Cream of "New Yorker" Cartoons

With in recent years a distinction has been noted between "New Yorker" notion and other action. This has been largely the work of that magazine's founder Harold Roes. When he wrote the prospectus for the magazine 26 years ago he said: "The New Yorker will be a reflection in words and pictures of metropolitan life. . . . This will be done by writers capable of appreciating elements of a situation." Rose had special regard for cartoonists in this plan writing that "The 'New Yorker' expects to be distinguished for its illustrations," and through the development of several excellent artists, he has accomplished this purpose.

The "New Yorker's" cartoons were, from the first, as distinctive as its short stories. They are a commentary on modern, metropolitan life. As Peter Arno puts it in his introduction to his collection (1926-51), "Ladies and Gentlemen." "Harold Ross, in starting the "New Yorker" cost out the stale joke, the pun, the he-and-she formula. . . . In their place developed . . . a humor related to everyday life; believable, based on carefully thought-out, integrated situations."

Take a simple, everyday situation, for example a large truck backing into a small parking space. It is normal enough until Arno puts in an old woman, complete with rakish hat and shawl, directing the driver: "O.K., Cut her hard!" she shouts. Or the man standing front of the burned ruins of his house in slippers and bathrobe. The fire trucks are pulling away and the chief says, "Well, if you ever need us again just give us a ring." Or the little boy lying on his bed as the governess reads a fairytale. "You mean the Three Bears raised all that stink over a lousy bowl of breakfast food?"

It is the situation everyone encounters, carried just one step further.

George Prices' collection, "We Buy Old Gold," is a selection from Price's work of the last six years. He too takes the everyday situation, but is 'more existence. Typical of this type of cartoon is the man on the motorcycle receiving gas and oil at the filling station, with one attendant wiping his goggles;

There is another distinction between Arno and Price. Price's characters meet some confusing situation and then commment on it. The man standing beside a collapsed taxi and the driver looking at him, plaintively crying. "I ast you not to slam the door," or two ladies in a car watching an escape-car pulling away from a bank robbery and commenting. "Hold it, Grace. There's someone pulling out now."

Arno's people, on the other hand, have generally created their own situation: The man sitting at a bar with a beautiful girl telling the bartender to, "Fill 'er up," or the two clerics watching a parish bazaar and saying. "Ah, well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."

The choice is essentially a personal one. For the purposes of a review, you can only say one is Arno, the other Price.