Music for a Ridiculous Ensemble

See if you can spot Dylan, Daft Punk, and a digeridoo. I recently did an interview with a great blog called Illustration Concentration - check it out for some intimate secrets about how Incidental Comics are made and a couple previously unreleased sketchbook pages. For an extended musing on the above cartoon, keep reading.

The recent death of Ronald Searle and the 100th birthday of the late Charles Addams got me thinking about how much The New Yorker has influenced me as a cartoonist. During my sophomore year of college my brother brought a stack of back issues to our apartment. I'd never opened the magazine before, but I quickly became obsessed with it - especially the cartoons. To someone raised almost exclusively on newspaper comic strips, the humor was understated and often weird. The drawings were especially appealing - the best cartoonists had a unique style that couldn't be mistaken for anyone else. I remember puzzling over a full-page spread drawn by Roz Chast, probably in the yearly cartoon issue. At first I couldn't decide whether I hated it or was just mildly annoyed by it. It grew on me, though. A few months later, she was my favorite cartoonist.  

The comic I posted above is from mid 2010, but it was directly inspired by old New Yorker cartoon collections. I loved the highly-detailed drawings of full orchestras, rendered in gray ink washes. I was also listening to a lot of Steve Reich at the time, and I wanted to merge the lush experimental sound of a Reich piece with the visual gags of a New Yorker panel. I'm still happy with the way it turned out.

My New Yorker Cartoon Phase

Just as most teenage boys go through a Led Zeppelin phase, most young cartoonists go through a New Yorker cartoon phase. This was an early attempt at drawing in that trademark style. I've mostly recovered from my Led Zeppelin phase, but I still have visions of my drawings appearing in the same hallowed pages as a Roz Chast or Charles Barsotti cartoon - ideally in the middle of some impenetrable article on Mideast foreign policy.

"New Yorker" Staging

I'd swear that I read somewhere that when Disney animator Marc Davis taught drawing classes at Disney, he told his students to look at old New Yorker cartoons from the 30's and 40's and try to redraw the and improve their staging. Basically, they were always staged so well that it was a nearly impossible task. I don't remember where I read that he did that, or if it's even true...can anybody help me out here?

Anyway, I grabbed these from a CD that came with the big treasury of New Yorker cartoons that came out a few years ago. I'm sorry the quality is so low...it's the way the CD was made so that they can't be reproduced, I guess. But take a look at these and ask yourself what you would add, or remove, or draw differently to make the ideas come across better.

These are by Robert J. Day:





These are Peter Arno's:





Please let me know if these are clear enough to see; also, let me know if you found this interesting or not...I can post lots more if people liked this.