Tag: The New Yorker

Cartoonists Honor Fallen Libyan Artist

Last week, I heard from my a cartoonist friend of mine from Corsica, Manfruelli Batti, that a Libyan street artist/cartoonist named Kais al-Hilali had been killed by Quaddafi supporters after drawing a caricature of the leader on a Benghazi street wall.  I put out a call to my international cartoonist friends, and gathered a number of poignant cartoons on this tragedy.  The New Yorker created a slide show of the cartoons, I wrote some copy and it was posted on their News Desk Blog. Here it is. There is nothing like the power of cartoons to speak to an issue.

 

cartoon by Riber Hansson of Sweden

 

Stone Age Print

The future of print media is, to put it mildly, uncertain. I don’t read any magazines any more (except for, ahem, The New Yorker. I have to say that), and still hang on to reading the paper version of the New York Times, as well as online. It’s not exactly becoming obsolete, but is a different form of news gathering. I read the paper edition of the Times to see what they consider worthy of being in the print edition. The online version is for me up-to-date news.

But my first love for immediate news is, of course, Twitter.

 

 

Ideas and Words

Sometimes ideas spring from just one word.  But it has to be the right word.  Doing a cartoon around the word “uprising” would be difficult. Plus, it’s not a very interesting word.  “Revolution” could lead to a lot of things.  But the word “protest” is more malleable, it can fit into many situations. It’s not an interesting word, but it is a buzz-word in the public’s mind right now, so using it at this moment in time works.

While the above idea is not really what I want to say about all the turmoil that is going on in the Middle East, you sometimes just have to go with the flow as to where words take you. Political cartoons in The New Yorker are often oblique, and are about how events affect people often far removed from the events. And unlike editorial cartoons, they are not necessarily about my opinion.  I am an observer.

I often say that cartoonists are sponges, soaking up all that is around us and then squeezing it out into ideas. But we are also grabbers, snatching ideas and words–I envision a butterfly net– as they float in the air around us. We put them on our papers and mold them into cartoons.

cartoon originally published on womensEnews.org

“Young” New Yorker cartoonists at lunch

I found this photo (link below) yesterday while researching for my upcoming talk at the Norman Rockwell Museum.  Love this. I can identify Steig, Addams, Saxon, Hamilton (the only guy with brown hair). The others are hard to see or I don’t recognize their faces. Michael Maslin also posted it on his site, Ink Spill

http://www.corbisimages.com/Enlargement/U1727254-4.html

I used to do the cartoonist lunch every Wednesday. Now I join the group on Tuesays every so often. The regulars when I was going early in my career (in the early 80’s)  were Roz Chast, Jack Zielger, Mick Stevens, Sam Gross, Bob Mankoff.