Two men are walking by a bank, just in time to see an angel fly out of the front door carrying a gun and bag of money. “So much for moral clarityl” says one man.
The guest of honor at a funeral suddenly sits up in his coffin. The priest says to the organist, “This calls for some spooky music!”
At a bar, a man offers a beer to a cloaked figure. “Sure, I’ve got a few minutes to kill,” says the Grim Reaper.
These are just a few of the hundreds of cartoons Memphian Frank Cotham has drawn for The New Yorker. Founded in 1925 by veteran journalists Harold Ross and Jane Grant, it’s fair to call The New Yorker the “magazine writer’s magazine.” It’s long been the gold standard of sophistication among periodicals, famous for breaking fiction writers like Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Haruki Murakami into the public consciousness, and for devoting an entire issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which spurred the creation of the anti-nuclear weapons movement.
From the beginning, interspersed with all this high-minded seriousness are the cartoons. Once ubiquitous in all kinds of publishing, hand-drawn, black-and-white, single-panel images still survive and thrive in the pages of The New Yorker. They are integral to the publication’s history and identity.
Even though the magazine now enjoys acclaim across the English-speaking world, its original publisher, Harold Ross, famously said that the New Yorker was not created for “the old lady in Dubuque.” So how did a Memphian end up being one of its most prolific and best-loved cartoonists?
Cartoons by Frank Cotham / The New Yorker.
Lifelong Love
It wasn’t easy or quick, explains Cotham. Both of his parents are from the Mid-South. In 1807, Issac Cotham settled near Parsons, Tennessee, in what is now Decatur County. “I imagine they took the route that a lot of settlers took,” Cotham explains. “They made their way to the Tennessee River, drifted until they got to that spot on the river, and apparently they stayed there.”
A century later, Frank’s father Harry Lynn Cotham grew up in the small town before joining the Navy in 1939, where he became a Chief Petty Officer in the medical corps. His mother, Edith Lowe, was from a small river town near Marion, Arkansas. “I think the Mississippi River washed that one away.”
As is the way with military families, the Cothams moved frequently. “One of my earliest recollections was when we were living in Paulsboro, New Jersey,” he says. “We took the ferry one day when the river was full of ice. It looked like icebergs to me.”
Cotham says he was a quiet kid who liked to doodle. “I would sit on the sofa in our little Navy housing project house and listen to TV with a pad of paper. …We moved back here when my father retired in 1959. I was just turning 11 years old.”
Pretty soon, he met a girl named Janice Gore. “We went to church together at East Frayser Church of Christ,” he recalls. “I think it was at Vacation Bible School. I was 12, and she was 11. We were friends all through our teenage years, and then we started dating.”
Squares and Hippies
No one in the Cotham family was an artist. And at first, young Frank wasn’t sure if he was, either. “I remember a teacher holding up a picture before the class that I had colored with crayons, as an example of how not to do it,” he said in a 2010 New Yorkerinterview.
Nor did he come into cartooning via any of the traditional on-ramps. “I’ve always hated comic books,” he says. “I liked Peanuts for a while, but I never read the funny papers. I don’t think I’ve got the attention span to go four panels. If I didn’t get it in one panel, it didn’t interest me too much. I liked the art you saw in magazines. It was mostly black and white, so I’ve worked mostly in black and white. To me, the drawings are so much more elegant in some ways. … I got interested in magazine cartoons in junior high school. I discovered The New Yorker then.”
In high school, his first job was with the Frayser branch of the public library, but he was soon transferred to the publications section at the main library (then on Peabody Avenue), where he was tasked with creating the artwork for the library system’s brochures and signage. “My father’s dream for me was to stay away from the military and become a rich and successful commercial artist,” he recalls with a smile. “He had a real misconception about the earning possibilities of a commercial artist in Memphis.”
Cotham enrolled in then-Memphis State University in the wild and wooly year of 1966. “The Vietnam thing was going on at the time. I had to take ROTC. I applied for the advanced course, where I would graduate and go into the Air Force. My father didn’t like that too much. He was really anti-military. He was a pacifist by nature; that’s how he ended up in the medical corps. I went into the ROTC interview, but I think those Air Force officers could see I was not officer material. I had long hair and granny glasses.”
After five years as an undergrad (“Apparently it was a four-and-a-half-year course, but no one told me. So it took me five years to get through it.”), he graduated in 1971. He and Janice married in 1972, and have two children together.
Graphics Cards
At Memphis State, an art teacher named Brack Walker had trained Cotham in the creation of television graphics. “He saw that my strongest point was my drawing, such as it was.”
After graduation, Cotham went to work for a public television station in Jackson, Mississippi. “They had a nice new facility, and big art department. I was kind of in on the ground floor. But they had an election [in Mississippi], and the new Governor Bill Waller came through the facility one day and scowled at everybody. He didn’t like the idea of all those hippies being there. I thought, they’re going to cut back, and I’m the last employee they hired, so I’ll be the first out. And that’s what they did, a few months after I left.”
Cotham returned to Memphis to work at the Southern College of Optometry. “That was a pleasant job,” he recalls. “It was a bunch of hippies at the time. I designed the logo, just sitting down and doodling. They used that logo for years.”
Eventually, Cotham ended up at the Memphis TV station WHBQ. Back in the days of analog broadcast technology, creating graphics for the news programs could be a harrowing job. “I would get a list from the news department about 3 o’clock in the afternoon for the 5 o’clock show. I would have two or three hours to get 10-12 graphics together.”
In this pre-digital age, Cotham would create his graphics on 3-by-5 cards. There was an extensive file of stock images, but every day involved a raft of new topics the news team was reporting on. “I’d frantically crank those out, and they would save them and then reuse them. … I would put them in this little plastic tray, and slide them in front of a fixed TV camera. It would be superimposed over the news anchor’s shoulder.”
Unbeknownst to him, the frantic graphics job would lead to his future calling. “I had a lot of downtime waiting for the graphics lists from the news department. So the guy who worked next to me said, ‘You’re always doing these stupid little drawings. Why don’t you try sending some to magazines?’ I did that for a couple of years without having any luck whatsoever.”
When electronic graphics, such as the now familiar Chyron, ended the old way of creating images by hand, Cotham spent more time in the WHBQ studio, mostly running a camera for the popular Straight Talk With Marge Thrasher show. Then, in 1979, he sold his first cartoon to the Saturday Review.
Cultural Revolution
Today, Cotham’s humor is observational and droll, but the first cartoon he sold to Saturday Review was somewhat political. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had enforced ideological and aesthetic conformity since the mid-1960s, had ended with the death of Mao Zedong three years earlier. In Cotham’s cartoon, two men wearing the ubiquitous, high collared Mao jackets look at a poster, where a Communist Party official has spruced up his required attire with a polka dot bow tie. The caption reads, “This definitely signals a relaxation of party discipline!”
More sales quickly followed. “After selling nothing for two years, and Janice getting mad at me for spending so much money on postage, because I had to send everything by mail, two other magazines bought a couple.”
Being successful in any creative field means learning to live with rejection. How did Cotham manage? “I never really could,” he says. “There was a lot of blubbering and carrying on. Most people would just send you back a form. … But some people weren’t so nice. ‘Don’t send us any more of this crap’ or ‘This is totally inappropriate for this conversation’ or ‘Good luck selling this somewhere else!’ You just got used to it after a while, I guess.”
By 1986, he was regularly selling his work to multiple outlets, and decided to leave WHBQ after 13 years. “I thought I could make a living at it, so I ought to give it a try.”
Early in his career, Cotham drew this cover for Memphis magazine (June 1985).
Adventures In Cartooning
It was rough going for a little while, with frequent lean times. Demand would be highest during Thanksgiving and Christmas, when clients would call for pitches on Thursday afternoon and expect to review ideas on Friday morning. “I would stay up all night trying to come up with something new on Christmas that hasn’t been done a million times before. I’d do 25 sketches and fax them — I was able to fax by then — and they would select what they wanted, and then I would finish them.”
His list of credits kept growing, but one prize continued to elude him. “I sent stuff to The New Yorker for 15 years before they ever published anything,” he says. “Every week, I would send them a pack of cartoons. I knew they weren’t going to buy anything. I would get a little rejection notice that said, ‘editors regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material.’ Then, after 15 years, they took one.”
Longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn, whom Cothan describes as “set in his ways,” retired in 1992, handing over the reins to former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who liked Cotham’s work. He soon became a regular contributor.
Something Old, Something New
Cotham’s cartoons for The New Yorker epitomize the dry, often dark humor the magazine is known for. In one of his most famous panels, a married couple sit in a well-appointed living room. “We’ve completely child-proofed our home!” the mother says. Then, you notice two children’s faces pressed against the window.
Four old gangsters sit in a dank basement. “For me, crime pays for what Medicare doesn’t cover,” one says.
A couple stands at the altar, while the priest receives a call on his Bluetooth headset. “Hold on — I’m getting information on why these two may not be wed.”
A dentist shines a flashlight into his patient’s mouth. “I see it, but it scampers away from the light,” he says.
“I used to just sit down at a light table and get a piece of typing paper and draw something out,” says Cotham. “Then I would send the sketches out, and The New Yorker would ask for something more finished, more detailed, more print-ready.”
But in 2008, the artist faced a potentially career-ending diagnosis. “I’ve had Parkinson's for about 11 years now,” Cotham says. “Handling a piece of paper or a piece of tape is pretty hit or miss. I’ve had to give up the bottle of ink, because I couldn’t hit the open neck of the bottle.”
When at rest, his hands shake with tremors, but like a singer with a stutter, he retains fine motor control when drawing. Now, he works with the help of an iPad. “I was so excited when Apple came out with a stylus. I started doing sketches on this, and it was a lot faster, and a lot easier.”
Today, Frank and Janice Cotham live in Bartlett. His two children also live and work in Memphis. Prints of his New Yorker cartoons sell on the magazine’s “Cartoon Bank” website. He’s still a regular contributor to The New Yorker. “They’re always open to something new,” he says.
Rest assured, the dean of Memphis cartoonists is still there in his modest home studio, surrounded by his favorite works and art that he has traded with other cartoonists, still wracking his brain to come up with fresh, funny ideas.
