Saturday, January 4, 2014

Great Cartoon of the World, Series 7, part 1

There were several volumes of this series, one every year, which I've been posting. This one is from 1973 and also edited by John Bailey.

Jean-Jacques Sempé
Michael Ffolkes
Jean-Jacques Sempé
Charles Elmer Martin, who did this The New Yorker cartoon, is written about in the introduction thusly: Charles Martin (C.E.M.) is an impressive figure who wears a light beard and looks like one of Robin Hood's men. He has a lively, inquiring mind, is constantly looking around to see what is going on, and has a vast appreciation of textures and moods. His drawings are surprising in their delicacy, at times approaching filigree work.
It says of Charles Saxon, another New Yorker cartoonist: Saxon does not look like his work—close-knit features, an open, alert expression, the solid muscularity of the athlete, and a cool, keen eye—but when he starts to talk about his work. He is emotional, even saturnine about life. His private sense of humor can rarely be detected in conversation, but it is sufficiently evident in his drawings. He has taken material of the twentieth century, has narrowed it down to a comfortable section that includes the upper middle drawer of the upper middle class, and has become a leading authority on it.
New Yorker's Stan Hunt is: ...an excellent example of the work matching the artist. He is hypersensitive with a special insight into the fears that haunt people—illness, failure, and that indefinable feeling that something will get you. All expressed in his cartoons right on the nose.
Boris Drucker is ...saturnine, gloomy, and philosophical, but his work is funny and gay. There is a genuine laugh connected with every cartoon he draws, and he is one of the best gagmen in the business. He looks like a Dosteofskian journalist leading a kind of Kafkaesque like, but somewhere in the depths of Drucker there is a lot of humor.
[Frank] Modell has what has been called “a ready wit”. His work is a true expression of his personality. He is rascally, cynical, and bubbling over with the fun of everything. Very little surprises him. There is not much naiveté in his work or in his nature. The subjects he covers are the subjects he is really interested in, and he does not force himself into any vein that goes against what he can observe easily in his life.
The editor in his intro doesn't mention the foreign cartoonists featured in the book, like Miroslav Barták...
...or Stanislav Holý.
Charles Addams
Forty years ago a plane crashing into a building didn't have the weight it does now, like in this cartoon by Pit Grove.

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