A Happy 90th to Lee Lorenz (belated)
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Belatedly we welcome cartoonist Lee Lorenz to our Senior Strippers club.
Michael Maslin notified us (for some reason our notebook says born in 1933):
Lee Lorenz Born October 17, 1932, Hackensack, NJ. Lorenz was the art editor of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1993 and its cartoon editor until 1997. During his tenure, a new wave of New Yorker cartoonists began appearing in the magazine — cartoonists who no longer depended on idea men.
Famously a New Yorker cartoonist Lee sold across the board:
LORENZ: I started making the rounds at little magazines. I had a book with a list of cartoon markets. I began selling long before I had a sense of personal style. Gag ideas turned out to be very easy for me. After a few years, everybody in the business said, “If you want to make money you have to go to The New Yorker.” So I began submitting there.
GEHR: What other magazines were you selling to?
LORENZ: I was selling to all of them: Post, Look, True, Argosy, Playboy, and all the Playboy imitators. Then there were magazines like 1000 Jokes, where you’d go at the end of the day with whatever you hadn’t sold. The editor was a sympathetic comic-strip artist named Bill Yates, and I’d always sell five or six drawings there for $20 apiece. I was able to make a living out of this early on and did quite well.
Inevitably the cream rises.
If you don’t have any Lorenz book collections on your shelf you can enjoy (and buy) Lee cartoons at The Condé Nast Store, at CartoonStock, at AllPosters, and at artnet.
Happy Birthday Lee! And welcome to the club.
art © Condé Nast and Lee Lorenz
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