Bulletin

Issue: May 2006

Books

A study of new yorker’s finest

The New Yorker magazine has dotted its pages for decades with cartoons that have amused and sometimes puzzled its readers.

Four cartoonists stand out for their charm, wit, sophistication and often disarming humour, Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg.

Dr Iain Topliss, a senior lecturer in La Trobe’s English Program, has published a book in which he describes the work and techniques of the four cartoonists published in the magazine between 1925 and 1975.

Entitled Comic Worlds, the book is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dr Topliss examines the quartet’s different kinds of humour, traces the development of their art and recalls the cultural and social context in which it was created.

He delves into the nature of humour and the elements that make cartoons funny, paying special attention to matters of style and technique.

Dr Topliss draws particular attention to the ways the four artists mocked the status quo without alienating the magazine’s readers. He even argues that the New Yorker cartoons helped define Ameri-can consciousness in the mid 20th century.

Dr Topliss was recently awarded a Jackson Brothers Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to research a biography of Saul Steinberg, the greatest of all New Yorker cartoonists.