Case in point No. 5 in this ongoing feature is award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon. Mr. Saxon died in 1988 at the age of 68. More than 700 of his sophisticated, highly-stylized cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1956, and he also created 92 New Yorker covers. His pre-New Yorker cartoons, five of which I’m posting here, show an interesting progession in drawing style (and sense of humor).
Yes, “we all have to start somewhere”.
The first 2 cartoons are from an anthology I’ve mentioned before, “The Good Humor Book”, published in 1944. The next two are from the Saturday Evening Post, late 1940’s or early 1950’s (I’m not sure of the exact dates). The last cartoon was printed in True magazine. I found it in a paperback anthology of True cartoons, “Cartoon Laffs”, which was published in 1952.
The photo I’m including is from the back cover flyleaf of one of Charles Saxon’s own anthologies, “One Man’s Fancy”, published in 1977. Two other collections of his cartoons were published, “Oh, Happy, Happy, Happy!” (1960) and “Honesty Is One Of The Better Policies” (1984).
To see Charles Saxon’s cartoons in The New Yorker, just look at the years 1956 to 1988, or of course you can check him out in The Cartoon Bank.
Charles Saxon
3 Comments
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Thanks for these, Eli. I have been told that Mr. Saxon took some serious time off (6 months or more) to develop what became known as the Saxon New Yorker style. I don’t know if he truly locked himself in a room by himself until he developed this new way of drawing, but I heard it was a conscious effort to develop a new style that would appeal to The New Yorker. And, goodness knows, it worked.
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My husband’s uncle was a pilot in WWII but shot down in 1945 shortly before the war ended. We were given a box of items from his service when his widow died several years ago. A drawing of Uncle Bob on legal size paper was discovered. It was signed Saxon. We don’t know exactly when they met but Uncle Bob like to draw and maybe they exchanged drawings of each other.
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Interesting story, Susan. If the signature matches the early Saxon cartoons that I posted, I guess you’ve got a genuine original “Saxon” on your hands.