If you’re a regular reader of The New Yorker magazine, you’re probably familiar with the creator of these single-panel comics we’re excited to share with you today. The mastermind behind these works of art is none other than Harry Bliss, a well-known cartoonist and illustrator known for his daily Bliss cartoons. His illustrative career includes an impressive resume of 25 New Yorker covers. Some of his first covers date back to 1998 and the last one was illustrated in 2020.
Harry’s Bliss cartoons tend to poke fun at the absurdity of today’s society and are designed for a more adult audience. So whether you’ve been a loyal reader of The New Yorker for years or are simply discovering the brilliance of Harry Bliss’s work, we think you’ll chuckle at this selection.
Credit: Harry Bliss
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Harry tends to find humor in everyday life, no matter how dark things may get. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the artist’s work was chosen for several covers of The New Yorker magazine. However, creating the cover of such an iconic magazine is not without its challenges.
“I don’t come up with as many cover ideas as I used to. My daily cartoon Bliss keeps me busy. But every once in a while I send my editor at the New Yorker an idea that he always appreciates and often likes, but ultimately rejects. The hardest thing about covers is that you never know if your art is going to be published until you see it on the newsstand. Anything can happen. I’ve had covers that were supposed to appear a week after being finished and ended up unpublished or published two or three years later. “This can be frustrating, but over the years I have learned to compartmentalize the frustration and move on to other work,” Harry wrote.
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