Cartoonist Barbara Shermund was a younger artwork faculty graduate when she made her first contribution to the New Yorker: a daring illustration of a girl using the evening bus on the duvet of the June 13, 1925 version. The journal, which printed its first situation 100 years in the past this month, carved a distinct segment within the crowded Twenties panorama of American periodicals with its distinct artwork route and tongue-in-cheek protection of native cultural life. As one of many New Yorker‘s first girls cartoonists, Shermund created single-panel cartoons drawn with a seemingly off-the-cuff fluidity of line and expression that got here to outline its now-iconic humorousness.
Barbara Shermund, “Well, of course, I do say I’ll never marry—though, somehow, I’ve always wanted to be a widow.” from the New Yorker, Could 29, 1926
Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her manner as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comedian interactions with different character sorts painted an image of life in Twenties New York. Rendered in strains as crisp because the best etching, and a way of flapper type and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s younger girls gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the evening with married males; they awoke, horribly hungover.
And whereas Shermund could have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between younger girls significantly, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a realizing wink beneath all that eyeshadow — every gossipy remark is a whispered secret.
Barbara Shermund, “Well, believe me, girls, I always let a man think I’m dumb” from the New Yorker, January 22, 1927
By foregrounding intimate moments between girls, Shermund not solely mainstreamed a extra feminist perspective within the New Yorker however created area for queer interpretations of her cartoons at a time when public queerness was not broadly accepted. Whereas we’re not sure how Shermund herself recognized, as Caitlin McGurk writes in her glorious 2024 biography Inform Me a Story The place the Unhealthy Woman Wins, we do know that her social circle of unconventional artists included queer and polyamorous folks, who, just like the flappers, made their manner into her cartoons.
Barbara Shermund, “What is that, a boy or a girl?” from the New Yorker, July 31, 1926
As a more in-depth have a look at her cartoons reveals, Shermund could have handled these moments of queerness with queer audiences in thoughts. As with flappers, she’s not afraid to include LGBTQ+ folks in her cartoons, however a realizing kindness appears to underpin her acidic humor. If there was a queer character in a cartoon, the punchline tended to make extra enjoyable of the reader’s assumptions than of the character themselves.
For instance, a 1926 black-and-white cartoon depicts three folks in a park: two males, whom a realizing Twenties reader would shortly clock as homosexual, and an androgynous individual, who’s smoking a cigarette seductively. Compared to the lads, the androgynous individual’s gender presentation is intentionally ambiguous, making the punchline — that the homosexual males resolve they’re a girl, clearly, as a consequence of their “sex appeal” — all of the extra humorous.
There was actually a restrict to queer illustration within the early pages of the New Yorker — in 1928, for instance, a cartoon a couple of butch lesbian shopping for a showering swimsuit was reworked to be extra palatable to straight audiences, and McGurk writes in her biography of Shermund that one other a couple of trans man went unpublished.
Because the social panorama of the US grew extra conservative from the Thirties to the Nineteen Fifties, so too did Shermund’s cartoons. However her work from the early days of the journal, significantly as the federal government threatens the well being and freedom of trans folks at the moment, provides us a glimpse of a sexually liberated and feminist American society, a queer utopia of types that’s price holding onto.
Barbara Shermund, “Huh, well what do I mean to you, anyway?” “Oh—just an experience.” from the New Yorker, April 3, 1926
