Peter Arno: Avoiding Easy Stagnation
Posted by Tom Mason Categories: Editorials,
Peter Arno was one of the great cartoonists of his generation, probably one of the greatest of all time. A mainstay of The New Yorker, his work helped define the magazine, and he was wealthy enough to party on with the types of people he lampooned in his cartoons. He was only 64 years old when he died in 1968.
In the introduction to his book, Peter Arno’s Ladies & Gentlemen (Simon and Schuster, 1951), Arno answered a few questions that had been constantly hurled at him over the years. One of my favorite responses was to the age-old question all creative people must suffer.
Here’s Arno:
“Question Number Two seems to be: ‘Where do you get all your ideas? Do they just come to you?’
“The last thing they do, madam, is ‘just come.’ My ideas are produced with blood, sweat, brain-racking toil, the help of The New Yorker art staff, and the collaboration of keen-eyed undercover operatives. For the first few years I did think up most of my own situations. I had to. I was developing a style and a new kind of format, and there was no way anyone else could do it for me. But as time went on, and a distinct pattern for my work was set, it became easier for others to make contributions. By “others,” I mean the scant handful of gifted idea-men (there are hordes of the other kind) who have grown up in the field during the past few years.
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Campaign for Drawing: Gerald Scarfe, Quentin Blake and Steve Bell
Posted by Tom Mason Categories: Editorials,
Even though I’m not a big collector of original art, I love looking at it and the pieces that I own are very special to me—and they’re framed and mounted on the wall of my office. I love to thumb through originals when I go to Comic Con International. I like to feel the weight of the art board, see the underlying pencils and study how the ink line digs into the paper.
The Campaign For Drawing is a British organization that’s holding a silent auction. The campaign is devoted to creating a “new regard for the value of drawing to help people see, think, invent and take action. Its long-term ambition is to change the way drawing is perceived by educationalists and the public.” Their Big Draw Auction features original art by a couple dozen wonderful artists and cartoonists.
Over at the website, you’ll find some excellent pieces by artists Tony Husband, Steve Bell, David Roberts, Martin Rowson, Posey Simonds, Gerald Scarfe, Bill Stott, cartoonists from The Guardian and Private Eye, Ken Pyne, Lucinda Rogers, Robert Duncan, Rosey Brooks, Anthony Brown, Quentin Blake and lots more.
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FORGOTTEN COMICS: ARMY LAUGHS with Bill Wenzel
Posted by Tom Mason Categories: Editorials,
From the early days of cartooning until the market went south in the 1980s, there are a lot of humor publications (and would-be humor publications) that all followed the same basic format: black and white gag cartoons, jokes, odd little articles and features, and the occasional pin-up girl. Many of these publications sported cartoons from cartoonists who would go on to careers at the top cartoon markets like Playboy and The New Yorker, and many of these publications served as dumping grounds by cartoonists who sold off their rejects: selling a dozen cartoons at once that had already made the rounds for $15 each was a quick $180, a way to monetize finished work that no one else wanted. Hey, cartooning is a business, too.
The publications had names like Best Cartoons, Broadway Laughs, Army Fun, Laff Time, Cartoon Carnival, Cartoon Capers and Good Humor and were published by companies like Charlton (at the same time they were publishing their comic books) and Crestwood and Magazine Management. You can guess the target audience by some of the titles.
One of my favorites of that era was the digest-sized Army Laughs (one of many similar titles published by Crestwood), which featured a high-volume of risqué military-based cartoons – almost all of them sexist, along with the usual jokes, text features and teasing pin-up girls with funny captions.
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