barbara shermund--8/14/26

14 Aug 2026

barbara shermund--8/14/26

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Today's selection-- from Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins by Caitlin McGurk. The impossibly gifted cartoonist Barbara Shermund (1899 – 1978) whose work appeared in The New Yorker from its start in 1925.

“Shermund loved to draw women. There are several distinct themes that run throughout her work, but none as consistently as women talking to each other. In private parlors and bars, at perfume counters or on picnics, Shermund's women confide in or conspire with each other, gossip or goad, and create scenes in which the reader feels privy to a private conversation. To that end, it comes as no surprise that one of her greatest inspirations was writing and drawing from life–and most of her captions read as bits of overheard conversation between friends, roommates, or family members. While her work may not always pass the Bechdel Test of today, when women discuss male counterparts, it's most frequently at the latter's expense. Her affinity for and fascination with how women interact with each other–the way they reveal themselves in the company of close friends, or lament life's petty problems in operatic terms–is apparent. Often, her cartoons seem to serve up a dose of drama and ask, does any of this really matter? She delighted in contrasts: pitting the perspectives of youth and age against each other, a shy shopper and a brassy saleswoman, a clueless rich collector and the starving artist they admire. If someone took themselves–their troubles, their dreams, their tastes–too seriously, they made for the perfect subject. More often than not, the humor of Shermund's work is in the sense of a shared experience of shock or amusement reflected in the face of whatever character is on the receiving end of her narrator's quips. One gets the feeling that they are in on the joke with the other occupants of the scene by way of an inked eyebrow raise or eye roll in place of a real-life elbow nudge. Occasionally, they stare directly out at us, making eye contact with the reader as if to say, ‘can you believe this?’ at life's little ludicrous moments. In this way, her people bring us into the picture, situating us within a relatable scene. Although her work seemed to laugh hardest at wealthy society-types, she skewered everyone, including the elites, intellectuals, and artists to whom the magazine catered. As Dale Kramer put it in Ross and The New Yorker, ‘high society would be kidded, but preferably as if from the inside.’

Self portrait of Shermund

“Ross and his editors strongly encouraged–and supported–his contributors to get out into the world and draw from life. With a small sketchbook on her always (a few of which survive in private collections), Shermund created countless drawings of people, usually women, in conversation on the train or bus, out on the street or in fashionable shops. Fragments of comments or conversations would be jotted down in the margins, as well as occasional notes on costuming. She sketched from the theater, from boxing matches and fencing bouts, and used this form of life drawing to help develop a keen understanding of what the slightest gesture or glance could communicate. New York City offered endless opportunities for Shermund to immerse herself in and observe scenes from other people's lives as they unfolded, as did her extensive travel experience. When she mentioned in a letter to her editors in 1928 that she might head off to California for a visit soon, their reply encouraged her to consider working up some drawings that could take place on a transcontinental train while she was at it.

“She was bursting with her own ideas in those early days, and it's possible that the "realness" of Shermund's work may also be what made her difficult to pair with a compatible writer at first. In the magazine cartooning business, the use of ‘gag men’–or caption writers–had long been standard practice. Although people of all genders sent in ideas, the term ‘gag men’ was standard for the time and usually referred to those consistently contracted for the punch lines. Certain sectors of cartoonists can't imagine separating the writing and drawing process. But when it came to single panel cartoons for magazines like The New Yorker, Collier's, Life, or later, Esquire, an artist would occasionally be paired with a writer or could even accept submissions directly. In her earliest years at The New Yorker, Shermund wrote most of her gags, which was how she established her brand-in essence, this baseline work of hers gave the editors a sense of what themes interested her, what characters and settings she was most drawn to, and what a Shermund cartoon looked and read like. It's from this guideline of understanding the personality and tempo of her work that the editors could then send her ideas that seemed fitting to her style. Finding the right idea for her to draw could be a challenge, and rarely did the cartoons written by others hit as hard as those fully formed from her own mind. Ross and the art staff respected their cartoonists enough that they truly treated the shopped-out gags as suggestions rather than assignments, meaning Shermund could reject an idea if she felt it just didn't work or wasn't her style."