Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Sidney Harris, whose cartoons, drawn with classic pen and ink, usually refer to science or math

Rachel Loube: Every Tuesday: A Portrait of the New Yorker Cartoonists (2011)

This shorter film from the School of Visual Arts in New York provides a kind of companion piece to The Art of Spiegelman. The link is The New Yorker magazine, on which Spiegelman's wife is Art Director, for which he did many covers over several decades. Here, we glimpse a whole group of people who draw the magazine's famous cartoons. Every Tuesday the next week's cartoons are chosen, and the main cartoonists, who vie with each other for the few spaces in each issue, get together at a restaurant for lunch. If what New Yorker cartoons are like (now anyway) and how they are chosen, you might also like to watch another short film of similar length, not in the Jewish Film Festival but available as a YouTube video, Bob Mankoff: Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon. Mankoff is the cartoon editor, also one of the magazine's more successful cartoonist of recent years. There is nothing in either of these 20-minute films about the great New Yorker cartoonists of the past (whose cartoons I grew up with), the most famous being Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Pete Holmes, Barney Tobey and Gahan Wilson. Addams, Arno, Steinberg, and Thurber were household words in ways no ones since have been.


Steinberg's famous cover showing nothing between the
Hudson River and the Pacific

It feels to a lot of lifetime New Yorker readers who go back a while (and my mother read it when it began, and I read it as a child of the Forties and Fifties) that the editorial reign of the buzz-hungry English shock-journalist Tina Brown that began in 1992 is one from which the magazine will never recover; that David Remnick is a continuation of Tina Brown, and things went downhill after Harold Ross (1925-52) , William Shawn (1952-87) and the brief editorship of Robert Gottleib (1987-92), more known as a book editor at Knopf (he discovered and edited Catch-22) If you peruse the New Yorker's own "Timeline," you can follow the comings and goings of some of the great writers and artists associated with this American cultural monument. It's arguable that the promotional events, cruises, and special issues begun by Tina Brown to advertise and grandize the magazine have diluted its original independent flavor. However, a New Yorker cartoon is still something special even with Charles Addams, Peter Arno, and James Thurber long gone.



Every Tuesday shows ten cartoonists lunching together but interviews four, Sidney Harris, Emily Flake, Drew Dernavich, and Zach Kanin – they provide a sketchy but quite varied picture of the range of personalities and styles making the magazine's cartoons. Mankoff's talk will give you more of a sense of the selection process.

Leah Wolchok and Davina Pardo are raising funds to complete a historical documentary about New Yorker cartoonists. The subject so far has only been touched on, though the peripherally related Art of Spiegelman short doc is highly recommended as an introduction to his life and work.

Every Tuesday: A Portrait of the New Yorker Cartoonists, 22 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2013 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.