Crying all the time because your captions never make it in? This should dry your tears. If you can believe this, people once had to make do with homemade cartoon caption contest games, as the always sharp-eyed I Hate the New Yorker pointed out way back in December.
So what’s the story with the game? From the Cartoon Bank:

Here’s all it takes—a captionless New Yorker cartoon is shown and everyone gets to make up a punchline. The trick is to advance your game by guessing who wrote which caption or by having your caption chosen as the funniest. No drawing necessary! Part humor, part intuition, all fun.
With an introduction by Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker, original board design by Jack Ziegler, and produced by All Things Equal, Inc.

I think I’d play it. Speaking of entertainments, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to write about this yet, but The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games, released over the summer, is genuinely hours of fun—surprisingly so, for me at least, since puzzles usually bore me silly. It was extremely diverting for everyone in the cabin on a lake where I spent a week in July, and it would entertain a smart kid for an entire car trip, I swear. We could not stop doing them, and you wouldn’t have to be a rabid New Yorker fan or or know any of the cartoonists’ work, or even be a reader of the magazine, to dig it. It’s been road-tested by my friends and relatives, including my clever young cousin George (whose game taste usually runs more toward pixelated Harry Potters), so pick it up!

Isn’t that how “crummy” is spelled in Catcher in the Rye? I’ll have to check. But good news: There’s a new Aline Kominsky Crumb b..ok, called Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, coming out on Valentine’s Day ’07 from MQ Publications. From PW:

The 400-plus-page book includes her recollections of growing up in a dysfunctional 1950s middle-class Jewish community on Long Island; her first visits to New York’s Greenwich Village, and the art, drugs and sexual escapades of the 1960s. It chronicles the early days of the underground comics movement and, of course, meeting and falling love with R. Crumb. She discusses motherhood (daughter Sophie is now a notable young comics artist) and their move to France, where the Crumbs have lived since 1990. And there’s even a chapter at the end called “The Kominsky Code,” offering Aline’s beauty, exercise and fashion tips—not to mention some smart photos of the svelte A.K. Crumb today. And the book is full of photographs and memorabilia from every period in her (and Bob’s and Sophie’s) life, all supplemented by her ever-candid commentary and reflection.

This is the sort of thing you get when you wander off the Boing Boing page without supervision: If Marmaduke Appeared in Every New Yorker Cartoon. Plus even funnier entries. The incredibly witty hordes at The Comics Curmudgeon will surely approve.

This will be great news to many of you, and I know my colleague C. will be especially delighted to hear it: Sempé Cartoons En Route to U.S.
Here’s an intriguing New Yorker Forum thread about a Sempé cartoon from February that had everyone stumped.

in the Syracuse Post-Standard. From the piece (by Laura T. Ryan):

Q: How has the world of comics changed since you entered?
A: Well, I would say while America has been going into an absolute nose dive and turning to (expletive), comics have been doing great, much to my happy astonishment . . . and I would say, during the last few years, more so than ever. Comics have just been kind of upgraded in their cultural status.
Q: They’re more respected as a form of literature now.
A: Yeah, when I was first being a cartoonist, I would really hesitate to tell people what I did. It certainly didn’t win me any points with the girls, I’ll tell you.
Q: And now it’s got cachet . . .
A: It’s got cachet! It’s like being a small-scale rock ‘n’ roll star.

From the wonderful Drawn, a link to illustrator John Mavroudis’s story of his conception, and the eventual realization by Owen Smith, for the memorial issue cover image.

From an interview with Tomine by Greg Yano in the Nichi Bei Times:

NBT: How did you get involved with doing illustrations for The New Yorker?

AT: I’ve never had any great ambitions to be an illustrator, but as a result of my comic book, a number of illustration jobs have fallen into my lap. But the New Yorker was the one place that I really wanted to work for, and they weren’t taking the initiative to make that happen! So when I visited New York after graduating from college, I actually did the old-fashioned ritual of the portfolio drop-off. I went to the New Yorker offices on the appointed day and left some samples of my work. It was all very intimidating to me…I was pretty young and I felt like a country bumpkin getting lost in the big city. Just dealing with the receptionist at the office was intimidating to me. But then I went back to California, and a few weeks later, an art director from the New Yorker called me up and gave me my first job, and I’ve been working for them now for almost ten years. And I still love the magazine…It’s the only one I subscribe to and read religiously.

(Published August 31, 1987.)

The first thing I turned to when I got the new New Yorker this week was the back page, and as Blog About Town and co. have declared, Harry Effron (Radosh Anti-Caption Man of the Hour) has won the actual caption contest! Harry, please consider this an interview invitation. It’s time to reinstate the caption-contest interviews, this very week.

There’s a nice extended profile of 90-year-old Algonquin bartender Hoy Wong in the London Independent. A tidbit: ” ‘It’s rare in your life when you meet some[one] who really is the real deal, like him,’ says the hotel’s general manager, Bill Liles. ‘He is by far our most dependable employee, always a smile on his face. And he has quite a female following, quite a sex symbol in New York. He is an icon, really.’ “

Speaking of sexy icons who know how to pour a drink, if you were unlucky enough to miss Carolita Johnson at the Rejection Show last night, here are the drawings from her comic-tragic presentation “Ape-Face and Me,” the story of an “ugly” (ha) model.

Finally, I’ve neglected to mention my favorite Talk last week, which was the debut piece by Goings on About Town scribe Michael Schulman. It’s called “The Cooper’s Tale,” and it’s about a cooper (as you know, “a maker of wooden buckets, tubs, butter churns, and, above all, barrels”) from—or at least of—Colonial Williamsburg. Happening on the cooper near his South Street Seaport home, Schulman persuaded him to take a trip to Williamsburg, as in Brooklyn. The result is a pip and a joy to read, and I was pleased to tell Schulman so in person. He mused, “I thought he’d be amazed by how hip and expensive everything was, but all he saw was barrels!” Well done, and looking forward to more of his writing in the magazine.

Related: a video for sale, “The Cooper’s Craft: The Art of Colonial Barrel Making.”