Charlie Barsotti dies

Hi everyone,

An old friend from Hallmark days has passed from the scene. When Charlie Barsotti worked as an illustrator in the editorial department, he kept everyone amused with his rapid fire drawings. After a day’s work the desk and floor would be littered with drawings that didn’t suit his critical eye, but those that survived were wonderful. He left Hallmark for New York where he prospered on the national scene for the rest of his life as a cartoonist with a large following of fans, friends, and admirers. Here’s his obit that appeared yesterday in the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader.

New Yorker cartoonist Barsotti dies
By Maria Sudekum

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY — Charles Barsotti, whose New York­er cartoons plumbed the human condition featur­ing characters such as the psychiatrist dog and the pilgrim with the walking stick, has died. He was 80.

Barsotti was diagnosed in 2013 with brain cancer and died late Monday at home in Kansas City, his daughter, Kerry Scott, said Tuesday.

“He got the maximum out of the minimum,” said Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine, which has pub­lished nearly 1,400 Barsot­ti cartoons since the 1960s. “With just a few lines he could delineate a hobo, a spy, a king, a philosopher, a dog, a judge, all those in the same picture.”

Barsotti, born Sept. 28, 1933, in San Antonio, Tex­as, graduated from Texas State University in 1954 and worked for Kansas City-based Hallmark Cards as a greeting card artist before moving to New York to become car­toon editor for The Satur­day Evening Post until that magazine closed. Barsotti and his family returned to Kansas City in the 1960s when Barsotti developed the “Sally Bananas” comic strip.

He freelanced cartoons for The New Yorker for several years before he became a staff cartoonist for magazine about 1970, while he and his family re­mained in Kansas City.

Barsotti’s cartoons also appeared in other publica­tions, including The Atlan­tic and The New York Times.

Several collections of his work have been pub­lished, including most re­cently the 2007 book “They Moved My Bowl,” which featured his dog cartoons.