At Wit’s End: Cartoonists of the New Yorker

By Michael Maslin, photos by Alen MacWeeney

Clarkson Potter 2024

To the broad shelf of oversized volumes celebrating the New Yorker’s 99-year history of signature covers and cartoons is now added this black-and-white volume from Clarkson Potter, At Wit’s End: Cartoonists of the New Yorker, in which writer Michael Maslin and photographer Alen MacWeeney concentrate not so much on the artwork as on the men and women who created it – including the photo of artist Barry Blitt that adorns the front cover, a spot you’d naturally expect might be reserved for one of the cartoons themselves.

Aficionados of New Yorker cartoons will promptly search for their favorites in the table of contents, and a good many of those searches will come up empty. There’s no Peter Arno here, no Charles Barsotti, no James Thurber, no Charles Addams, no Saul Steinberg, no Helen Hokinson. Long-time magazine standards like George Price and Roz Chast are here, as is the magazine’s stalwart George Booth: “Meeting Booth was like meeting a character in his cartoon world,” Maslin writes in the profile that accompanies a couple of the artist’s pieces. “As he spoke, it was tempting to think of what he was saying as captions – captions that work only in a Booth cartoon.”

But the book’s real trick for most readers will be putting names and faces to some of the most iconic cartoons in the magazine’s modern decades. Donald Trump’s presence on the American political landscape, for instance, was perfectly captured by Paul Noth’s illustration in which sheep looking at an election billboard for a ravenous wolf sporting the slogan “I AM GOING TO EAT YOU” complacently say “He tells it like it is.”

And then there are the two clear winners for most reprinted, most framed, most memed, and most popular two modern-era New Yorker cartoons. One is done by Peter Steiner, whose studio is a predictable ramshackle mess. “In his studio is a tall cabinet with glass doors through which you can see stacks and stacks of drawings,” Maslin writes. “I asked if those were his original New Yorker drawings. He replied, “No, I don’t even know what’s in there.” Steiner has had prolific career, but crucially, he was responsible for the classic cartoon in which a dog seated at a computer is explaining our modern world to a canine companion: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Also Robert Mankoff, about whom Maslin writes, “He has what some would call a large personality, seemingly unsuited for the patient construction of cartoons out of dots.” It was Mankoff who produced an image of a harried business drone standing at his desk looking at his appointment calendar and saying over the phone “No, Thursday’s out. How about never – is never good for you?”

For all the manic eccentricies of its subjects, At Wit’s End is a curiously subdued volume, at once harkening back to decades past when black-and-white New Yorker cartoon anthologies were a staple of the holiday book season while at the same time introducing many fans of the magazine to a dozen artists who may be new to them. Readers who long for a big 220-page anthology crammed with cartoons and skipping the painstakingly whimsical artist profiles will have to wait, but given the quirky entertainment in these pages, they might not mind.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News