Peter Arno

Harry Lee Green presents another grand sampling of that epitome of gag cartoonists, The New Yorker's Peter Arno.

Like Harry, I have that giant COMPLETE CARTOON OF THE NEW YORKER book/CD-ROM set and, also like Harry, I've never looked at the CD-ROMs. I had heard that they are not indexed properly, as he states. That seems to defy common sense.

Anyway, above is the seminal Arno cartoon, the one along with the man in the shower cartoon, that gets reprinted over and over.

I wrote about Arno before (Peter Arno's Favorite Part) but would like to add that his composition and gray-spotting is wonderful to look at. The whole story (above) is there: we are on an airfield; plane just crashed -- we know this because men in foreground are running toward it; the pilot is safe. What tips the scales from a "good" to a "great" cartoon is the drawing of the designer, who dominates the foreground. The problem, that Arno solves here, is this: How do you draw a character who looks like the scientist behind the plane's construction? Arno's drawn him as a bookish, skinny, bespectacled sort with a blueprint.

That's a lot to take in in the requisite 4-5 seconds it takes to look at a gag cartoon. And Arno does it so well that it looks easy.