Bruce McCall RIP - 1935 - 2023

 

Safe Travels

There may not be as many Canadian obituaries as there should be for McCall who was born in Simcoe, so I will provide some from other places. I have written about him before, so will not add anything here other than some obits. (In MM, see: "Bruce McCall;" "Canadian Cartoonists" and "Year Ends & Odds" where he appears near the end.) 

The Bruce McCall Website. 

Here are brief snippets from four obituaries from the many that can be found

1. "Remembering Bruce McCall, Satirist and Compleat Canadian:

For McCall, the business of getting it down right was a form of self-salvation."

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 6, 2023

"But in life Bruce was, despite a sometimes gruff exterior, the most sympathetic and least abrasive of men: a perfect Canadian, raised in Simcoe and then Toronto, in a vast, intense, and varyingly unhappy family, whose fate he documented in his masterpiece, the memoir “Thin Ice.” A tale of gray-good Scots-Presbyterian Canada and its dowager-queen city, Toronto, at a period when it was at its grayest and goodest, the book describes the indignities of being a young Canadian yearning for the south. Yet Bruce remained, even in New York, the most compleat Canadian, with all the key Canadian traits: self-deprecating to an often hilarious degree, polite to an almost ferocious fault, and in equal parts appalled and attracted by the crazy circus energies of his adopted country. (With one fellow-Canadian he maintained a clandestine traffic in Coffee Crisp, a strange-tasting but weirdly addictive Canadian snack, once unfindable in America.)"

2. "Bruce McCall, Noted Humorist and Former Car and Driver Columnist, Has Died: His acerbic view of cars and the world entertained readers of the New Yorker, Car and Driver, and other magazines. Jamie Kitman, Car and Driver, May 6, 2023. "Bruce McCall, one of the funniest men ever to write about cars—and also sketch, draw, and paint them with inimitable style—died yesterday at 87, owing to complications arising from Parkinson's disease. Though known to the non-enthusiast reading population for the more than 80 covers he created for the New Yorker and the many illustrations and humorous essays he contributed to that tony East Coast periodical, as well as to the madcap 1970s comedic juggernaut the National Lampoon, McCall distinguished himself to the car-loving world with his acerbic and always hilarious work for Car and Driver and Automobile Magazine. His illustrations, which showcased the automotive and aeronautical themes that first captured his interest during what he would describe as a resolutely grim Canadian boyhood, defined a genre he'd come to call "retro-futurism," a self-created style that at once mocked and celebrated the over-the-top enthusiasm and huckster's bluster that characterized mid-20th-century American marketing, nowhere more shamelessly than in the sale of new automobiles. Overlaid with an Anglo-Canadian's love and loathing of all things British, the genre he helped carve out would become an enduring pillar of American satire, leading even to a short-lived stint in the 1970s as a writer for Saturday Night Live."

3. "Bruce McCall, Satirical Artist Who Conjured a ‘Retrofuture,’ Dies at 87:

On New Yorker covers and elsewhere, he lampooned the rich by forecasting a plutocratic fantasyland — or, as he put it, “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.” William Grimes, New York Times, May 5, 2023.

"Bruce McCall, whose satirical illustrations for National Lampoon and The New Yorker conjured up a plutocratic dream world of luxury zeppelin travel, indoor golf courses and cars like the Bulgemobile Airdreme, died on Friday in the Bronx. He was 87.

His wife, Polly McCall, said his death, at Calvary Hospital, was caused by Parkinson’s disease.

Borrowing from the advertising style seen in magazines like Life, Look and Collier’s in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. McCall depicted a luminous fantasyland filled with airplanes, cars and luxury liners of his own creation. It was a world populated by carefree millionaires who expected caviar to be served in the stations of the fictional Fifth Avenue Subway and carwashes to spray their limousines with champagne."

[Use This One To See Some Good Illustrations]

4. “Bruce McCall – RIP”

D.D. Degg, May 6, 2023, The Daily Cartoonist

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2023/05/06/bruce-mccall-rip/

Here is the cover of the October 2014 issue of The Walrus, done by McCall

The caption: Can They Come Back?