How About Never- Revised(Adam) & Revisited(Bob)

Editorial cartoonists often take universally recognizable images and twist them into a useful satirical drawing for sarcastic and humorous purposes. So it was that Adam Zyglis appropriated a very famous Bob Mankoff cartoon for an effective lampoon of current events. Said Adam:

I believe Trump’s desire to postpone the election was really his way of saying he didn’t want to have it at all. I needed a metaphor, and the businessman in the ‘never’ cartoon popped into my head.

In my mind, the ‘How about never’ cartoon is one of the most quintessential New Yorker cartoons. It perfectly captures the tone and humor in what so many cartoonists try to emulate.

Adam Zyglis’s Buffalo News reported:

Zyglis imitated Mankoff’s pointillist style and refashioned the familiar caption so as to make a classic new again. The cartoon, which ran Thursday, worked even if you didn’t know the original reference – and really popped if you did.

 On Sunday, Zyglis was thrilled to get a call from Mankoff. They spoke for nearly an hour.

“He thought it was a great adaptation,” Zyglis says. “I’m so glad he was flattered.”

The Buffalo News article, like the cartoon, follows on the heels of Bob Mankoff, who blogged:

…However, when it’s not a rip-off but a timely editorial take-off, it’s an homage that honors me. A case in point is [the] cartoon published in The Buffalo News last week.

I contacted Adam Zyglis, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Buffalo News, to congratulate him and ask how he came to adapt the cartoon.

2 thoughts on “How About Never- Revised(Adam) & Revisited(Bob)

  1. I’ve enjoyed Zyglis cartoons for a long time on the Buffalo News site. They haven’t been updated since June 25. Is he no longer there?

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