This year has seen the passing of some great New Yorker cartoonists: William Hamilton, Frank Modell, Anatol Kovarsky, Michael Crawford, and now Bob Weber, at the age of ninety-two. He was a true master of the art of cartooning.

Bob published nearly fifteen hundred cartoons during his career at The New Yorker. Most of them were shepherded into print by my predecessor, Lee Lorenz, who was also master of the form. So when Lee speaks of Bob Weber, he knows whereof he speaks. Listen: “Bob’s draftsmanship was elegant," Lee said. "His preferred medium was charcoal, which he mastered during his early career as a fashion artist. Charcoal is a difficult but very versatile medium. One can produce a rich, inflected line as well as a broad range of shading. Bob took advantage of this to produce elegant black-and-white drawings that often suggest full color.”

Of course, this great art was a marvellous example of form following function—the art served to communicate the joke in the cartoon. If the ideas weren't laugh-out-loud funny, they were, to my mind, something deeper: laugh-inside funny, providing the kind of humor that ricochets and reverberates around the mind because it’s wry and insightful. Humor that doesn’t punch up or punch down but, rather, gently elbows to the side, tweaking the mishaps and frustrations of everyday life, so that the recognizable becomes recognizably funny.

Here’s another fine New Yorker cartoonist, Mort Gerberg, describing the process by which Weber performed his magic:

“Bob could compose and visualize a complete drawing in his mind, and then just 'transfer' it to a blank ledger sheet. That enabled him to draw directly, with ultra-soft Swiss charcoal sticks, to produce fuzzy lines and lush gray tones that might smear at the faintest touch. To avoid that, he would draw his characters and backgrounds from top to bottom, starting on the left, then draw vertical areas, moving right across the page, completing the picture in one sweep.”

If you would like to see more of Bob Weber’s magic (and who wouldn’t), here’s a slide show upon which to feast your eyes and mind: