Cart1600
Well, we told you the New York Times LOVES comics, but this is a whole new level of romance as a regular New Yorker cartoonists lunch attended by such folks as Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross and Marisa Acocella Marchetto is captured for posterity :

Mr. Gross, wearing a green baseball cap, swaggering like a schoolboy out to pick a fight, carries a portfolio case by his side. His are the magazine’s precocious cats and dogs, their human counterparts outmatched and comparatively unrefined. He has wanted to be a cartoonist since he was a kid.

Next to him, Mr. Wilson walks with an easy stride, tall and black-clad, with fine white hair. His work, fancifully absurdist, morphs the bodies of monsters with those of men. If any adult still takes a pre-emptive peek under the bed or in a darkened closet before falling sleep, it is his creations they will find.


The LONG article is must reading is for no other reason than it validates the existence, if you squint a whole lot, of an older, more classic New York, where erudite, witty people who contributed to important magazines which influenced opinion had lunch (probably smoking right at the table) and said witty, erudite things that everyone would later they had overheard. The cartoonists slog is also captured:

Tuesday’s midday feeding is still a comparatively novel invention, perhaps no more than 15 years old, a vestige of the days when cartoonists in this media capital literally took to the streets to sell their work, running into each other on their respective circuits.

From the 1940s to the early to middle ’80s — before submissions could be faxed in, before Kinko’s made copies for a dime and before the magazine market began to dry up — New York City’s cartoonists set out about town each week, on foot, to markets like Collier’s, True, Cavalier, The Saturday Evening Post, National Lampoon and Playboy, many now long defunct. Wednesday in New York was the designated day when the editors saw their work.

“We used to spend the whole day going from magazine to magazine,” Mr. Gross says. At the time of the Wednesday walk, The New Yorker had a second day, Tuesday, as the day to see its regulars. “Tuesdays they had the elite people come,” Mr. Gross said. “And Wednesdays they had the unwashed people come. I came on Wednesdays.” (Now, Tuesday is the only day when The New Yorker sees its cartoonists.)

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