One of the quiet losses as print magazines have declined because of technological shifts and because they’ve been focus-grouped to death, is the dwindling of panel cartooning. From Bruce Handy’s New York Times Book Review piece about New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s just-published memoir:

“I should note, as Mankoff does, that The New Yorker didn’t invent the captioned, single-panel cartoon, but under the magazine’s auspices the form was modernized and perfected; [Peter] Arno, for one, ought to be as celebrated as Picasso and Matisse, or at least Ernst Lubitsch. But if The New Yorker has long been the pinnacle, ‘the Everest of magazine cartooning,’ as Mankoff puts it, the surrounding landscape has become more of a game preserve, with a sad, thinned herd of outlets. In olden days, when rejected drawings could be pawned off on, among many others, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Ladies’ Home Journal or National Lampoon, a young cartoonist could afford the years it might take to breach The New Yorker — Mankoff himself made some 2,000 total submissions before he sold his first drawing to the magazine, in 1977. Today there are probably more people alive who speak Gullah or know how to thatch a roof than there are first-rate panel cartoonists.”