Captive Audiences

 

Tom Gauld "Captive Audience" March 8, 2021 The New Yorker

The "Cover Story" blog about this cover is here. 

A couple interesting things in the interview:

It’s nice to see more of my neighbors as they walk along the street—usually, many of them would be at work all day. And, when I take walks, I see a lot more people sitting by their front windows, often working on a laptop. The idea for this cover started when I walked past a building and noticed that there was a figure in almost every one of the windows. I tried to imagine an everyday event that might attract the attention of everyone in a building.

You draw people as featureless silhouettes. What magic did you use to indicate that they’re all looking in the same direction?

The magic of cartooning! It’s partly just careful positioning, so that these little circles suggest a head held in a certain orientation. But, more important, it’s about leaving space for the viewer to fill in the blanks, to build these simple shapes into figures that tell a story. The ball is just a tiny circle, but placed in the right position, with a line under it: it’s a ball in midair. And when we see a stick figure with an outstretched arm and a dog, we imagine the movement and create a story. Making this happen is one of the fun things about drawing cartoons.