Tuesday Spill: George Price…”The Chuckling Champion Of The Washed-Out Man”

George Price: “The Chuckling Champion Of The Washed-Out Man”

We expect puffery in advertising, and this ad for the late great George Price’s 1940 cartoon collection, Good Humor Man, doesn’t disappoint (“the year’s biggest and best book of humor”). I like the “chuckling champion” but “washed-out man” seems a bit, well, odd as a selling point.

Price’s cartoon world was loaded-up with characters (one of his collections is titled, appropriately, Characters). Now that I’ve seen this ad copy, I’m going to fight thinking of his people that way (as washed-up). To me, his people were regular folks getting by.

I can’t help but think of George Booth’s people when I look at Price’s work. Booth was admittedly influenced by Price, telling Lee Lorenz: “…I examined his work closely…” (the two cartoon gods co-existed at The New Yorker, with Booth coming in during last 22 years of Price’s 62 year run at the magazine). Both excelled at filling up their drawings with personally stamped humorously drawn people and things.

During my earliest days of studying New Yorker cartoons, I found much to soak up from both George’s work, but I found Booth’s world warmer — more approachable. Price’s drawings were brittle — constructed as if he used mechanical tools. The mechanical element, present in his earliest work, but not dominating, soon developed into his signature; would his “washed-up” people been as interesting to us without it? Hard to know. It’s no secret that Price relied 100% on writers for his cartoons. I always thought his gift was convincing readers, though the use of his diagrammatic lines, that the ideas were born out of his hours at the drawing board.

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George Price’s A-Z Entry

George Price (above) Born in Coytesville, New Jersey, June 9, 1901. Died January 12, 1995, Engelwood, New Jersey. New Yorker work: 1929 – 1991. Lee Lorenz, the New Yorker’s former Art/Cartoon editor, called Price one of the magazine’s great stylists (along with Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, James Thurber, and William Steig. Of the many Price collections, here are two favorites: Browse At Your Own Risk (1977), and The World of George Price: A 55-Year Retrospective (1988)