but, to me, the weathervane guy looks a bit like Mr. Ross, minus the mustache.
And then there’s this 5 parter from Vahan Shirvanian. It needed to travel over the fold and onto the following page (if you look closely you’ll see that the paper is ever so slightly grey in the first drawing in the series). So funny, and so simple (the idea and the drawing style itself). It reminds me a little of Arnie Levin’s work. Mr. Levin, who came into the fold three years after this issue, was another master of the deceptively simple (often caption-less) line drawing. Michael Shaw, who followed Mr. Levin’s debut by twenty-five years, took the deceptively simple line drawing about as far as it could go, letting it melt on the page.
If you think about it, these three artists (of the 17 in the issue) provide a nice lesson: Mr. Koren’s work, with his controlled chaotic lines; Mr. Ross, with his disciplined fluid line — it’s loose, but it’s not; and Mr. Shirvanian, giving us the what could’ve been a casual drawing lifted out of a sketchbook and onto the pages of The New Yorker. If I said I didn’t “borrow” something from these three artists and the 14 others joining them in that week’s issue, you know I’d be a liar.