At Wit’s End: Cartoonists of The New Yorker

New Yorker cartoonists are celebrated as characters in their own right in this mixed-bag illustrated tribute. Maslin (Peter Arno), a New Yorker cartoonist himself, provides brief profiles of his colleagues (including legends George Booth and Roz Chast, as well as newbies like Ellie Black) alongside MacWeeney’s photographic portraits and a few of each subject’s cartoons. Maslin’s elegant prose ably evokes the artists’ styles (“David Sipress’s drawings seem on their way to collapsing; the scritchy lines of varying widths appear in need of adhesive tape to hold the whole thing together”), though the cartoons themselves are hit-or-miss. While Emily Flake amuses with her depiction of a jaded New York dad counseling his child on the playground (“Son, if you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating”), the majority fall flat with head-scratching conceits (Drew Dernavich’s “Stonehenge Squarepants” features a megalith decked out in men’s underwear) or groan-worthy puns (Maslin contributes a cartoon of an angry pie yelling, “C’mon! You want a piece of me?”). Only the most avid New Yorker fans will be in on the joke. (Nov.)