| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Iain Topliss. The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 325. $45.00.
Iain Topliss's ambitious study of four of the New Yorker magazine's most notable cartoonists is anchored by Sigmund Freud's notion that joking is ultimately a social transaction of some heft. In this, the first book-length scholarly treatment of New Yorker cartoonists, Topliss illuminates the comic art of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg, devoting a chapter to each artist and focusing particularly on the years in which each was at the height of his creative and social powers. This organizational technique allows the author to use each artist as a heuristic device—a lens through which he can view four distinct periods in the history of twentieth-century cosmopolitan America.	1
In an introduction that offers an intelligent, though perhaps over-zealous "defense of the cartoon as a form" (p. 10), Topliss describes New Yorker cartoons as largely "benign." He claims that this kind of comic art does very specific cultural work, in that it draws people momentarily into a "group consciousness, creating a special solidarity born of self-awareness and manageable self-doubt" (p. 13). Topliss, an Australian, also takes time to situate himself as an outsider, someone for whom the New Yorker was neither "a symbol of [the] cultural ethos" of his parents, nor something he "had to repudiate." Rather, the magazine offered him the keys to a kingdom "richer, more various, more unexpected, and more rewarding" than anything he had previously known (p. 18).	. . .

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