New Yorker Artist, Ed Koren, 1935-2023

A wonderful person and cartoonist

One of the wonderful things about the professional community I am a part of is that it’s small and we all know each other. The down side of that intimacy is losing people. Yesterday, we lost one of the greats, Ed Koren, and it is reverberating throughout our small gang of New Yorker cartoonists.

Ed was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, selling his first drawing to the magazine in 1962 and working up until the weeks before he died. His work is instantly identifiable as his own. Not only in his drawing style and his fuzzy characters, but also in his captions and choice of topics. Ed liked to ridicule pretension, and as an extremely political person, he often took aim at current events. But his work also could be sweet, and his drawings showed us the bright side of life.

What I particularly enjoyed about Ed’s drawings were that often they were simply observational, not about any kind of “joke.” I loved that about his work. Ed told us about ourselves.

I don’t remember when I first met Ed, but it was probably in the 1980’s. As a young cartoonist, I was in awe. I was still in awe when my husband Michael Maslin and I visited him in his studio in Vermont a few months go. We talked shop, politics, laughed and he shared stories of his time at the magazine.

Plus, he was just simply a lovely man who was thoughtful and kind and generous. And so very funny, in a sly and subtle way. He loved our art form, and was passionate about it. He was very protective of it.

Ed will be greatly missed.

Ed Koren, Michael Maslin and me being photobombed by David Remnick.