Bruce McCall: The Secret Life of Skyscrapers Notecard Folio

Years ago, freshly dropped out of high school in Ontario, Bruce McCall apprenticed as a commercial artist in a shop that specialized in ads for automobiles; his tendency to parodize the very work he turned out (e.g., painting Detroit behemoths even huger, lumpier, and sillier than the real things) prompted his boss to observe that McCall had no future in the business; nevertheless, he stayed in advertising for a number of years. McCall's mischievous, leg-pulling style first gained him a national reputation in the 1970s, when he regularly contributed humorous prose and artwork to National Lampoon.

As both a writer and an artist, he has consistently taken a sly interest in the overgrown, the overweening, the self-important, the foolishly luxurious, and--as the images in this folio show--just plain big. Since 1980, the New Yorker has been a frequent venue for McCall's humor; the two works reproduced here first appeared as New Yorker covers.