Zeitgeist Drawings
This cartoon was drawn for The New Yorker last year, as NYC was emerging from the first covid nightmare. I keep it in a frame propped at my desk.
I cannot wait for this new varient to blow past us. Here is a column by NYTimes writer, David Leonhardt, that says we should be encouraged. Omicron is not as deadly. It’s hard to read these things and still not worry, but it is hopeful. I’ve been lucky to avoid infection (as far as I know) and everyone around me as well. I think my mental health has been fine, I’m coping. But this recent set-back with the new varient almost took me down emotionally! I exagerate, of course, and do not mean to belittle those who have suffered so much. I have been lucky.
This is another favorite cartoon that hangs on my wall behind me. It was drawn in 2002, a few months after 9/11. If I’m going to give prefence to my cartoon babies, I seem to like ones that are not wholly funny, but that capture a certain zeitgeist of the time in which they were drawn. Sadly, this cartoon can be applied to many different situations in our world, and I have brought it out again to share on every anniversay of 9/11, and at other times.
In keeping with not funny cartoons, below was my second political cartoon (the first was one about the 1984 presidential election) for The New Yorker. NYC was dangerous at the time in 1992 when I drew this, more so that recent decades. It resonates differently now, if this was published today….it doesn’t work. It only worked at the time.
The New Yorker has published many cartoons in the serious vein over the years, by other artists. This one below is the most poignant (that word seems to soft) one I can recall seeing in all my years studying the cartoons in the magazine. It is by Reginald Marsh, who became more known for his art outside of The New Yorker. Published in 1934, it is a chilling drawing.
Cartoons have the power to inform, offend, bring together. Cartoons are not always funny.