Danny Shanahan 1957 - 2021

New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan passed away on the morning of July 5th at the age of 64 following complications from surgery. He was 64 years old.

His friend and fellow New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin has a remembrance.

"Danny’s star rose quickly at The New Yorker, becoming a favorite contributor during editor Robert Gottlieb’s short tenure. Mr. Gottlieb was so fond of Danny’s work, he once huddled with then art editor, Lee Lorenz to develop a cover idea for Danny to execute (the cover, a businessman running along a city street, with New York City Taxi rates on his briefcase, was published August 12, 1991). Over his thirty-two years at the magazine Danny contributed approximately a thousand cartoons, numerous illustrations, and a dozen covers.

"Danny was born in Brooklyn, July 11, 1956, one of eleven children, and raised in Bethelhem, Connecticut. Before bursting onto the pages of The New Yorker, he tended bar at The Bottom Line in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. He lived for a time in New Mexico with his family before moving to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where he became part of a small community of New Yorker cartoonists that included Michael Crawford, Liza Donnelly, and myself.

"Around Rhinebeck, Danny was often seen strolling the town’s main street, sometimes with a cigar in his hand (until he quit in later years). In a number of his New Yorker cartoons showing small town sidewalk scenes, shop windows contain names of actual stores in Rhinebeck."

 

From a 2015 interview:

Brent: Do you usually come up first with the visual or the words? 

Danny: I'm a word guy, primarily a comic writer, I suppose, so I nearly always work with the captions first, the drawings following. I write in a sketchpad because I like to immediately rough out the ideas I come up with. Sometimes these ideas are half-formed, but if I get them sketched out, they might eventually be more fully realized the following week, or the week after.

 

Via The Daily Cartoonist:

"Certainly his years at The New Yorker (1988 – 2020) sealed his cartooning fame, but he also contributed to other publications including: Time, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Fortune, Playboy, Esquire, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and others.

"Danny’s last years had seen some troubles but he had hoped to regain his career when this tragedy struck."