A cartoon grabbed my attention while I was perusing the recent issue of the New Yorker.
courtesy of The New Yorker– you can find it’s cartoon bank entry here
I thought I’d seen this before. The concept itself is pretty generic, but… hadn’t this already been a New Yorker cartoon?
courtesy of The New Yorker– you can find its cartoon bank entry here
I would have been too young to have seen O’brien’s original cartoon, as it was published October 28, 1991. There’s a chance I’ve caught a reprinting of it. More likely, I’m as used to the concept as everyone else, demonstrated by the variety of “small fish eat big fish” images uncovered on a google image search.
While not ubiquitous, I’d say that the small-fish-forming-into-bigger-fish-and-chasing-predator is an established visual metaphor. It’s interesting to see that the small-fish-forming rarely occurs without the chasing/eating of the bigger fish (can they eat the bigger fish?) The pressure to group together is always a retaliation to predation. Additionally, while the motif has a satisfying punch line, it doesn’t seem like its primary function is to be funny. Typing in “organize fish,” brings up a decent amount of these cartoons with an anti-capitalist bent, where the concept is put across motivationally or strategically. Most of the fish images look like infographics, and a quick survey reveals their sources to be editorial blogs or stock-photo sites, (perhaps most revealing.)
Perhaps the New Yorker cartoon editor should have paid attention to the fact that this image isn’t very funny. Alternatively, he or she might have liked the fact that the cartoon’s commentary outweighs it’s laugh-factor, even though its message is more hopeful than truthful. Finally, the editor might have approved it because it just seemed like something the New Yorker would publish, which is actually the case.
Comparing the cartoons, I prefer the O’brien image. O’brien’s execution of the little fish is more whimsical, and he doesn’t require plankton or sea-monkeys to fill out the fins. The remorseless ambiguity of the predator’s expression is nice– perhaps he looks surprised, but fish look that way all the time. O’brien’s rendering of the sea-floor makes his cartoon less conceptually clean, but as money managers and Occupiers convert the idea into a truism, a slogan, I prefer it messy and maximalist. His use of stipling reminds me of an old scientific etching. I wish he had pushed that more aggressively– rather than an inspirational ‘au contraire,’ the drawing would have illustrated the absurdity of this metaphor happening in nature. But that’s not really that funny or interesting either. Oh well.
Does anyone care about New Yorker cartoons these days? I don’t get the sense that the comics internet in general does, and if not them, who? Would anyone care if they just stopped running them?
The New Yorker is usually my waiting room magazine of choice. If there were no cartoons in an issue I’d be disappointed.
That gag is also the resolution of Leo Lionni’s Swimmy, which well predates both cartoons.
Why is that New Yorker cartoonists usually have a boring sense of humour?
Plagiarism is really rampant in cartooning, most egregiously in editorial cartoons. This is beyond the graphic “swipes” in comics– for an editorial or general cartoon, the idea is what sells it.
In the fish case above, though, I think the problem is a deficit in “cartoon culture” among editors.
I’m cynically awaiting the rip-off of Charles Addams’ ski cartoon, probably the most famous cartoon the New Yorker has ever printed.
The second one trumps because of the one fish in the center playing the eyeball.
The eyeball fish is also “borrowed” from Swimmy:
http://thelittlewoodenhorse.blogspot.ca/2012/03/swimmy.html
The second one is better because the little fish have their mouths open! They’re really prepared to eat the big fish.
In the first cartoon, the little fish have their mouths closed in disapproving frowns. They’re just making a rhetorical point.
The Far Side 6/6/80
http://www.social-marketing.com/blog/uploaded_images/farsidefish-762558.JPG
“Perhaps the New Yorker cartoon editor should have paid attention to the fact that this image isn’t very funny.”
Well, you know Sinclair’s line about getting people to understand what their salary depends on them not understanding.
From “The New Yorker” cartoon editor Bob Mankoff: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonists/2012/07/seinfeld-episode-about-new-yorker-cartoons.html
(I’ve said harsh things about his cartooning, and I’m afraid his word balloon-rendering and typesetting within them in the fumetti above are pretty painful, but Mankoff’s a great cartoon editor.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Does anyone care about New Yorker cartoons these days? I don’t get the sense that the comics internet in general does, and if not them, who? Would anyone care if they just stopped running them?
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This is exactly like Pauline Kael’s amazement that Richard Nixon was elected President, because “no one I know is voting for him.”
An embodiment of that attitude: http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/steinberg-newyorker.jpg
There certainly is a generational thing going on; as “New Yorker” editor David Remnick says:
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The difficult thing there is getting young cartoonists. We have any number of cartoonists who are of middle age, late middle age and older; but it’s tough to make a living as a cartoonist. I think a lot of the people that might think of becoming a cartoonist do other things which are a hell of a lot more remunerative…
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http://bigthink.com/videos/whats-the-deal-with-new-yorker-cartoons
And…
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…it’s not about the money, [sometime “New Yorker” cartoonist] Shaw says. “When you consider the number of submissions, plus the amount of time spent coming up with ideas, plus drawing roughs, actually submitting, then creating finished cartoons, it comes to about $2.75 an hour.”
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http://onmilwaukee.com/buzz/articles/shawnewyorker.html
Suffice it to say, there still are a great many who highly appreciate the routinely excellent, often outstanding, cartoon fare at “The New Yorker.” With licensing fees, reprint rights, and regular collections of cartoons being highly profitable (see the final paragraph of the quotation below), it would seem somebody out there must like ’em.
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Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper’s weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department and a number of staff writers. Cartoons would often be rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931. (Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It was later found out that the office boy (a teenaged Truman Capote) had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he didn’t like down the far edge of his desk.)
Several of the magazine’s cartoons have climbed to a higher plateau of fame. One 1928 cartoon drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White shows a mother telling her daughter, “It’s broccoli, dear.” The daughter responds, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.” Three years later, the Broadway musical Face the Music featured a musical number named “I Say It’s Spinach”. The catchphrase “back to the drawing board” originated with the 1941 Peter Arno cartoon showing an engineer walking away from a crashed plane, saying, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”
The most reprinted is Peter Steiner’s 1993 drawing of two dogs at a computer, with one saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. According to Mankoff, Steiner and the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for the licensing and reprinting of this single cartoon, with more than half going to Steiner.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker
And what a cunning tactic, the way ” ‘New Yorker’ cartoons aren’t funny” screeds carefully pick lame examples to highlight, leaving out the mass of splendid stuff that constitutes the preponderance of the offerings in each issue.
Plus, what’s with all the ire about the “Cartoon Caption Contest”? Some splendidly funny stuff has come up there: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonists/2013/04/roger-eberts-caption-contest-entries.html#slide_ss_0=1
Some good points Mike, though I’ll admit, I’m not really much a fan of the cartoon caption contest.
For further thoughts on the topic, I refer y’all to the last HU New Yorker cartoon thread:
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/10/new-yorker-cartoons-a-legacy-of-mediocrity/
As for the recycled fish gag, I’m guessing that variations on this have been around as long as there have been people looking at schools of fish and making images. As for that particular Sipress cartoon, I can only say that for the most part he’s been one of my favorite of the (relatively) newer New Yorker cartoonists, along with Emily Flake and so I can forgive the occasional dud.
I really like the etching that’s on this collection of Brecht’s poems– a dead big fish barfing up the hundreds of small fish already in his gullet. http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/bertolt-brecht-the-burning-of-the-books-bad-time-for-poetry-reading-the-paper-while-brewing-the-tea/
Here so you don’t have to scroll down: http://books.google.com/books/about/Bertolt_Brecht.html?id=O7w4obd3dx4C
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