Reviews of the Cartoon Anthology are great—everyone's got a different idea of what the cartoons are all about. Here's a zippy new one by Jerome Weeks in the Dallas Morning News that's also an interview with Bob Mankoff. It includes cool facts like the payment for each cartoon (about $1,300), how many cartoons come in a week (1,000 or so), the percentage the artists take from Cartoon Bank sales (40-50%), and the number of left-handed contributors, according to Mankoff (roughly half). Good stuff:

The New Yorker started publishing high-quality cartoons 80 years ago—"when you had a million different magazines doing it," Mankoff says, "like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post."

Simply put, The New Yorker is the one that survived. Today, a periodical such as Barron's or Mother Jones prints the occasional panel, but only Playboy (started in 1953) still has a comparable commitment and a similar identification with them.

As for new magazines, Mankoff says, "they've gotten over-designed. There's no place for a cartoon. Plus, they don't have a real system. The entire system—it's in our DNA. We have a cartoon editor, people filing them, we have fact-checkers checking them...."

This sets up a question too:

Many young people have undoubtedly picked up an issue, entranced by the comic images, only to find that they had to decipher whatever elusive bit of humor was coded in them.

True, Mankoff says. But not so much anymore.

"They have gotten funnier," he says.

The thing is, there are also some only-semi-young people (for instance in My Age Group) who don't find them that funny. Plus, as I learned many times over when I tried to explain the jokes to my frustrated grandparents in the '90s, there are older people who don't get them either. What's to get? we say, though obviously there are always duds. But there seems to be an optimal age range for New Yorker cartoons. If anyone wants to venture a guess as to what that range might be, I'd be very interested to hear it.

And if your next thought is that there's an optimal class demographic too, I wouldn't be so sure about that. A whole lot of people buy those golf and cat and lawyer books from Barnes & Noble, and the other day I saw several much-taped cartoons in the nurses' room at my doctor's office. The one that startled me, though, was a lush cover drawing of a Thanksgiving turkey at the fortuneteller's by William Steig. As I sat in my paper shift, I contemplated the message: As the turkey waits, a single tear runs down the fortuneteller's cheek as she looks into the ball. Oh dear! Now that's an effective cartoon, especially in the right setting.

By the way, as you'll see from the link below to the Steig cartoon, the good people over at the Cartoon Bank provide helpful descriptions for the uncaptioned cartoons; here, "(Turkey getting his fortune told as fortune teller sheds a tear.)" Sometimes, they add explanations—perhaps for those baffled folks of all generations addressed above? Take this one, for instance:

The caption underneath says, "(Rooster sings: ‘DAY-O! Day-ay-ay-o!!’ chorus of chickens sing, ‘Daylight come and me wan go home.’ Refers to ‘The Banana Boat Song’ by Harry Belafonte.)" I love that. If this ever gets beamed into space along with all those Craigslist ads, the aliens are totally going to get it. While they're hanging around the ether, I hope they take a minute to explain it to my grandparents.

Collection of New Yorker cartoons a wry, dry way to look at America [Dallas Morning News, via Florida Sun-Sentinel]
Doomed turkey [William Steig, Cartoon Bank]
Shanahan chickens [Cartoon Bank]
Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons [Powell's]