Jack Ziegler, 1942-2017

New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler, who published more than 1,600 cartoons in the magazine during his career, died March 29 in Kansas City. He was 74.

Lee Lorenz, the magazine’s former art and cartoon editor, said in an interview with The New York Times that Ziegler, like Roz Chast, was someone he wanted to bring to the magazine.

“They were special talents. Each was bringing something new to the magazine. Jack had been influenced by comic strips, a lot of multipanel things, that wasn’t just a punch line but the telling of a funny story.”

Lorenz began buying cartoons from Ziegler in late 1973, but they did not start appearing until the following year because of Carmine Peppe, the magazine’s layout editor.

“Carmine thought that if they printed my stuff, it would be the end of the magazine,” Mr. Ziegler told The Comics Journal, “that it would just destroy the future of The New Yorker as we know it.”

John Denmore Ziegler Jr. was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens.

While earning a degree in communications from Fordham University, he was a page at CBS in Manhattan and was in the theater when the Beatles first performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.

After graduation, he worked in a series of communiction-related jobs before beginning to sell cartoons to the National Lampoon, The Saturday Evening Post, Writer’s Digest and others.

His first sale to The New Yorker was not a drawing but

James R. (Bob) Young, who produced Tim Tyler’s Luck for some 50 years, died March 21 in Sequim, Washington. He was 96.

He grew up the son of cartoonist Lyman

W. Young —who created Tim Tyler’s Luck in 1928 — and was the nephew of Blondie’s Chic Young.

He received an economics degree an idea that Charles Addams drew: Edgar Allan Poe contemplating which animal — a pig, a moose or a turtle — should say “Nevermore.”

Ziegler was asked in an interview last year whether he was aware that his work was different from that of the previous decades when he began contributing to The New Yorker. Ziegler responded that he had little inkling of that.

“I knew that I felt that I wasn’t quite seeing the type of cartoons I wanted to see in the magazine,” he told fellow New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin. “They were good cartoons, but too many of them weren’t making me laugh the way they had when I was a kid.

“I wanted to do drawings that were funny to me, and not necessarily to anyone else. I was out to please myself, so I never asked: Is this a New Yorker cartoon? Who knows? Is this a Jack Ziegler cartoon? Yep.”

In a recent New Yorker post, Ziegler was referred to as the “Godfather of Contemporary New Yorker Cartoonists.”

Ziegler also published eight collections of drawings, including a book of food cartoons, one of drinking cartoons and one of dog cartoons. The Essential Jack Ziegler was published in 2000.

Bob Young, 1921-2017

from Georgetown University, and then served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Shortly after World War II, Young started taking on light work on his dad’s comic strip, eventually being its sole author. Young graciously continued to sign his dad’s name to the strip even decades after Lyman stopped working.

Under his authorship, Tim Tyler’s Luck became an adventure strip where the two characters, Tim and Spud, traveled around the world witnessing problems and endeavoring to solve them.

A short list of the subjects in Young’s work included wildlife exploration and rescue, threats to endangered species, the potential of renewable sources of energy, and salt water farming.

In total, the strip ran for 68 years.