San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cartoonist’s works populated by oddballs
George Booth, the New Yorker cartoonist who created a world of oddballs sharing life’s chaos with a pointy-eared bull terrier that once barked a flower to death, and sometimes with a herd of cats that shredded couches and window shades between sweet naps, died Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 96.
His daughter and only immediate survivor, Sarah Booth, said the cause was complications of dementia.
In a typical Booth cartoon, a lot happens at once. A stunned dog leaps 3 feet in the air. A shocked cat bounds for an open window, knocking a newspaper from the hands of a shaken man — all as his frumpy wife stands in a kitchen doorway with blackened eyes, announcing: “Eyeliner is back!”
Or, as a score of cats lounge in a parlor and a man in pajamas scowls into a newspaper in his easy chair, his wife in the kitchen says: “Edgar, please run down to the shopping center right away, and get some milk and cat food. Don’t get canned tuna, or chicken, or liver, or any of those awful combinations. Shop around and get a surprise. The pussies like surprises.”
Or, as a neighbor with a big nose peers over a backyard fence, 10 cats bound out of a back door to freedom and scatter in all directions as a woman at the open screen door shouts after them: “Everyone be home by two o’clock!”
In a half-century at the New Yorker, Booth drew roughly a score of covers and hundreds of zany cartoons for the inside pages. He became one of the most popular stars of a magazine whose readers relished sophisticated cartoon wit. His colleagues included Ed Koren, Jules Feiffer, Ed Sorel, Roz Chast, Art Spiegelman, David Levine, Charles Addams and George Price.
An affable artist who mostly resisted commercial offers, Booth was once asked to draw his trademark bull terrier as a gift for an anonymous celebrity. Instead, he recalled, he defiantly drew a “diseased chicken.” Later, he learned the gift was for President Ronald Reagan, who was “very gracious” when the two met in the Oval Office, he told the New York Times in 1993. “He never had me shot.”
“His work is about hope in the midst of what looks like calamity,” Bonnell Robinson, curator of the 1993 Boston cartoon exhibition “Lines of the Times: 50 Years of Great American Cartoons,” told the Times. “Booth cartoons express the will to continue in the face of disaster.” One cartoon in the show depicted a parlor crammed with junk, pets and sundry relatives. “Attention everyone,” a woman chirps. “Here comes Poppa, and we’re going to drive dull care away!”
Booth’s pen-and-ink cartoons were collected in a dozen books, reproduced as artworks and sold in galleries. He lectured widely and joined discussion groups at schools, museums and cartoon art exhibitions until he slowed down in his 90s.
His subjects ranged from the joys and perils of gardening and car repairs to banking and encounters with the Internal Revenue Service.
But the hands-down readers’ favorite was Booth’s mad-as-a hatter bull terrier, who whirled in circles until dizzy, scratched himself a lot and posed glowering on a lawn beside a sign warning: “Beware! Skittish Dog.” He adorned New Yorker T-shirts and became the magazine’s unofficial mascot, nearly as notable as the top-hatwearing Eustace Tilley, who appears on the cover once a year. As Lee Lorenz, the New Yorker’s art editor, once put it, “If you can’t recognize a Booth cartoon, you need the magazine in Braille.”
Booth had no explanation for his dog’s popularity. “I don’t try to analyze humor,” he told the Times in 1993. “You go nowhere doing that. A thing is funny or it’s not funny. I started drawing what I thought was an awful-looking dog.” After a letter writer asked if it was an English bull terrier, he said, “I went to the library, improved his breeding and made him an English bull terrier.”