The New York Times reports The New Yorker cartoonist Henry Martin died in Newtown, Pennsylvania, on June 30, 2020. He was 94. As well as his work for the esteemed magazine, Martin illustrated children’s books by his daughter Ann M. Martin, the creator of The Baby-Sitters Club series.
Henry Read Martin was born on July 15, 1925, in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended a prep school in Dallas, Texas, where he contributed cartoons and illustrations to the school newspaper and yearbook. He did his senior thesis on cartooning at Princeton University, which he graduated from in 1948, and spent the next two years studying at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.
After getting married in 1953, Martin lived and worked in Princeton, where he illustrated magazines like Good Housekeeping; humor books for Peter Pauper Press; and co-designed two board games, Boondoggle and Supermarket, which were sold to Parker Brothers. He began drawing spot art for The New Yorker in the early 1950s, but none of his full submissions were accepted by the magazine until 1964.
Altogether, he had 691 cartoons published in the magazine until his retirement in 1999, and he also contributed to British magazines Punch and The Spectator. In the late 1970s, he began a daily syndicated cartoon called “Good News/Bad News,” which mainly mocked businessmen. “I really like the business setting,” he was quoted as saying in 1984, “because my father was a businessman and many of his friends were businessmen.”
He illustrated two of his daughter Ann’s picture books in 1988 and 1989 (Fancy Dance in Feather Town and Moving Day in Feather Town), as well as a 1991 installment of The Baby-Sitters Club (New York! New York!). After his retirement, Martin sketched cartoons for the weekly bulletin of the retirement community he lived in in Newtown, as well as cards that were sent to Princeton donors at Thanksgiving from 1997 to 2011.
Martin was married to Edith “Edie” Matthews, a preschool teacher, from 1953, until her death in 2010. He is survived by their daughters Ann and Jane, a grandson, and a sister, Adele Vinsel.
