Bruce McCall: Nostalgia for a future that never happened
Bruce McCall paints a future that never happened -- full of flying cars, polo-playing tanks and the RMS Tyrannic, "The Biggest Thing in All the World." At Serious Play '08, he narrates a brisk and funny slideshow of his faux-nostalgic art.
Illustrator and humorist Bruce McCall paints our imagined future -- a supercharged, streamlined fantasyland that teeters on the edge of hysteria.
A longtime contributor to the New Yorker, Bruce McCall is a humorist and illustrator whose best-known work draws on the big-shouldered hubris of the middle 1920s and the early 1950s to create a future paradise where the skies are fllled with zeppelins and every car has wings. He's a wry observer of contemporary life and a witty writer.
McCall began his career as an illustrator for car ads -- by his own account not a very good illustrator. He'd left the field and became a copywriter when, on a whim, he and a friend sent some humorous drawings to Playboy (at that time, 1970, it was a legit career move). He soon connected with the founders of the National Lampoon, a pioneering humor magazine, and went on to create some of their most enduring images -- finding in the 1970s countercultural media a rich audience for his satirical take on the Atomic Age. He's now working the same magic at the New Yorker.
