Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund

In this lively debut biography, curator McGurk returns an unjustly forgotten cartoonist to her rightful place among the greats. Among the first female cartoonists at the New Yorker and Esquire, Barbara Shermund (1899–1978) made a name for herself in the 1920s with urbane, acerbic cartoons featuring rail-thin flappers with raccoon-eye mascara and mops of curls (“Well, of course, I do say I’ll never marry—though, somehow, I’ve always wanted to be a widow,” a typical Shermund character quips). As times changed, her Jazz Age party girls became “gold diggers” and harassed secretaries; a 1953 Esquire profile hailed Shermund, with her gift for drawing “bouncy babes,” as “the mistress of the cutie cartoon.” The biography is hampered somewhat by a dearth of personal information about Shermund, a private woman who was so forgotten by the time of her death that no one claimed her ashes from the crematorium. Yet she comes alive in McGurk’s analyses of her work, which examine how Shermund subtly interrogated her era’s sexual and gender norms by manipulating her figures’ body language and creating contrasts between character types. Lavishly illustrated with Shermund’s cartoons, paintings, and magazine cover art, this deserves a place in any comics library. (Nov.)