The Very Soul of Noble, Gentle Wit: Addison

“Last month, our February 2024 issue of Hubris was dedicated, in its entirety, to the single-panel cartooning of Mark Addison Kershaw, and if you scroll down our magazine’s current virtual Home Page, past our March 2024 offerings, you will come upon the seven February columns featuring portfolios of Addisonian work: so, if you missed seeing them last month, there’s still time. As someone who has all her life read an analog copy of The New Yorker every week, and whose usual custom is to flip through it locating all the single-panel cartoons before reading even the magazine’s Table of Contents, I can assure you that cartoons are the laugh’s blood of all literary and generalist publications—and yet cartooning is a dying art form.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Addison

By Mark Kershaw

“In this dark, when we all talk at once, some of us must learn to whistle.”―Walt Kelly 

ATLANTA Georgia—(Hubris)—March 2024—Editor’s Note: Last month, our February 2024 issue of Hubris was dedicated, in its entirety, to the single-panel cartooning of Mark Addison Kershaw, and if you scroll down our magazine’s current virtual Home Page, past our March 2024 offerings, you will come upon the seven February columns featuring portfolios of Addisonian work: so, if you missed seeing them last month, there’s still time. 

Elizabeth Boleman-Herring (aka Mark’s Editor): As someone who has all her life read an analog copy of The New Yorker every week, and whose usual custom is to flip through it locating all the single-panel cartoons before reading even the magazine’s Table of Contents, I can assure you that cartoons are the laugh’s blood of all literary and generalist publications—and yet cartooning is a dying art form. Editorial and political cartoons, now extinct in America, also once thrived and informed in the broadsheets, tabloids, and literary journals of the land, but that important, irreplaceable, bespoke genre of commentary, leavened by wit, has recently gone the way of the Oxford comma. But all, all single-panel cartoons have lost much of their luster of late. The Far Side? Calvin & Hobbes? Thurber’s “carnival”? History, now.

Even The New Yorker has slid, fast and far, to my eye, since the departure of Cartoon Editor (and brilliant cartoonist) Bob Mankoff, hired long, creative decades ago by then-editor Tina Brown. 

Currently ensconced in a very nice New Yorker office is Mankoff’s replacement, a spanking-young, non-cartooning, newly-minted Cartoon Editor who, when interviewed about what she’s seeking in a contributing cartoonist, made, to my ear, absolutely no sense at all (though her choices of cartoons reflect her not being able to tell a Gross from an Dedini). 

Last December, Ms. Allen opined: “Who wouldn’t want to scroll through top-notch examples of the proto-meme: single-panel gags, the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’ams of joke-telling?” Well, I, for one if that’s how you’re going to describe them.

That hypothetical query, and the sensibility informing it, gave me the willies back when I first read it: I do not want to see the “gags” Ms. Allen finds amusing, those “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” cartoons now sprinkled through The New Yorker like so much road salt. Patently, as far as I’m concerned, cartooning at The New Yorker has gone to hell in a hand-basket since Allen’s arrival, and it won’t come back to its senses until she’s given the wham-bam boot.

In the The New Yorker, and elsewhere, beginning in 2024, I want to see the single-panel work of Mark Addison Kershaw, and I want him to be paid the big bucks he merits for the sentimental education (sense, sensibility, and fine draughtsmanship) that his work embodies so beautifully. This man is the soul of wit, for heaven’s sake. Give him the time of day! And a modicum of blank space currently devoted to much, much lesser talents. 

In fact, I’m going to sit right down and write to some of the higher-ups at The New Yorker, editor to editor. What have I got to lose? 

Let me close with a few last words by Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo: “Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self- conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle. There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us. Forward!”