Drawing On The Lighter Side Of Dark Times

By Nancy K. Crevier

Take one part bleak economy, one part corporate excess, a splash of human frailty, and a dollop of despair, leaven with a cartoonist, let rise, bake in the heat of competition at a sophisticated magazine, then serve up a good laugh.

Newtown resident Dana Fradon and Easton resident Lee Lorenz, two veteran New Yorker cartoonists, have used this recipe to ease our way through society’s trials for the past several decades.

“An awful lot of cartoons are created that deal with the problems people are dealing with, so a cartoonist tries to say something about it that is amusing,” said Mr Lorenz during a visit to his former hometown paper, The Newtown Bee. When your career hinges on finding the humor in the everyday and the world at large, as it does for the longtime cartoonist and former art/cartoon editor (1973–1997) of The New Yorker magazine, you do not want the muse to go on vacation. So finding a sort of schadenfreude in life is essential.

Many cartoons created by the two men reflect on the issues of the economy as seen through the artists’ eyes, and though many hail from two or three decades ago, they are as timeless today as they were when first conceived.

Mr Lorenz said his cartoons are never drawn with the intent of becoming timeless, but it is not surprising that they often do so, since the themes of death, love, Heaven and Hell, urban couples, and the economy are “the common coin” for cartoonists. “I take an angle on an idea and people get a short relief from that. It’s very easy to do material with what is happening now,” said Mr Lorenz, even as he admitted, “Life does not look funny right now. This recession has affected me more directly than earlier ones, but if you were at the mercy of the environment, you’d never write anything.”

“There are two types of cartoons,” explained Mr Fradon. “The tactical and the strategic.” A tactical cartoon is very topical. The strategic cartoons, on the other hand, are the ones that last forever, he said. “People are always going to get into trouble. We’ll always have poverty and wars and economic crises. A cartoonist’s duty is to point out, in a humorous way, the fallacies that get us into these economic holes, for instance,” said Mr Fradon. “I’m pointing out to people the obvious negatives.”

The path to cartooning for both men was, as is their humor, a little skewed.

A product of Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Mr Lorenz’s goal was to become a painter. “I never set out to go into cartooning. But after college, the father of a high school friend encouraged me to try cartooning, and I had done some in high school in Greenwich.” He sold his first cartoon to Collier’s magazine in 1956, and with many small magazines saturating the market in the 1950s, he quickly found himself successful in selling what he drew. “I had no trouble coming up with ideas,” Mr Lorenz said.

With a few years of experience selling his work, he approached The New Yorker. The magazine had its own stable of contract artists at the time, who worked from ideas bought from the outside. His first sales to the prestigious magazine were for ideas for those artists, “hoping they would consider a finished drawing of mine eventually,” Mr Lorenz said. Finally, in 1958, he was offered a contract with The New Yorker. “I was very fortunate. There was a lot of competition. But I have had a contract with them ever since,” he said.

When working full-time for The New Yorker, Mr Lorenz would submit 20 to 25 ideas a week for consideration, of which he felt lucky if one idea flew. “I once sold 60 ideas to The New Yorker in a year. If you sold 30 in a year, that was usually a great success,” he said.

Generating new ideas is a combination of observing the surroundings and vignettes from real life. “I like to do social commentary, so I pay attention to what is going on. You have to be quick, too. If there’s some event that comes up, you know every cartoonist will have something to say about it, so you better be first,” said Mr Lorenz.

Real life also plays a big part in providing fodder for a cartoonist, he said. “It’s hard to do a cartoon without it reflecting your own situations, and there are so many situations that are common to family life. But real ideas are used in a broad sense. If you don’t come up with the ideas, you don’t say in the business long,” he said.

The best ideas sometimes are the ones that just pop into his head, Mr Lorenz said. “When I sit down to work I have little things I’ve jotted down – it’s a ‘mulch pile’ of little ideas.”

“I really wanted to be a political cartoonist all along, growing up in Chicago,” said Mr Fradon. He had always appreciated the quirks in life situations, but his success at developing those quirks into successful cartoons had to wait until after he had finished a stint in the army during World War II. He then set out to broaden his base of knowledge, an important tool for any cartoonist, he said. “A lot of cartooning is bringing two or three ideas together. You have to have a good knowledge of a lot of different things,” Mr Fradon said. “The advice I give young cartoonists is to have as many experiences as they can, and to read as much as they can.”

It is advice he continues to take himself, thoroughly reading the New York Times and the Huffington Post each day, and continually reading books, particularly about the medieval era, from which many of his cartoons arise.

He sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1948, followed by a second in 1950. Since then, he has had a contract with that magazine, publishing between 1,300 and 1,400 cartoons.

Like Mr Lorenz, he draws from his personal experiences, although since 2003 he has turned his attention away from cartoons to his novel about his years at The New Yorker. “I can’t write down a procedure for coming up with cartoons. It means always being alert to something a little incongruous and pouncing on it. You have to find what’s funny in the way you want it to be funny, but there is no formula,” said Mr Fradon.

While he is unafraid to take jabs at those who prey on the innocent — “If I were thinking of ideas today, I would go down the line of how blatant is the crookery and the thievery [of some of these corporate heads and corporations] and milk that.” — he does concede that there are areas that a good cartoonist realizes are taboo. “We don’t pick on infirmities. We don’t make fun of particular religions or race. Issues that are sensitive to any particular peoples are off limits,” he said. “Those things just wouldn’t sell.”

Sadly, said Mr Lorenz, the mulch pile of ideas sometimes grows larger than the market for the style of humor from which he and Mr Fradon grew their careers. “Cartooning in the world today is vestigial, I fear,” said Mr Lorenz. “It is definitely affected by the electronic world we live in. Based on what I see happening in the art world, kids are interested in the graphic novels. The change also comes from newer, younger editors who see the graphic novel style as an art that they are comfortable with,” he said. He does, however, believe that the “gag” cartoon, the genre to which he has contributed for so long, will continue to exist — but mainly in online magazines.

While no longer under contract with The New Yorker since retiring in 1997, Mr Lorenz continues to submit and be published there, as well as in the daily American Association of Retired People online magazine, and in books. Longtime readers of The Newtown Bee may recall that Mr Lorenz was a regular contributor to the Christmas front page during the 1960s, when he resided here, his boldly brushed characters wittily bearing witness to the season along with drawings by Dana Fradon and the late Paul Webb.

Mr Fradon’s concern is with the lessening of originality in drawings. “What used to be considered good drawing has fallen by the wayside. I have no idea how the future of this kind of cartooning is going to save itself,” he said.

Where there is still good drawing, said Mr Fradon, is in children’s literature, and that is where he sees more opportunities today for artists like himself. Both Mr Lorenz and Mr Fradon have published several children’s books.

“A good cartoon is a good drawing, and a little, funny idea planted in the cartoon that makes the reader go, ‘Huh!’ It’s an offbeat view of what life is,” said Mr Fradon.

Is life funny right now? Not so much, said both cartoonists. But it does not mean we should not laugh.

(Mr Lorenz and Mr Fradon are among several artists included in the “On The Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker From the Melvin R. Seiden Collection” exhibition at the Morgan Library, 29 East 36th Street, Manhattan, through May 24.)