Richard McGuire | Sequential Drawings

Richard McGuire

Sequential Drawings 

Pantheon Graphic Library, 2016

584 pp., 15.5 x 10.5 x 3.75 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

A spot drawing is an industry term for a standalone illustration designed to complement a publication’s content. The small, caption-less drawings are distinct from cartoons that may appear elsewhere in the issue, and are often used to break up large blocks of text on a page or screen.

The New Yorker is famous for its ongoing commitment to the spot illustration. The first spot drawing appeared on page three of the first issue, almost a hundred years ago. It was a small graphic by Peter Arno1 and became the template for the next eighty years. The little rectangle drawing appeared at the bottom of the middle column on the Talk of the Town page. It was unsigned, and resembled a woodcarving. 

To celebrate the magazine's 80th anniversary issue, the periodical changed its approach.

"The spot drawings are part of the delight of the magazine," editor David Remnick told the New York Times in 2005, "but I thought they needed a little something new. We've been running some of the same windmills, toasters, umbrellas and shoes in six-month rotation for a long time. And so we've let some contemporary artists take a shot at it, and some of the new spots are individuals and some have a recurring theme or joke or tell a kind of story."

Rather than have the spots that dot the pages be drawn by a variety of artists - as the cartoons are - Remnick approached artists to contribute every spot drawing in a single issue. 

"As someone who makes little drawings all day, I've always loved the spot drawings in the New Yorker,” said Tucker Nichols, who contributed spots to the magazine in 2021.2 "I see them as an exhibition of artwork you aren't supposed to notice on display in the most prestigious gallery.”

Remnick contacted Richard McGuire, who was in Paris working on some animation, and asked him to provide an entire issues worth of illustrations, for the inaugural issue of this new approach. "I think it was because I was working on the animated film,” McGuire said, "that made me think of it as a sequence.” 

After contributing cover graphics and illustrations for many years, McGuire became one of the most celebrated contributors of the spot drawings, and possibly the most prolific. 

“[The drawings] exist outside the text and tell a story, like little visual poems, a bit like haikus," McGuire tells Vincent Tuset-Anrès, in the new monograph Then and There Here and Now (see next post). 

Sequential Drawings collects a decade worth of these - from 2005 to 2015 - and presents them a single image to a page, arranged sequentially and given titles for the first time. 

The first series in the book is a homesick homage to the streets of New York, drawn when the artist was still in Paris. Titled "Three Friend"s, it features a tableau of a mailbox, parking meter and trash can, altered over the course of a season. 

In “Scenes from a Table”, items atop a restaurant counter become a family of sorts. A ketchup and muster bottle, salt & pepper shakers are anthropomorphized by their context, not by the addition of facial features, or arms and legs. 

“The Hallway” - not unlike McGuire’s celebrated single-location graphic novel Here - presents a fixed perspective on a space: a hall and three apartment doors. We see notices left under the doors, parcels left outside them, a pizza delivery, a sofa delivery, loud music, a lone balloon floating in the centre of the frame, a fire, and flood. In the final frame, the neighbours happen to be arriving home at the same time, curious about the other whose existence was previously only gleaned through what was seen in the shared space around their homes. 

At almost six hundred pages, the book is like a small brick. “I think my sculptural background makes me think of books as objects,” McGuire said. 

We first saw the title in Mexico, so have a Spanish Edition (the Chinese is below). It didn’t seem to matter as the introduction is fairly short and the rest of the book wordless. 

In a glowing review in the The New York Times James Yeh wrote “McGuire’s singular, virtuoso approach to storytelling is again the star….McGuire has given us another original and pleasurable work, as freewheeling, artful and exuberant as the artist himself.” 

Sequential Drawings is available from Amazon for $15.60, here. 

1. Peter Arno contributed 101 covers to the magazine, from 1925 until his death in 1968. New Yorker contributor Roger Angell described him as "the magazine's first genius".

2. Tucker Nichols produced small line drawings of a everyday objects used as flower vases (a teapot, roller skate, tube television set, measuring cup, spool, bowling ball, etc.)

"Consider the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page. It is small; it does not call attention to itself; it is missed by many insistent readers as they chase the progress of a story across columns and ads. It is kin to the textual space filler at the bottom of a page, but its language is visual, so it is there to make a spark as well as to balance out column inches. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the protean Richard McGuire has been quietly reveling in the form. McGuire, who wrote and drew the ineffable, time-traveling Here (2014) and is also an animator, author and illustrator of children’s books, maker of toys, creator of singularly memorable covers for The New Yorker, and indelible bass player (with Liquid Liquid), looms very large in the comics world while slaloming along a career path that hardly resembles those of any of his colleagues. He is the form’s Duchamp—a conceptualist with formidable skills who is disinclined to keep to any one routine but whose every move would make a lifetime shtick for any lesser being. He sometimes employs the spot sequence as if he had been handed a seven-panel strip in the Daily Bugle with no restrictions except a ban on words, sometimes as if he were putting up Burma-Shave signs along a highway, sometimes as if he were unveiling sample frames from a flip-book animation.”

- Lucy Sante, Inroduction

“Spot drawings are small, and McGuire’s combine the clean lines of comic art, the charm of a good idea, the pleasure of scientific observation, and a hint of story. In each drawing, and in each sequence, there are observations and connections that delight….Why are the drawings so appealing? Because they pay close attention to detail, to the many ways in which humans have invented small, useful things, and because they’re drawn simply and gracefully, with what feels like affection, despite being almost exactly realistic….Removed from the text in which they first appeared, [the spots] allow us to focus on the delicious works of art that they are—subtle, rewarding stories that once complemented other stories….Excellent.” 

—Sarah Larson, The New Yorker