Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.

Barbara and I spent Christmas Day at Sam and Marissa's house. Sam is our 31-year old. I looked through his copy of The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.

A lot of the drawings from the twenties and thirties made me laugh, and the drawings from the twenties were great -- draughtsmanship and composition equal to high art and illustration, some of the design derived from Cubism.

Beginning in the forties, I laughed a lot less. My reaction was usually, "Oh yeah, I get it." The drawing was okay -- cartoon-level

Then sometime in the nineties, the cartoons started to get funny again. Were they really, or was it that their themes were closer to mine, and the kind of gags were ones I'm conditioned to laugh at?

And if that's true, what does it say about the cartoonists eighty and ninety years ago?

Oh, and William Hamilton's drawings are twenties quality.

No comments: