The Tilley Watch Online, The Week Of December 23-27, 2024
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
Daily Cartoon: Niall Maher (as of this writing, an online only cartoonist contributor),Tyson Cole, Dimita Rizou (as of this writing, an online only cartoonist contributor), Tom Chitty, Joe Dator. See all the Daily Cartoons here.
For Auld Lang Syne (a cartoon slide show).
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Thoughts While Perusing A 115 Year Old Issue Of Judge
Now that we’re between holidays I was finally able to sit with it and look at the cartoons in the November 1909 issue of Judge magazine recently sent to me by a friend of the Spill (my thanks to him!). Having studied pre-New Yorker cartoons for my biography of Peter Arno, I’m no stranger to Judge or to pre 1925 cartoons found in the likes of Puck and Life. But for whatever reason, while spending this chilly icy upstate New York morning looking over this 1909 magazine, I began to think about the cartoonists who lived during that time and how their cartoon world was rocked with the arrival of Harold Ross’s New Yorker and his insistence that cartoons reflect (in many cases) the “real” world, both in subject matter and in the drawing itself. The style of drawings found in Judge soon disappeared as did he/she cartoons, such as this:
Writers providing captions for cartoonists almost died three-quarters the way through the 1900s, only to make a comeback in recent times.
I’m sure there are cartoon scholars out there who have written plenty about the changes that brought about the decline of the he/she form of cartoons and the cartoonists of that age — specifically, how they coped (in my own way, in the form of an unpublished memoir, I made a stab at addressing changes at The New Yorker for the past near half-century). Perhaps looking at Judge — an institution for many of its 66 years — has caused me to fast-forward and ready myself for the 100th birthday of The New Yorker. Luckily, for now, Harold Ross’s game-changing idea about cartoons (mostly) reflecting the real world, has stuck.