Best Cartoonist Ever* (*period)
I discovered George Booth and The New Yorker magazine 35 years ago when I was in the 4th grade in the Morgan County Library (Martinsville, Indiana) in the stacks where they kept back issues neatly filed in vertical cardboard boxes. From the start, it was George Booth's cartoons that I would spend hours searching for through the magazine's back issues. George Booth's sense of humor and drawing style combine to make him the most distinctive voice that ever emerged from The New Yorker magazine - he has been published by many magazines, but is chiefly associated with his years of service for The New Yorker - if you don't know his work then this is a great place to start. No other cartoonist makes me laugh in the same way. For instance another New Yorker cartoonist, Peter Arno, is very funny but his cast of characters (businessmen, chorus girls, The Whoops Dearie Ladies) are all too expected in a magazine like The New Yorker - well, the Whoops Dearie Ladies are rather unexpected anywhere you find them. Part of George Booth's act is that he presents workaday images in a very unexpected manner - the oddly disgruntled, the vaguely destitute, the spectacularly underprivileged, the great unwashed, dogs, cats, even the odd kangaroo - and in a forum like The New Yorker these characters are doubly funny. Did you ever see the one where the woman has purchased an enormous exotic bird with huge feathers on its head and as her husband is arriving home - he hasn't seen the bird yet - she mentions "I went by the pet store this morning, just for a peek." When that one was published I laughed out loud every time I looked at it - for hours - now that's rare and wonderful indeed.
