It’s Them Cartoonists Again
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Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is a comedian, author and New Yorker cartoonist. Her first memoir Murder Book won the Midwest Publishing awards for best graphic novel. Her second graphic memoir The Joy of Snacking comes out this October. You can follow her on Substack and IG @cartoonsbyhilary.
Over at Memoir Land Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell answers a few questions.
I was always creating in some way or another. Whether it was drawing, painting, writing, filmmaking. In college I studied film theory, with an emphasis in screenwriting and was lucky enough to win some awards with my scripts. Then I went on to work more in documentaries because I became more interested in nonfiction. But I was always drawing, so eventually, my drawing and writing found each other in cartoons.
Asher’s Hi It’s Me Again had just dropped, and our conversation naturally gravitated towards his most famous creation: Eugene. For the uninitiated, Eugene is that wide-eyed, innocent character who looks like he just materialised in the world ten minutes ago and is still figuring out the rules (and nervously figuring out how to ask the barista for the bathroom code).
Both of us admitted to fetishising paper and pen while acknowledging the seductive convenience of digital tools. Asher confessed to tapping his page to try to undo lines when working on paper.
Cartoonists work specifically for reproduction. As a cartoonist, I enjoy looking at the surface of such work, but a lot of cartoonists’ work looks better printed. It’s supposed to. So, in a gallery setting I am always on the lookout for cartoons that justify wall space, originals that gain a new voice under the spotlight.
I found plenty to like in the new Featherstone exhibit that features 120 original cartoons from The New Yorker and Daily Mirror. The exhibit was curated by Suzy Brown van Dijk and Lisa Brown Langley from the home collection of their parents, Philip and Eileen Brown.
For The Vineyard Gazette Paul Karasik reviews the Featherstone exhibit of The Phil & Eileen Brown New Yorker Cartoon Collection and Beyond.
It is rare to enter a gallery space and hear giggling as attendees point out choice drawings that tickle them. Appropriately, a few of the drawings reference Martha’s Vineyard where the Brown family summered, but they all have that New Yorker sensibility of looking at the world sideways to reveal the hidden truths with a smile.
A timely post by The Saturday Evening Post of some college cartoons from their archives with Barney Tobey, Stan Hunt, Brian Savage, Herb Green, Jack Tippit, and Harry Mace.
For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8, 2025, special centenary issue titled “The Culture Industry,” we decided to break with tradition. Cindy Sherman’s “Being Eustace” is her take on “Eustace Tilley.”
Françoise Mouly on The New Yorker’s photo cover by Cindy Sherman.
Between late 1955 and early 1957, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams created a weekly black-and-white newspaper comic panel, Out of This World, for the McClure Syndicate. It would be reasonable for one to surmise that Out of This World was made up of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Addams thought highly enough of a good number of the cartoons fromthis strip to include them in his collection Nightcrawlers (1957).
The run was sixty-five cartoons, according to H. Kevin Miserocchi, of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, in a comment he left on Ink Spill in 2021. Maybe so, but the panel strip spanned seventy-five weeks in The Tatler and Bystander. Whatever the case, the fifty-one Addams cartoons Jeff has provided for us represent a majority of the total run. They are shown here as they appeared in print on a full magazine page above the “Roundup” column.
Jeff Nelson and Stephen Nadler present a rare, and large, gallery of Charles Addams cartoons.
Keep up with the latest in magazine (read The New Yorker) news at Michael Maslin’s Inkspill.
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