New Yorker cartoon satirist Tom Toro once wrote in 2017, “Levity alone cannot change the world, but it can buoy up the movements that will.” And keep us sane. Since then, the world seems to have gotten more divisive and ugly, often resulting in partisan commentary that further polarizes.
And so a new collection of Toro cartoons – 200 selected from his 15 years at The New Yorker-- that manages a balance between, as he puts it, “jeering and jesting,” comes at an important time in the country’s culture wars and factional politics. Not to mention a time, also, of dwindling skills in reading and comprehension. It’s called And to Think We Started as a Book Club.
Aware that cartoons for The New Yorker have to “adhere” to the magazine’s “highbrow aesthetic” and “etiquette,” Toro pays homage, in interviews, to his early years when he spent sometimes painful time learning how to craft one-panel situations that felt “organic and unforced.” Rejections from The New Yorker, his gold standard, were constant, but finally submission 610 made it in. It’s instructive to learn that what look like casual, easy ink-and-wash designs may have had struggling gestation periods between original sketch and publication. The process is called art. And Tom Toro is a master artist.
Witty cartoons live beyond their creators. They prompt a connection between eye and brain, appreciation of the interaction of visual and interpretive, and they linger suggestively, after repeated viewing, as critical comments on our times – absurdities and stupidities owing to extreme behavior, ignorance, Biblical literalness, mythical history, and indifference to animals and Nature.
His collection is structured into seven “Book” sections-- of Life, Love, Family, Work, Beasts, Technology , and the Weird. No need for overt policy statements – inferences are built into the lampooning, as they always have been in American cartooning, ever since the days of Ben Franklin, arguably the country’s first political cartoonist.
Front and back covers demonstrate Toro’s gently sly style. The front features the title, And to Think We Started as a Book Club - a panel showing a getaway car of women in masks and shades, holding cash – a delicious acknowledgment of female power and community. In the upper right, a startled male figure on a corner does a double take – a slight but significant Toro feature in many cartoons that extends the composition and meaning even further – eccentric situations in an ordinary world.
The back cover cartoon is among Toro’s best known: A boy in tattered attire is talking to three young children around a campfire: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
Those who listen in, in Toro cartoons – are they us? -- lack mouths – certainly awareness: it’s the speakers who make the observations that riff on familiar expressions and events-- Hamlet listening silently to a ghostly king saying he wasn’t murdered. “I just came back to encourage you to go to medical school.” And fish who observe Moses parting the Red Sea and know that it means a traffic jam.
Of all the gems here, one seems to sum up the book’s overriding theme: Two men sit in a book-lined study, both bespectacled. The older one speaks: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.” So laughably, tragically true. Which is the way with memorable cartoons.
