Bruce McCall

Simcoe Boy

   I gather that The New Yorker cover pictured above will appear next week and it will be the latest one done by Bruce McCall who grew up a few miles from London. I subscribe to a few print publications, The New Yorker among them, and they all send me emails which often contain content not to be found in the actual publication. Given that the next New Yorker may have a McCall cover without any information about him, I will provide some below. Although I wrote briefly about him in my post about Canadian Cartoonists, he should be more widely known north of the U.S. border. 

   That he isn't more popular here may be because he is an expatriate and because he was rather critical of the blandness of Ontario in his early biographical work, Thin Ice, which was described by Graydon Carter as "a funny and sentimentally tragic little memoir of a tortured Ontario boyhood". Or perhaps it is because many people do not appreciate the kind of humour produced by comedians like David Letterman (with whom McCall wrote a book) or Steve Martin (who regards McCall as a 'God'), or books with titles like All Meat Looks Like South America. 

   I read Thin Ice a few years ago and enjoyed it. I now know that it was also made into a National Film Board documentary and I look forward to viewing it. I also look forward to his new work which is due out about a year from now and is tentatively titled: How Did I Get Here: A Memoir. Apart from the recent reference, I will provide a few other excerpts from reviews that should entice you to have a look at his books.

   

Sources: Bruce McCall's "A Brush With Greatness," Francoise Mouly,  The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2020 [in a New Yorker email].
"Bruce McCall, now eighty-four, has been contributing comic prose and covers to The New Yorker for forty years. Many of those covers have a retro-futuristic style, but his latest takes place in the present, with three museum painters pausing to take in the view. McCall recently talked to us about his own favorite museum, along with some of the ways his writing differs from his illustration."

This short profile is currently available on The New Yorker website:
"Bruce McCall has contributed covers and humor pieces to The New Yorker since 1980. He has painted more than seventy-five New Yorker covers and contributed more than eighty pieces for Shouts & Murmurs. McCall previously pursued careers in commercial art, automotive journalism, and advertising. He has published several books, including “Zany Afternoons,” “All Meat Looks Like South America,” and “The Last Dream-O-Rama,” and also a memoir about growing up Canadian, called “Thin Ice.” His latest book,[2013] in collaboration with David Letterman, is “This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me).”

Here is the "Ironing Board Building, 1897" from Zany Afternoons. 


   Robert Fulford who, like McCall, dropped out of Malvern Collegiate, wrote an admiring piece in The National Post back in Sept. 26, 2000 from which this is taken:
"When Thin Ice appeared, reviewers focused on McCall's dislike of Canada: "I had been a failure as a Canadian ... The patience, the mildness, the taste for conformity that seemed prerequisites for a tolerable life were beyond me." But in the book his disappointment with his native land means far less than his profoundly unhappy family life. He was one of six children of T.C. McCall, a Simcoe, Ont., newspaperman who became deputy minister of travel and publicity for Ontario and then a Chrysler public relations man. T.C. (his family as well as friends called him that) was an absentee father, either literally out of town or emotionally unreachable; his wife, Peg, was a sad, defeated alcoholic with no talent for mothering."

   In "They Shoot, McCall Scores," by Simon Houpt, Globe and Mail, Jan. 18, 2001 Houpt notes:
"When Thin Ice, the memoir of expatriate Canadian humorist Bruce McCall, was published in 1997, it was subtitled Coming of Age in Canada. In the new National Film Board of Canada documentary based on the biting autobiography, however, McCall reveals that the U.S. publishers requested one minor change for the book's subsequent paperback publication. "They said, 'You gotta get rid of the word 'Canada' in the title, because it's death on the bookshelves,' " McCall tells his friend Steve Martin in one scene. "I had to change it to Saved by the American Dream, which makes me a total sellout, doesn't it?"
   The article concludes with a line from McCall which he spoke in the movie version of Thin Ice: "There's still a great residual part of me that never crossed the border," says McCall. "Part of me is still back in Simcoe. Maybe the best part of me."

Post Script: 
   Steve Martin was spotted here in London a while back. He is also an admirer of the Group of Seven and he recently put up for auction Lawren Harris's Mountain Sketch LXX, which is expected to "fetch between $300,000 and $500,000." Canadian Press, Oct. 2, 2019. Here is a picture of it if you are interested.

Canadian Cartoonists

     Once again, you should know that I have been preoccupied and am attempting to quickly increase my posts for December and avoid shopping. So, given quick consideration are a few Canadian cartoonists and illustrators who would otherwise deserve more of our attention.

Barry Blitt


   
     If you have your own shopping to do, you might consider buying the book Blitt by Barry Blitt. In it you will find “caricatures of the public figures, mainly entertainers and politicians, who've occupied the limelight from the late 1980s on. It's got Michael Jackson holding an infant over an apartment-building railing, Vladimir Putin depicted as a figure-skater prancing around the ice, Pope Francis doing snow angels and, of course, Donald Trump, mid-air, coming down for a big, fat belly flop in the American pool.”
     Perhaps you have wondered, “How did a Jewish kid [Blitt] from the insular Montreal suburb of Côte Saint-Luc end up in the thick of New York's cosmopolitan media scene, published by everyone, the unlikely owner of playwright Arthur Miller's old house?”, and if so, you will find the answer in this review: “Catcher of the Wry: A New Collection of Satirical Sketches Highlights Cartoonist Barry Blitt's Singular Take on the Past Few Decades,” by Alec Scott, G&M, Nov. 10, 2017.

Bruce McCall


(Sorry about the quality of the image.
The billboard says "Bay of Pigs Now Called Porky's Cove)

     Much of Blitt’s work appears in The New Yorker where the covers are also often done by another Canadian, Bruce McCall. His (McCall’s) first appeared in 1995 and he has now done over 70 of them. He also provides the odd cartoon and articles such as “Not So Fast, Canada”, a funny one found in the July 31st, 2017  issue. He has published a number of books, including Thin Ice which describes growing up in Simcoe and elsewhere here in Ontario.

Doug Sneyd

   
     I only know of Mr. Sneyd because of the stories I have heard about him. He was a friend of my father-in-law who just passed away on Dec. 2nd. [this was the major preoccupation]. During the late summer and early fall, he tried to get to Orillia to see Doug, but was unable to do so.

    Mr. Sneyd has been a cartoonist for Playboy since the 1960s. Given the new prudishness and puritanism, I chose to supply his image rather than one of his cartoons. You can find them in the book,The Art of Doug Sneyd or you can see and buy them from his web site: Sneyd: The Art of Playboy Cartoonist Doug Sneyd.

Post Script
     The stories we heard about Mr. Sneyd generally had to do with fine parties and good times and were more about his conviviality than his career. After a little poking around, however, I have learned that his career was perhaps, shall we say, more illustrious than I indicated. The book mentioned above, for example, was nominated for an Eisner Award back in 2012 in the category “Best Humor Publication.” If you are dismissive of the Playboy cartoons as bordering on the ‘pornographic’, you should know that he created many political ones for newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. In the latter I found this article about him from forty years ago: “Mixing the Comic Strip and Editorial Cartoon,” (July 23, 1978)

    “As a high school student in Ontario, Canada, Doug Sneyd got no further than lesson 18 in the Famous Artists correspondence course. That one was titled “Earn While You Learn.” He decided to do just that.
     Steyd, now 46, has been earning his living as an illustrator and cartoonist ever since. After 12 years as a regular cartoonist for Playboy magazine and eight years doing an internationally-syndicated political panel, Sneyd has created SCOOPS, which begins today and will appear each Sunday on the Op Ed page of The Globe.
     SCOOPS now appears in 112 newspapers.” [c.1978]

     The article concludes with Sneyd noting that with the help of his family he runs a “real cottage industry” from his lakeside home in Ontario.
     Cartoons were an important feature at Playboy. Recently, when Mr Hefner died, it was noted in one piece that he “was as devoted to cartoonists as he was to the centerfold,” and that is why Sneyd had  such well-known cartoonist colleagues as, Al Jaffee, Jules Feiffer, Shel Silverstein and Arnold Roth. See: “Hugh Hefner Dreamed of Being a Cartoonist; Instead, He Changed the Market for Top Comic Artists,” Michael Cavna, The Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2017.
     A few years ago Sneyd was honoured at the ToonSeum, which is a museum in Pittsburgh that celebrates the comic and cartoon arts. See: “Bunny Tales: Legendary Playboy Cartoonist Doug Sneyd Will Give Fans a Glimpse Into His Life and Art,” Dan Majors, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 19, 2012:

     "Joe Wos, executive director of the ToonSeum on Liberty Avenue, Downtown, has as his guest tonight legendary cartoonist Doug Sneyd, whose art has adorned the pages of Playboy magazine for nearly 50 years.
"Like most men, I bought Playboy for the cartoons," said Mr. Wos, who opened the cartoon museum almost three years ago. "And I always loved his work.
"He is able to meld two worlds. The beauty of the human form, these beautiful, voluptuous women. And, at the same time, he caricatures human nature, poking gentle fun at our sexual hang-ups and foibles. He has tremendous insight."
Mr. Sneyd, 80, of Ontario, Canada, arrived in town this morning for the Pittsburgh Comic Con this weekend. While some artists are shy, even reclusive, Mr. Sneyd said he delights in traveling and meeting fans.
Mr. Wos, a cartoonist himself, said Mr. Sneyd is one of his heroes.
"There's no question that he is one of the greatest Playboy artists ever," he said. "His wit is still biting and satirical today. For example, he has some rough sketches for tonight's exhibit that Playboy declined to use. One shows a woman in bed between two men who are wearing dark glasses and earpieces and the caption is 'How long have you guys been in the Secret Service?' Well, this was done long before today's controversy. His work remains timely."


Graydon Carter

 
     The vulgarian is the guy on the right who is frequently attacked by the Canadian Carter who is the gent on the left. Although he is not a cartoonist, he is another Canadian who went south and found success. He is retiring this month after 25 years as the editor of Vanity Fair. This year he became a Member of the Order of Canada “For his contributions to popular culture and current affairs as a skilled editor and publisher.”

Post Script:
    I did not know that Carter was the editor of the short-lived periodical Canadian Review which was published between 1974-1977. I see that the university nearby has most of the run (although the issues are in storage). Perhaps I will have them pulled in the new year and include them among my “Periodical Ramblings”.