Critical Response to Robert Mankoff’s short profile of Bruce Eric Kaplan in The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

by James Spica

In a time of great upheaval in political, social, and technological circles in the United States, there is much food for cynical cartoonists. Robert Mankoff, editor for the New Yorker, writes of Bruce Eric Kaplan, in The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, “the New Yorker’s Cartoons have often been dark… …but [Kaplan’s drawings] make the Addams Family look like the Brady Bunch.”

Mankoff praises Kaplan as being “the most convincing and funniest portraitist we have of a postmodernist psyche still stumbling out from the shambles of the fading 20^th century.” This is to say that he critiques and recounts the spirit somewhat dazed and problem-ridden United States moving into a new era.

Mankoff clearly believes that Kaplan is on the cutting edge, and rightly so, as he embodies this “view is more widely held among [the New Yorker’s] readers than one might imagine, or, rather, hope.”