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Loading... How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons (original 2014; edition 2014)by Bob Mankoff
Work InformationHow About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons by Bob Mankoff (2014)   
Top Five Books of 2014 (288) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) skid0612 | Mar 20, 2024 |   ) schoenbc70 | Sep 2, 2023 | Last night, I was sooo bored with this plan that I almost scrapped HB all together and just started in on the small stack I’m trying to wait on, and in a last ditch effort to find something else on my TBR to hold my attention, I found How About Never? Is Never Good for You? on a very small outlier of my TBR pile. I’d forgotten all about it, and honestly can’t remember where I bought it, only that I did so because I like most of the New Yorker’s cartoons, and I’d read Mary Norris’ Between You and Me which I thoroughly enjoyed, leaving me with a positive feeling about the staff’s extracurricular writing. How About Never? Is Never Good for You? turned out to be a very engaging, and very fast read. I knew nothing about Bob Mankoff before reading it and therefore had no expectations. The subtitle is My Life in Cartoons which is a nice double play on words, as this memoir covers almost exclusively his career as a cartoonist and cartoon editor for The New Yorker, and the book is liberally sprinkled with cartoons, both his and others’ works, which is, along with the engaging writing, the reason the read goes so fast. He discusses the rise of the periodical cartoon as an art form, the genesis of The New Yorker’s cartoons, the process by which the magazine chooses the cartoons each week, and the advent of, and the fiendish difficulty of, the “add a caption” contest and how not to win it. And he does it all with a charming brevity that is just long enough to be interesting and just thorough enough that the reader gets something out of it. All in all, it turned out to be a delightful way to kill 3 hours or so last night. ( ) murderbydeath | Feb 10, 2022 | Warning: the text in a number of the cartoons in the trade paper edition require a strong magnifying class. Recommend for lovers of the New Yorker cartoons. (  ) ChrisRiesbeck | Jan 1, 2018 |  This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. ) heavyleg | Oct 4, 2017 | no reviews | add a review
"Memoir in cartoons by the longtime cartoon editor of The New YorkerPeople tell Bob Mankoff that as the cartoon editor of The New Yorker he has the best job in the world. Never one to beat around the bush, he explains to us, in the opening of this singular, delightfully eccentric book, that because he is also a cartoonist at the magazine he actually has two of the best jobs in the world. With the help of myriad images and his funniest, most beloved cartoons, he traces his love of the craft all the way back to his childhood, when he started doing funny drawings at the age of eight. After meeting his mother, we follow his unlikely stints as a high-school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student. Though Mankoff abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist, he recently realized that the field he abandoned could help him better understand the field he was in, and here he takes up the psychology of cartooning, analyzing why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't. He allows us into the hallowed halls of The New Yorker to show us the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving us a detailed look not only at his own work, but that of the other talented cartoonists who keep us laughing week after week. For desert, he reveals the secrets to winning the magazine's caption contest. Throughout, we see his commitment to the motto "Anything worth saying is worth saying funny." "--
"The New Yorker has published over 75,000 cartoons since its founding, and 95% of them were done by only a few hundred cartoonists. For decades now, Mankoff has been at the center of this talented group of artists. He starts his story at age eight, when he started doing funny drawings, and follows his unlikely stints as a high school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student--all the while turning out cartoon after cartoon. We see his unwavering determination to have The New Yorker publish his work ("After two years of submitting all I had to show for it were enough New Yorker rejection slips to wallpaper my bathroom . . .I kept at it. I had other rooms that needed wallpaper"), the lucky breaks he finally gets at the magazine, and his most popular cartoons (the one that lends this book its title earned him a spot in The Yale Book of Quotations). A story about making a career out of your passion, How About Never is also about why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't, and why it's so damn impossible to win the New Yorker caption contest"-- No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumBob Mankoff's book How About Never--Is Never Good for You? was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)741.5The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, ComicsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.01)
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