The New Yorker Cartoon Rip-Off Scandal.

Okay, so it's a bit of a storm in a tea cup. I noticed the drawing and the Kirby creature registered with me, but I really didn't pay much attention at all. It was only after I followed the links on Dirk Deppey's Journalista blog that I actually paid any heed to the 'furore'. Anyway, I really like Harry Bliss's drawings. I love that strange looking pencil he uses. And, I also know how easy it is to end up with similar ideas, I mean, I'm sure I sent the 3 little pigs cartoon with the pig with the brick house being repossessed to the New Yorker months ago - they didn't use it, but one of their cartoonists did one very similar to mine in the April 28th issue. Of course they could have had that one in the drawer when mine arrived, and that sort of thing happens all the time. I really was certain that the sub-prime mortgage crisis would affect the little piggy much more than the wolf's huffing and puffing - and I wasn't the only one; it seems.


On this occasion though, with Harry Bliss's cartoon, it's a little different. If, like me, and I presume like Harry, you are a comic book fan, you would have noticed something vaguely familiar about the cartoon in the New Yorker caption competition:

Cartoon by Harry Bliss (after Jack 'King' Kirby), copyright, the New Yorker, 2008.

Yup, it's based on the work of the 'King' himself, Jack Kirby - the artist who 'co-created' many of Marvel's greatest comic book creations and breathed life into Thor, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, etc, etc. It is, in particular, a drawing that clearly owes a debt to Kirby's cover to the vintage Silver Age comic, Tales to Astonish # 34:

That's the thing though, it is very clearly based on that cover, right down to the buildings in the distance and the ring around the creature - it foregrounds its similarities to the work; it is clearly not trying to pretend it owes Kirby's cover no debt. Now I don't pretend to know what was in Harry's mind when he created the drawing, but it looks like an homage to the King, and Harry Bliss claims it is just that, so I believe him.

If there is a fault here, I'm inclined to think that it was in not acknowledging the debt to Jack Kirby in the first instance, either by Harry himself, or at some later stage by someone else in the magazine. After all, a simple 'after King Kirby' or some such would suffice. That is certainly fairly standard here in the UK. However, the New Yorker's response that they could assume their readers would find a reference to 'Tales to Astonish # 34 'obvious' , may be stretching it a bit - according to their demographic that is. Or has it become the latest object d'geek? No, it looks to me like an oversight, a real blooper, but thankfully one that has now been corrected.

Of course this has drawn unwanted, and perhaps unwarranted, attention to Bliss's output and someone has noticed a similarity between Harry Bliss's cartoon about being referred to a rehab clinic by a publicist, and one drawn some time back by John Rau.

Copyright, this copy, The New Yorker (click here to visit the Cartoon Bank)

Copyright John Rau, 2006.

Now I admit it looks similar, but this is surely a little like my 3 pigs cartoon that I mentioned above. Cartoonists can and do think alike. Their wires can cross and let's face it, it's a pretty obvious gag. I've actually looked through the Cartoon Bank cartoons and found a lot of the ideas I think are new, have been done, it's just a case of a subject not having an infinite amount of funny possibilities, I suppose.

I must admit, though, I did become a little perplexed by Harry Bliss's 'I'm with stupid' tee-shirt cartoon from the March 2008 edition of Playboy, after Mike Lynch brought the subject up on his blog. It made me think more about the cartoon, which up until then I had simply enjoyed as a drawing because of its very modern look. Harry has drawn a young male student walking through the campus wearing an 'I'm with stupid' tee that is pointing down to his junk. I actually recognised the t-shirt, vaguely, I was sure I'd seen it before. And I had, there are at least three companies out there who print an identical tee, BuyCoolShirts, Printfection and Jiggy. There may even be more. However, I'm fairly certain they are all certain they came up with the idea too, and I think Mike Lynch attributed the original to VIP (I may be wrong). But then I thought about why I liked the cartoon in the first place. I liked it because it looked like a modern Playboy cartoon, to me. In light of the fact that the t-shirt design isn't invented in the cartoon and therefore isn't really the gag; I don't like it any less. What I enjoy about it then is that almost every male student who turns up at University should wear a t-shirt reminding them they are with stupid and who stupid is, in the first two semesters, at least.

It's also worth pointing out here that 'I'm with Stupid' is, like the desert island and the visits of Death, a familiar cartoon theme, or trope, that is still fairly common in cartooning circles. The Harry Bliss cartoon here, from the New Yorker in 2004, where one gravestone is pointing at another and has 'I'm With Stupid' as the legend on it, establishes it is an idea he plays with often. And I think the fact that Bruce Bolinger's undated cartoon here at Cartoonstock (scroll down to 'I'm With Stupid, Cartoon #9'), which is also a cartoon with one tombstone with 'I'm With Stupid' pointing at another, is just another example of how when you have a popular subject and you have a lot of cartoonists out there 'thinking', they can come up with very similar ideas.

There's probably a maxim behind this that if you give 100 monkeys an infinite amount of time they can programme a virtual world where all the cartoonists will believe they exist and they will all have the same ideas randomly forever - or something to that effect.

Old Coren is dead.

I wonder sometimes if manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

The thing about working for Punch during 'Old Coren's' reign, from around 1978 - 1987, was that as a cartoonist one had achieved two things; you had made it as a cartoonist because it was the satirical magazine that gave birth to the cartoon, the pinnacle of cartooning; Punch was, after all, the magazine on which The New Yorker was based, but it also meant something else, something equally important, that one had met with Alan Coren's approval. Perhaps, even, that one had made Alan Coren laugh, and that was really, really some achievement.

I don't know how you might compare this to another profession, perhaps if you were a painter and you visited Picasso and found he had a painting of yours on the wall, or you were a singer and maybe heard Sinatra say in an interview that he listened to your songs. I think that's the sort of yardstick it was, to many of us cartoonists. It really meant more than any payment or associated fame or contracts that might result from appearing in the famous tome. Now, how often can you say that, nowadays?

I have to say I always enjoyed reading Punch. Of course, nowadays, give me an issue from that period and I'll read it from cover to cover, but even back then I enjoyed Coren's piece, it was effortlessly clever, and always fiercely funny, and I loved the fact that this clever, funny, man enjoyed cartoons so much, and enjoyed some of my cartoons. I suppose, like many of my peers, sending cartoons to Punch was as much about seeking approval from Alan Coren as if was about getting into that magazine.

In more than one interview his love of the cartoons came over and that is unusual even in a humour magazine where the editors like you to think they are doing you an enormous favour by publishing your work - Coren was the exact opposite. He said, '...the writers like me, knew it was the cartoons that sold the magazines'.

Alan Coren (1938 - 2007) will be missed. I wish I could think of something funny to say, I can't.