Like Walt Kelly, George Booth was always found on my grandparents’ bookshelves. Booth’s characters seem to live somewhat out of time, and as a kid I assumed that the cartoons dated from many decades earlier.
Maybe that’s why I was surprised to learn that Booth is still living, even though The New Yorker still runs his cartoons. (New cartoons weren’t necessarily proof of life to my mind: the magazine should be slowly amassing a backlog of Booth cartoons to give us all comfort at least a decade past his death.) Wikipedia informs me that Booth is going strong at 96 years old, thank goodness.
It was delightful yet somehow unsurprising to learn in this 1993 profile that Booth’s style was, in part, inspired by Picasso:
BOOTH: I liked his stuff. He would draw a profile of a face looking that way, but have another eye out here in space looking at you. The painting is looking at you and he's looking over here, too. That fascinated me. Picasso talked about small children who do such beautiful drawings just this side of being babies, and it’s so wonderful a lot of times. And then they grow up and go to art school, where they unlearn what they did naturally, and then try to recapture it, if they’re awake. It's not easy. It’s a matter of relaxing and enjoying and mentally letting go. It's drawing something that has a lot of feeling, as opposed to concentrating on drawing all the time.
In this same conversation, Booth describes various approaches he has used to preserve the raw energy of his own initial draft, sometimes cutting and taping small bits of an early sketch into a later version, or tracing portions via a light board. He explains in another interview that “sometimes a rough had so much feeling in it […] that you almost can't repeat it by doing a finish. You stiffen up.” All of this resonates very much with me, as loose, messy lines are always the ones that seem to convey more personality in my own doodles. (I realize that, as someone who is untrained and has no formal technique, this is a convenient position for me to take.)
I mostly fell in love with George Booth because of his animals. My own dogs and cats—especially the ones who are grumpy, or a little “off”—seem to owe him a debt:
Unlike the characters in Kelly’s Pogo, Booth’s dogs and cats are definitely NOT people. They are the doggiest of dogs and the cattiest of cats; they do their own thing in parallel with their humans, and only very occasionally in tandem. Even when tap dancing or riding bicycles, the joke is that they are animals tap dancing or riding a bicycle.
That said, every single one of Booth’s animals has personality, and I would say Booth is more concerned with personality than authenticity. Consider how his most recognizable dog came into being:
As for his trademark terriers, he says, "I drew an ornery-looking mutt in the New Yorker and somebody wrote a letter and said, 'Is that an English bull terrier?' And I didn't know what they looked like. I went to the library, and gradually the dog became an English bull terrier. […] I had drawn a dog sitting next to a sign that read BEWARE OF SKITTISH DOG. That was the character that started that.”
This loose and easy approach seems a part of Booth’s general ethos. He also takes people as they come, and “there is no nastiness” in how Booth observes the human condition. I especially love how many of Booth’s characters, from all walks of life, appreciate art and music and beauty. While he loves to contrast the artist with the sublime art, he never mocks the aspiration.
I know that my doodles—mostly the cats—owe a debt to Booth and his affectionate observations, but I hope some of his kind, clear-eyed acceptance of fellow humans has also rubbed off.