When I was little, I liked to look at the cartoons in my parents’ New Yorker, and the ads, too if the pictures were interesting.
I loved the old ads for the Philadelphia Bulletin, in which one skinny, anxious guy in black, like a modern day Cassandra, tried to get people’s attention about something going wrong. Cassandra’s fate was to see the future and never be believed. His was never to be heard.
Usually what he saw was something that had me worried, too, like a shark coming onto the beach. I really couldn’t understand why all those beachgoers were reading the paper instead of paying better attention. On some level, I sensed that the ad might not hit its mark: it might make people wary of reading the Bulletin and maybe getting eaten by a shark.
My husband remembers those ads, too, and when we were reminiscing about them in a restaurant Saturday, he did some Googling and turned up the artist’s name and the cartoon below.
The cartoonist was Richard Decker. Wikipedia writes about him here.
From his obit: “Mr. Decker worked nearly four decades as a contract cartoonist at the New Yorker, starting with the magazine in 1929 and becoming well-known on its pages for his detailed cartoons and lush washes. …
“Those cartoons Mr. Decker crafted that did not appear in the New Yorker often found their way into such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Look, Colliers and Playboy.
“And over the years, he also did illustrations for advertising campaigns. Among the best known was a 28-year Philadelphia Bulletin series, which ran until the 1960s, that centered on the slogan, ‘In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.’ A major feature of the campaign was ‘Mr. Nearly’ – the only man around not reading the paper.” Decker’s full obit is here.
The cartoon character Mr Nearly is no more. But I can’t help hoping that sometime before his demise, someone heard his warnings.
Photo from the University of Pennsylvania
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