IntroductionFor a magazine that’s been around for a century, one might suppose that it has had its act together for much of that time. But the truth is:
The New Yorker has been restless since its debut in the mid–Roaring Twenties. That restlessness, defined by a desire and openness to change, has been, and continues to be, its core strength.
The magazine that made a name for itself in the last millennium is in some ways not the magazine it is today. And we hope that
The New Yorker of a hundred years from now will not be a duplicate of the current magazine. It has always been the magazine of surprise, beginning with issue #1’s cover by Rea Irvin of an oddly compelling top-hatted Victorian-era gent (soon to be dubbed Eustace Tilley). The magazine’s cartoonists have kept the element of surprise afloat to this very day. Who among us does not flip through the latest issue to see the cartoons, looking and hoping to be surprised.
My guess is that not a year has gone by—not even a month in a year—without someone somewhere saying that the cartoons “aren’t as funny as they used to be.” If we’re lucky, that will continue as long as there’s a
New Yorker. Change at the magazine means that the idea of
what’s funny changes. In 2025, cartoonists should not be trying to mimic cartoons that tickled funny bones in 1925—they should be capturing the humor of the present. Looking at a 1920s cartoon will inform you of that era’s fashion and concerns and behaviors, and even politics. The same can be said for the cartoons of the 2020s. Around and around it goes, with plenty enough oddities to make things more than interesting. This is the meat and taters of
The New Yorker.
In a now grand tradition, the magazine’s cartoonists identify themselves as “
New Yorker cartoonists”—but in truth they work for themselves. They remain, for the most part, solo acts, seeing what most of us see, then running that through their brains’ highly attuned and complex cartoonist gadgetry. They’re hard workers, these cartoonists—they always have been. As you will see in Alen MacWeeney’s photographs of the artists in this volume, they are a determined lot.
—Michael Maslin
Copyright © 2024 by Photographs by Alen MacWeeney, Words by Michael Maslin; Foreword by Emma Allen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
