J. B. Handelsman

John Bernard "J.B." Handelsman (February 5, 1922 – June 20, 2007) was a cartoonist and illustrator whose work appeared for decades in The New Yorker, Punch, Playboy, and other United States and British publications.

Self-satisfied businessmen, grown stout round the middle, featured frequently in the cartoons of JB Handelsman. Bernard "Bud" Handelsman did not look like his creations, more like a poet. Though he was lean and lank and his bearing was scholarly and serious his cartoons were, and still are, sharp and funny. Bud was born in the Bronx, New York, and had his first cartoon published in 1961. He moved to London in 1963 with his second wife Gertrude and his three children Jonathan, Peter and Constance. Bud made the move because he thought his style more suited to Britain than the US, which was odd because the people in his cartoons always seemed like New Yorkers, and the Bronx clung to him like a fog. He lived in England until 1982 but said he always felt like a stranger. That may have had more to do with his temperament than nationality - his cartoons have the detached, ironic view of an outsider.

He arranged a cartoon as if was a film set and could get a lot in a frame without it ever looking crowded. Bud studied at the Art Students League art school in New York and at New York University, and worked as a graphic designer; you can see that discipline in the deft way he organised tone and texture on the page. You could spot a Handelsman, pinned on an art room wall, at 50 paces.

Cartoonists can be an unsociable morose bunch, and Handelsman toed that party line; it was rare to hear his laugh ring out across a crowded room, but his dark wit lit up the pages of Punch, Playboy and the New Yorker. The themes of sex, status and money run through much of his work, which is why his cartoons will not date: "Marvin still has plenty of virility," a smug wife says, patting her smug, portly husband "although of course these days it goes into real estate." "May I suggest to Madame that Monsieur do the ordering?" a waiter suggests to a plump well-heeled couple, "otherwise there may be incalculable harm to Monsieur's self image."

Bud had a bit of a thing about names. He didn't much like being called Bernard and awarded himself the name John in adulthood. I can't remember anyone ever calling him that. He was also in the habit of sending in cartoons under the pseudonym of TR Squink without making any attempt to disguise his style. They got printed under Squink's name, but everyone knew they were Bud's.

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