Word of the week: Retrofuturism

Bruce McCall, the Canadian-born author and illustrator whose work adorned 83 New Yorker covers and who was, according to Car and Driver, “one of the funniest men ever to write about cars,” died on May 6, four days shy of his 88th birthday. He had recently completed “Safe Travels,” the gouache illustration that appears on the cover of the New Yorker’s May 15 issue.

McCall’s specialty was “retrofuturism,” a word he claimed to have coined. (The OED awards that honor to a 1988 issue of Inland Architect magazine. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael used “retro-futurist” in a 1986 review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.) As McCall defined it, retrofuturism entails “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow”—in McCall’s case, with sly faux-nostalgia and a keen eye for hucksterism and hyperbole. His first job after dropping out of high school was at a Toronto ad agency, and he later wrote copy for a Detroit agency that represented Chevrolet; he drew on those experiences to concoct automotive inventions with fanciful names like Bulgemobile and Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti Turbo-Hipster. Many of McCall’s delicious, fictitious car promotions originally appeared in the National Lampoon and were later included in The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build. McCall also wrote about his automotive career in a memoir, How Did I Get Here?, which was excerpted—with wonderful illustrations—in the New Yorker.

 

In McCall’s imagining, Bulgemobile models included the Fireblast, the Blastfire, and the Firewood (“For the man who has everything and just needs something to carry it in!”).

In a 2008 TED Talk, McCall told the audience that past visions of the future were “always hilariously, optimistically wrong.” The peak period for this sort of futurecasting was the 1930s, “because the Depression was so dismal” that people would “do anything to get away from the present. Technology was going to carry us along.” As his fellow New Yorker cartoonist Art Spiegelman put it in a tribute, McCall’s imagined future was “cynical and absurd, but somehow a happier dystopia than the one we face without him.”

It’s been a season of loss for fans of New Yorker humor and cartoons. Cartoonist Edward Koren died in April, and today brings the sad news of Sam Gross’s death on May 7. That McCall, Koren, and Gross remained productive and funny until their respective ends, in their late 80s, says something encouraging—optimistic, even—about the humor-making arts. I lift a half-full glass to all three gentlemen.

Comments

[Dan Freiberg]

McCall, Koren, and Gross were all great artists.
Gross' "Frog Legs" cartoon is one of the greatest. It's such an ingenious, outrageous, funny situation. But I still feel guilty laughing at the pathos of that poor little double-amputee frog, bravely carrying on, in spite of his brutal treatment.