Artist Profile | Cartoon & Caricature

George Booth

George Booth was born on June 28, 1926 in Cainsville, Missouri. He is an artist, the son of school teachers; His mother, Irma, was also a musician, fine artist, and cartoonist, and his father, William, became a school administrator in Fairfax, Missouri, where Booth grew up on a vegetable farm. Booth attended, but did not graduate, Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the School of Visual Arts, and Adelphi College. Drafted into the United States Marine Corps in 1944, Booth was invited to enlist and join Leatherneck magazine as a staff cartoonist; When he was drafted back into the Korean War, he was ordered to return to Leatherneck. As a civilian, Booth moved to New York City, where he struggled as an artist, married, and then worked as an art director in the magazine world; he also worked on the comic strip Spot in 1956. Fed up, Booth quit and devoted himself to cartooning full time, beginning with success in 1969, with the sale of the first cartoon of him in the New Yorker. A characteristic element of Booth's generally cluttered or dilapidated interiors is a ceiling light bulb attached to a wire pulled by another connected to an electrical appliance such as a toaster. Most of the domestic elements in his cartoon were taken from his own home. Over time, caricatures of him have become an iconic feature of the magazine. In doodle style, they usually feature a man, woman or older couple, beset by modern complexity, bewildering and interacting with cats and dogs (often a large number of them). Booth also created the comic strip Local Item in 1986.