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?

Periodical Ramblings (12)

 The Saturday Evening Post

   At the beginning of this year I took a look at Look magazine and now in my dozenth post about periodicals, I will point you to The Saturday Evening Post. You will be surprised to learn that it still exists. Look ceased publication in the early 1970s. 

   The Saturday Evening Post was popular in the early 1960s, but it briefly stopped publication in 1969. It now has a colourful website and if you go to it you can subscribe and gain access and also receive by mail six print copies per year. As well, you can read over 200 years of archival issues. You should have a look. 

Norman Rockwell

   Even if you were born in this century you are likely to be familiar with The Saturday Evening Post because you are probably aware of Rockwell who produced over 300 covers for the magazine. There is a museum dedicated to Rockwell in Stockbridge, Mass. and it is worth visiting. We went to the Berkshires a few years ago and toured the museum and you should as well.  This will help you make the decision: Norman Rockwell Museum: The Home For American Illustration. 

   You may think his illustrations are "corny", but they can be costly.

In case you can't read the above, the painting sold for $46 million.

   I just finished reading the memoir of the Canadian writer and artist, Bruce McCall, and here is what he has to say about Rockwell. 

    "Norman Rockwell painted 322 Saturday Evening Post covers between 1916 and 1963. For much of that time he ruled as America's most famous artist, most beloved artist, and finest artist. He was sui generis, so confoundingly skilled that no artist ever tried to copy him. Rockwell was tall and skinny, his face arguably better known than that of many movie stars. He wasn't handsome, but he conveyed an inimitable decency. 

   I adored Rockwell's work. Any Rockwell cover stimulated a fond inch-by-inch examination. The "corny" charge, the jeering criticism of his work as trafficking exclusively in mythical America, the world Rockwell populated with cliched characters -- the lovable kid making harmless mischief, the benevolent small town cop, the gawky young GI, the bashful couple getting their wedding license from a grandfatherly clerk, ad infinitum --- all of it was provably true, upsetting to neither the Post readers, nor to me. These were incidental elements.

   His characters couldn't exist in the real world, but Rockwell documented the places, things and rituals of everyday American life with absolute stunning fidelity. He had no identifiable "style." His scenes looked found, natural. Tricks of composition were ingeniously buried. Rockwell studied every detail he placed in his pictures; should you find an error anywhere -- even a tiny prop of zero importance to the picture -- the entire illusion of reality he slaved to create would collapse. So he never erred." (How Did I Get Here, p.20)

   Rockwell did leave The Saturday Evening Post later in his career when he decided to portray more controversial images which he did, in Look. 

 "But it is less well known that he [Rockwell] decisively turned a corner just a few decades later, choosing to reject the airbrushed image of a nation implicitly populated with only happy, White, middle-class families.

Rockwell did this by abandoning his employer of nearly 50 years, the Saturday Evening Post, in large part because the magazine would let him portray Blacks only in subservient positions. After including two Black children in his 1961 illustration “Golden Rule,” Rockwell began receiving hate mail from segregationists, and the Post told him he should paint portraits only of statesmen or celebrities. Those instructions clashed with his conscience. Severing his ties with the magazine in 1963, Rockwell told his longtime editors that he had “come to the conviction that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme.”

He joined Look magazine, and it was there that he painted some of the hardest-hitting, most widely seen visual attacks on racism in the nation’s history."

Sources:

   The quotation directly above is from: "Why Norman Rockwell Left Thanksgiving Americana Behind," Andrew Yarrow, Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2021. 

    Visit the Norman Rockwell Museum for details and for a link to his useful article: "Stockbridge, A Small Berkshires Town With a Big Artistic Reputation, " Alexandra Pecci, Washington Post, May 3, 2019. 

    For the rationale behind these "Ramblings" see: "Periodical Ramblings: The Series." 

A Gumball Rally

 From Toronto to Miami

  Given the current emphasis on DIVERSITY and my tendency to be contrarian, I like to occasionally offer an entry about something other than books and libraries. It is for those reasons that I now present to you some information about wealthy (mostly) white guys driving very fast in very expensive, gas-guzzling vehicles. “The horror, the horror.” 

   Surprisingly, some of this information was taken from the staid Globe and Mail, which issues from Toronto the Good, but you likely averted your eyes from the horrifying headline below, which is one of the few in the last several months that wasn’t about an apology or Hockey Canada. Homogenised reading is not good for you and it is interesting to learn that other things are happening.

“We’re Absolutely Not Going to Stick to the Speed Limit: Gumball Rally Gets Ready to Peel Out of Toronto After Showing off Cars,” Mark Richardson, June 1, 2022. The subtitle is: About 100 Pricey Cars Will Depart Toronto Headed For Detroit En Route to Their Final Destination of Miami for the Gumball 3000 Rally.

   If you are displeased by such antics, you should note that, like a walkathon, money is raised for charitable causes: 

“We’re trying to break the speed record in every leg of the race – that’s our goal,” said TJ Rinomato, a Toronto-based investment manager, driving with his best friend Will Brereton in a 1,000-horsepower Chevrolet Hennessy ZL1 Camaro. “Every mile an hour over the speed limit, we hope to raise a thousand dollars for that.”

Admittedly, more fuel will be required at the rally than at the walkathon.

“I flew up to Buffalo,” said Danny Creighton, a Florida real-estate developer driving a Dodge Ram TRX with Canadian co-driver and drag racer David Schroeder. “But the new fuel tank I put in started to have a valve issue. It started to leak fuel, so I had to send my plane down to pick up the guys who custom-made the truck in (Fort) Lauderdale, (Fla.), fly [them] back up, fly back for additional parts, come back up. We spent $50,000 in jet fuel yesterday. Then I drove it into Canada.”

Creighton’s pickup truck is hardly stock – it has six wheels on three axles and makes 800 horsepower. The new fuel tank is a 378-litre unit, additional to the existing 105-litre tank. “So when all the Ferraris and Lamborghinis are pulling over every 150, 200 miles,” he said, “the Warlord is just going to keep going down the track, cruising at 140 – rrrrrrr!” Those are American miles an hour he’s talking about, or 225 kilometres an hour."

“I think we’re getting somewhere around five miles to the gallon,” he added. Just for the record, that’s 47 litres per 100 kilometres. For comparison, a Honda Civic consumes around seven litres per 100 kilometres. 

The article also mentions that the celebrity, David Hasselholff is participating

and will drive a Pontiac Firebird and a Maserati. His luggage is travelling in a separate Cadillac Escalade. 

Sources: 

  I am sure the “Readers Comments” about the G&M, article will have addressed all the issues you also are stewing about and that there were likely very few which weren’t critical. If you go to GUMBALL3000.com, you can learn all about it and buy a deluxe edition of the book: 20 Years on the Road (£265.00).

There is also a Wikipedia entry for “The Gumball Rally.”

Some cities along the way welcomed the Gumballers. Here is the Nashville press release: “The Gumball 3000 Rally is Back With a Spectacular Route from Toronto - Miami, The 22nd Annual Gumball 3000 Rally arrives with a festival of Supercars and Superstars in Nashville on Monday, May 30 to make it a Memorial Day to remember!

They made it:

“Gumball 3000 Rally Arrives in Miami With an All-star soccer Match,” iCrowdNewswire, June, 2.

"The epic Gumball 3000 has been back in action for 2022, with an iconic line up of supercars and superstars setting the pace across North America. The rally will conclude in an epic finale in Miami on 3rd June as more than 100 incredible cars cross the finish line at David Beckham's Inter Miami stadium.

From the 27 May – 3 June 2022 the 22nd Annual Rally has travelled from Toronto to Miami. Over 100 cars – from Bugatti’s to Batmobiles – and 200+ personalities have taken part in this wacky-races-style road trip, driving 3,000 miles in just 6 days.

To conclude in true Gumball style, the rally finish will coincide with the inaugural Gumball Goodwill Charity Soccer match, taking place at the DRV PNK stadium on 2nd June. Ignition Casino will be sponsoring the match, with all the proceeds being donated to charity."

Post Script:

The Gumball Rally is not a race. Real men race in The Cannonball Run, from N.Y. to CA. It is done surreptitiously. The last time I checked, they crossed the country in about 26 hours and averaged 174 (KPH). See my post about The Cannonball Run.

The Bonus:

I happen to be reading the very good memoir by Simcoe-born Bruce McCall. The sentences below are found on p.196 when McCall mentions his friend Brock Yates:

"Yates, an automotive journalist and the nearest thing to Hunter S. Thompson I ever knew, crashed through life at speed. Brock founded the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, a flagrantly outlaw sprint from New York to Los Angeles that attracted every nutbar car maniac in America. There were no rules. Miraculously, nobody got killed. It was typical of Yates. He flicked an anarchic finger at convention everywhere he ran into it, earning such a reputation for aggression that his nickname was the Assassin."

How Did I Get Here, Bruce McCall.

McCall is an illustrator and writer whose work is often seen in the New Yorker.

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”.