Plagiarism Is Beneath The New Yorker, Its Cartoonists
Even though we know that special issues of the New Yorker are just an excuse for more ad pages, we still fall for the Cartoon Issue, which came out last week. After all, cartoons are the reason we still read started reading the New Yorker.
But this year’s edition featured a cartoon by Lee Lorenz (left) that seemed eerily similar to a drawing by Gary Larson (right) from 1984.
Bob Mankoff claims the coincidence is just that, and tells Gelf, “They are very similar … but I can guarantee you that Lee Lorenz is not a guy who copies cartoons.”
Sounds like Mankoff’s just plagiarized an excuse from Jerry Seinfeld.
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Editorial Director
As old as Larson's cartoon is…I'd wonder if Lorenz might have subconsciously copied Larson…how old is Lorenz?
Might he have been a boy when he saw Larson's cartoon? Could he, on a conscious level, have forgotten that he'd seen that image before…and believed that he conjured it on his own? I think that's highly possible, given the age of the original cartoon.