Henry Martin, New Yorker Cartoonist, Is Dead at 94

The New York Times reported The New Yorker cartoonist Henry Martin died in Newtown, Pennsylvania, on June 30, 2020. He was 94. 

After 35 years and almost 700 cartoons published in The New Yorker, Martin’s last irresistible cartoon for The New Yorker appeared in 1999. It showed five snowmen at a restaurant naively ordering hot beverages.

© Henry Martin / The New Yorker

Henry Read Martin was born on July 15, 1925, in Louisville, KY. His father was the president of a furniture manufacturing company, and his mother was a homemaker. By 15, Henry knew he wanted to make drawing a career. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948, where his thesis was about cartooning and spent the next two years studying at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

After marrying Edith Matthews, a preschool teacher, in 1953, Martin began working from a small studio in Princeton where he drew for magazines including Saturday Review and Good Housekeeping. “My plan was to work hard at getting better at what I did and to learn as much as I could before venturing out on my own,” he told his daughter Ann M. Martin, the creator of the popular children’s book series The Baby-Sitters Club. 

Martin illustrated two children’s books written by his daughter Ann, both about two chickens, Fran and Emma: Fancy Dance in Feather Town (1988) and Moving Day in Feather Town (1989). And he illustrated one of her Baby-Sitters Club books, New York! New York! (1991). “We were eager to work together,” Ann Martin wrote in an email. “Not much convincing needed!”

Martin started his association with The New Yorker by drawing spot art, small drawings that appear within a block of text, in the early 1950s. He began submitting cartoons in 1960, but it wasn’t until 1964 that his first cartoon was published. He then became a regular.

In the late 1970s, Martin launched a daily syndicated cartoon called Good News/Bad News, which largely lampooned businessmen. It lasted for 15 years. 

By his retirement in 1999, Martin had published 691 cartoons in the New Yorker. He defined his artistic mission as “finding humor in the mundane and everyday” — and he found it, for 35 years.