My Kind of Comic Book

December 26, 2004 7:14 PM

''The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker" (Reviewed by Walter Kirn)"Of more than 68,000 pieces of art that could have been included in its pages, only about 2,000 have been printed on paper, while the rest are reproduced on two CD's attached to the inside of the front cover." I gotta git me one a 'em. Kirn also says "a fool who can laugh at his folly is not a fool but something rarer and finer: a self-ironist." [New York Times, wants registration.]
posted by davy (22 comments total)

From Seinfeld - Episode 169 - The Cartoon

Elaine: Look at this cartoon in the New Yorker, I don't get this.

Jerry: I don't either.

Elaine: And you're on the fringe of the humor business.

(George comes in)

George: Hey!

Elaine: Hey! George look at this.

George: That's cute.

Elaine: You got it?

George: No , never mind.

Elaine: Come on , We're two intelligent people here. We can figure this out.
posted by Arch Stanton at 7:44 PM on December 26, 2004

The NYT even has a slide-show sample .
posted by davy at 7:44 PM on December 26, 2004

This is a Must-Buy. It's the Coffee Table Book of Coffee Table Books. I love those old renderings of people.
posted by ParisParamus at 8:19 PM on December 26, 2004

(the people in the stands in the third slide). I have the impression of being exposed to lots of such drawings as a tot, so much so that I have this inexplicable obsession with them.
posted by ParisParamus at 8:27 PM on December 26, 2004

My father met my mother partly because he went to the University of Chicago library every week to read The New Yorker (and in those days it was more determinedly parochial). I grew up reading it, and one of my family's favorite in-jokes derives from a George Booth two-pager about cavemen (not online at CartoonBank, but I wonder if it's on the CD) that hung on our fridge for years. And I was most pleased, after having lived in NYC for a mere year and a half, that there was a NYer cartoon which I immediately got, but nobody else who wasn't a NYer themselves got, including my parents (a yuppie woman relaxing on a divan, her yuppie husband with an annoyed look brandishing a sheet of paper: A chinese menu just came in on our fax.) -- which divide I found even more amusing than the cartoon itself.

OK, see in NYC, the Chinese restaurants hire people to slip into apartment buildings and slide menus under people's doors. Or the delivery guys hit an entire floor afterward. Perhaps this was obvious to you.
posted by dhartung at 8:44 PM on December 26, 2004

"I gotta git me one a 'em."

Got one. It's heavy enough to stun a bear.
posted by jscalzi at 9:02 PM on December 26, 2004

My dad got it for xmas and has been reading it non-stop since; almost done! I haven't asked how many he's "got" though. As a British-born Canadian, I'm guessing not many.
posted by krunk at 9:28 PM on December 26, 2004

Hmm, so how'd they convince people that the ones that weren't funny were the ones that they just didn't get? That's very clever.

I'll wait until the Playboy version comes out, unless its already out and then I'm waiting for it to go on sale.
posted by fenriq at 10:21 PM on December 26, 2004

So, after you post a four paragraph MetaTalk screed on someone posting some news item which you had already seen, you post a New York Times review of the Complete Book of New Yorker Cartoons. Boy, how much more Best of The Web can you get than that ? That's not just NewsFilter but Newsfilter plus Pepsi Blue. Not exctly a tidal wave but rather a hum drum product placement for a product everyone not yet brain dead knew about. How utterly totally unique. A rarity, a true gem of the internet. What next--a one link New York Times movie review ? We wait with breath abated.
posted by y2karl at 11:01 PM on December 26, 2004

Arch Stanton: I was thinking the exact same thing.
posted by menace303 at 11:07 PM on December 26, 2004

I read the New Yorker quite frequently, and I've never really understood the cartoons. They don't have their own section - they get placed randomly in the middle of other essays, stories, etc. - and are never related at all to the story they're placed in. A style thing, I suppose, but I never liked it. Also, I only get the joke in maybe a third of them. Sometimes I wonder if there's even a joke to get.
posted by aerify at 12:56 AM on December 27, 2004

karl, no offense (because I agree with the sentiment), but you should have left that one in the preview box
posted by The God Complex at 2:58 AM on December 27, 2004

Hmm, so how'd they convince people that the ones that weren't funny were the ones that they just didn't get? That's very clever.

I completely agree.

The worst part is that I still wind up checking the cartoons every month for the chance that maybe, just maybe, this will be the isssue where they find humor.

In contrast, National Lampoon Magazine had some funny cartoons.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:51 AM on December 27, 2004

Civil_Disobedient, the Lampoon also had an extremely funny and spot-on parody of The New Yorker, probably in 1976 or so. Talk of the Town was redubbed Town on the Take...the cartoons were hideously unfunny and thus hilarious. The cover was modeled on the magazine's water color paintings of the city, this time, with a masked burglar toting a TV emerging from every brownstone.

The writing in the New Yorker is probably the most self-indulgent, way-impressed-with-itself stuff out there. Unreadable, to me at any rate.
posted by 1016 at 6:28 AM on December 27, 2004

Fenriq, there is one for the playboy cartoons, it came out last year.
posted by drezdn at 6:38 AM on December 27, 2004

I love the Addams cartoons that were the basis for the classic TV show and the godawful movie.
posted by nathanrudy at 8:37 AM on December 27, 2004

a hum drum product placement for a product everyone not yet brain dead knew about.

y2karl, you have just ineradicably branded yourself a very parochial elitist, and a particularly vicious one at that: what in the fuck makes you think "everyone not brain dead" reads (or should read!) the Sunday New York Times Book Review, online or off?

I'll consider that you might someday have something to say to me when somebody I know well whose opinion I respect informs me that you've finally become half as intelligent,worthwhile and pleasant as explosive diarrhea.
posted by davy at 9:49 AM on December 27, 2004

Somewhere, huddling alone before a crackling fireplace, his aged hand clutching a snifter of brandy, the other stroking a yellowed tome of memories past, y2karl bitterly remembers that fateful day he became isolated to the world when some newbie announced that he was "branded" as something as if that had any bearing on anything, and everyone, against all respective concepts of reality, actually gave a shit.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 10:17 AM on December 27, 2004

I wouldn't be so apathetic if I wasn't so lethargic.
posted by unsupervised at 10:49 AM on December 27, 2004

Davy, you've posted three links, exactly one of which wasn't to the NY Times. Why don't you check out y2karl's front-page posts and come back to try your hand at clever insults when you've posted one-tenth as many good things as he has. Go on, I'm waiting.
*waits*
posted by languagehat at 12:14 PM on December 27, 2004

I've heard about it, and I don't read the Sunday New York Times Book Review (or, most of the time, the New Yorker).

davy's not banned yet? Who wants to start a pool?
posted by IshmaelGraves at 1:16 PM on December 27, 2004

I'll consider that you might someday have something to say to me when somebody I know well whose opinion I respect informs me that you've finally become half as intelligent,worthwhile and pleasant as explosive diarrhea.

I appear to have offended you in some way.
posted by y2karl at 2:32 PM on December 27, 2004