Cartoonist Barbara Shermund was a younger artwork faculty graduate when she made her first contribution to the New Yorker: a daring illustration of a girl driving the night time bus on the quilt of the June 13, 1925 version. The journal, which printed its first concern 100 years in the past this month, carved a distinct segment within the crowded Twenties panorama of American periodicals with its distinct artwork course and tongue-in-cheek protection of native cultural life. As one of many New Yorker‘s first ladies cartoonists, Shermund created single-panel cartoons drawn with a seemingly off-the-cuff fluidity of line and expression that got here to outline its now-iconic humorousness.
Barbara Shermund, “Well, of course, I do say I’ll never marry—though, somehow, I’ve always wanted to be a widow.” from the New Yorker, Might 29, 1926
Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her method as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comedian interactions with different character varieties painted an image of life in Twenties New York. Rendered in traces as crisp because the best etching, and a way of flapper type and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s younger ladies gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the night time with married males; they awoke, horribly hungover.
And whereas Shermund could have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between younger ladies significantly, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a understanding wink underneath all that eyeshadow — every gossipy remark is a whispered secret.
Barbara Shermund, “Well, believe me, girls, I always let a man think I’m dumb” from the New Yorker, January 22, 1927
By foregrounding intimate moments between ladies, Shermund not solely mainstreamed a extra feminist standpoint within the New Yorker however created area for queer interpretations of her cartoons at a time when public queerness was not broadly accepted. Whereas we aren’t sure how Shermund herself recognized, as Caitlin McGurk writes in her wonderful 2024 biography Inform Me a Story The place the Unhealthy Woman Wins, we do know that her social circle of unconventional artists included queer and polyamorous folks, who, just like the flappers, made their method into her cartoons.
Barbara Shermund, “What is that, a boy or a girl?” from the New Yorker, July 31, 1926
As a better take a look at her cartoons reveals, Shermund could have handled these moments of queerness with queer audiences in thoughts. As with flappers, she’s not afraid to include LGBTQ+ folks in her cartoons, however a understanding kindness appears to underpin her acidic humor. If there was a queer character in a cartoon, the punchline tended to make extra enjoyable of the reader’s assumptions than of the character themselves.
For instance, a 1926 black-and-white cartoon depicts three folks in a park: two males, whom a understanding Twenties reader would shortly clock as homosexual, and an androgynous particular person, who’s smoking a cigarette seductively. Compared to the lads, the androgynous particular person’s gender presentation is intentionally ambiguous, making the punchline — that the homosexual males determine they’re a girl, clearly, as a result of their “sex appeal” — all of the extra humorous.
There was actually a restrict to queer illustration within the early pages of the New Yorker — in 1928, for instance, a cartoon a couple of butch lesbian shopping for a showering swimsuit was reworked to be extra palatable to straight audiences, and McGurk writes in her biography of Shermund that one other a couple of trans man went unpublished.
Because the social panorama of the US grew extra conservative from the Thirties to the Nineteen Fifties, so too did Shermund’s cartoons. However her work from the early days of the journal, notably as the federal government threatens the well being and freedom of trans folks in the present day, affords us a glimpse of a sexually liberated and feminist American society, a queer utopia of kinds that’s price holding onto.
Barbara Shermund, “Huh, well what do I mean to you, anyway?” “Oh—just an experience.” from the New Yorker, April 3, 1926
