Barbara Shermund was a pioneering female cartoonist and feminist in an era when both were exceedingly rare. Twice married but never truly cohabitating with either husband or conforming to societal norms, she led her life as she pleased and translated it into her gag cartoons populated by independent, headstrong women. As a founding cartoonist of The New Yorker and one of the first three women cartoonists admitted into the National Cartoonist Society, she managed to forge a lifelong, self-sustaining career in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field, and yet her story has never been told until now.
Buy Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara ShermundShermund’s work presented in the book is largely in the mold of typical The New Yorker gag cartoons, a mold she helped to forge a century ago as one of the magazine’s founding cartoonists. Her black and white work for the magazine exhibits a loose, playful style, with impossibly big-eyed and long-limbed characters navigating murky splashes of shading. She also contributed multiple color covers for the magazine, with the samples included in the book showing her elevated attention to detail for the big showcase.
Examples of her earlier work in college show that she was capable of expertly rendered lifelike portraits, making her professional work notable as much for her loosening in technique as her distinctively cartoony style. Her eventual shift to color at Esquire is a revelation, with Shermund’s art blossoming with the addition of her lush watercolor work. While she also found success in commercial illustration, book covers, and a syndicated newspaper cartoon, her longest and closest association was The New Yorker. It’s somewhat perplexing that she frequently chose to shade that work in heavy ink washes, making them difficult for reproduction even now, but her insightful gags shine through regardless of the shifting clarity of the art.
Readers expecting an art book should be aware that this is also a text-heavy biography, with writer Caitlin McGurk following her title’s direction to tell the story of Shermund’s trailblazing life and career. This heavy biographical approach results in Shermund’s cartoons sometimes getting overshadowed, minimized to cramped multi-cartoon page layouts in sizes approximating current cartoons in The New Yorker. Thankfully, the oversized hardcover format by Fantagraphics allows Shermund’s work to shine, especially in numerous full-page cartoons and her vibrant full-color work for Esquire.
Caitlin McGurk is the curator at the world-renowned Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, a role that granted her unparalleled access to Shermund’s archival materials in their permanent collection. She’s also an Associate Professor on campus at the Library’s home, Ohio State, and brings that academic rigor to her thoroughly researched biographical text about Shermund. While she occasionally allows her text to drift a bit far afield into lengthy background info on items such as Shermund’s parents’ upbringing, the artist community scene in Woodstock, and the formation of Esquire magazine, there’s no questioning her passion for providing a complete picture of her mysterious and elusive subject. With very little concrete biographical information or even photos of Shermund, McGurk constructs a life story that is as close to accurate as possible, a monumental effort resulting in a fascinating portrait of the artist.
