90 Years of New Yorker Cartoons in the Penny Press!
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On newsstands now, as the saying goes, is one of my very favorite semi-regular Penny Press confections: a New Yorker cartoon collection. This one is meant to commemorate the magazine’s 90th anniversary (as unbelievable as that figure must seem to some of us), and (equally unbelievable, in its own way) this seems to be the only such recognition that milestone is going to get in 2015 – a glossy bound magazine rather than a book. Still, for $13 this is one nifty little anniversary item and might just reach more New 
Yorker fans than a $50 hardcover would have done.
This issue is set up decade by decade, a fairly standard arrangement that’s still irresistible, since it shows the steady evolution of the magazine’s cartoonists efforts to mirror the fads of their society. When you watch that evolution, driven by temporary fads, played against what’s often demonized as the eternal New Yorker “themes” (therapy, class friction, downtrodden workers, over-privileged kids – basically, the Upper East Side), you get a weird and not at all unpleasant suggestion of an institutional brain guiding the whole process, decade after decade, allowing for changes in architecture and clothing styles and argot, but keeping the feel of everything remarkably consistent. It’s a big part of what makes New Yorker cartoons so oddly comforting – at their best, they’re predictable but not boring, socially relevant but also anodyne, simultaneously cutting and coddling. All of which might sound vaguely horrifying to some people (I’ve known various changing guards of such people my entire life), but me? Sign me up! As an old friend discovered just recently, one of the surest ways to make my eyes positively light up on a book-gift is to give me one of those 
mildewy old hardcover cartoon collections the New Yorker used to publish fairly regularly back when the Cold War was on.
This magazine substitute isn’t half bad either. Most of the New Yorker all-time classics are here, including “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it” and “I don’t care what you say – I’m cold!” and, a personal favorite for obvious reasons (and taped to my old transparent blue desktop computer), “On the Internet, nobody 
knows you’re a dog.” New Yorker greats like Peter Arno, Charles Addams, George Booth, my beloved Helen Hokinson, Saul Steinberg, and my favorite, Gluyas Williams (whose “The Day the Cake of Soap Sank at Procter & Gamble’s” leads off the collection even though it’ll make no sense whatsoever to most of the issue’s readers) are all represented here, as are newer giants like Dan Shanahan, Joe Dator, and the mighty Roz Chast, although the collection’s “more than 262.5” selections means quite a few favorites are going to be left out, this issue is full of wonderful stuff.
And by flipping through the pages, you get to see some of those standby New Yorker themes slowly adapt themselves over the decades. The earliest cartoons lean heavily on a semi-affectionate spoofing of the cluelessness of the very uppermost ‘class’ in America in the ’20s and ’30s (you see this quite often in the Saturday Evening Post covers of the time as well), the joshing of the toff. But gradually both toffs and their ribbing disappear from the landscape. The very rich remain (they shall be always with us), but they slowly take on more sinister and cutting tones, especially after President Eisenhower warned the country about the military-industrial complex. Likewise artful innuendo (including a famous “All right, have it your way – you heard a seal bark!” panel by James Thurber) is replaced by explicit talk of sex, and Botox, and Facebook.
I could have hoped for another elaborate hardcover volume like the one the magazine produced to celebrate its 75th anniversary – after all, it’s not every magazine that gets to turn 90 – but this glossy issue will certainly tide me over until the big 100-years hoopla commences in 2025. And in the meantime, there may still be one or two of those mildewy old volumes I haven’t yet discovered …