For The New Yorker’s ninety-sixth anniversary, Sergio García Sánchez draws the magazine’s trademark dandy, Eustace Tilley, masked and with a vaccine dose in hand. We also see scenes of pandemic life, and the contours of a city waiting to reëmerge. “With masks, social distancing, and vaccines, we’ll slowly recover life in the city,” Sánchez told us. “The chance encounters with people of all cultures; the thrill of eating outside at any hour. The city is a container for so many stories, and soon they’ll be out in the open again.”
This is Sánchez’s début cover, but he isn’t the first to reimagine our mascot. When Rea Irvin, the magazine’s inaugural art editor, drew a Regency dandy for the first issue, in February, 1925, he likely wanted readers to laugh—this self-serious gentleman was a caricature of the dour, bourgeois old guard. A year later, to celebrate The New Yorker still being afloat, Irvin and the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, decided to republish the cover, establishing an anniversary tradition that endures to this day. Tilley, of course, has changed with the times, and we’ve collected, below, a few of the ways in which artists have remade him.
For nearly seven decades, the magazine reproduced Irvin’s original Tilley cover every February. In 1994, though, R. Crumb turned the dandy into a punk in Times Square. There was no monocle, and Tilley’s butterfly had become a flyer for a sex shop.
After artists were encouraged to play with the character, Eustace quickly became Eustacia. Above, from left to right, are R. O. Blechman’s Anniversary cover, from 1996, and Ana Juan’s Summer Fiction cover, from 2005.
For the magazine’s eighty-fifth anniversary, in 2010, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes, and Ivan Brunetti drew four separate covers, each imagining how Irvin might have staged an encounter between Tilley and the butterfly. Astute readers may have noticed that when the covers were placed next to one another, they revealed Tilley’s outline.
Over the years, the magazine has held Eustace Tilley contests, inviting readers to submit their own takes on the character. Occasionally, the best entries landed on the cover, as with this witty take, by Brett Culbert, from 2012.
For Simon Greiner, a winner of the 2013 Tilley contest, a hipster Tilley could only live in Brooklyn.
For the magazine’s ninetieth anniversary, in 2015, nine artists paid tribute to Tilley, each showcasing their particular style. Top row: Christoph Niemann, Istvan Banyai, Peter Mendelsund. Middle row: Lorenzo Mattotti, Kadir Nelson, Roz Chast. Bottom row: Barry Blitt, Carter Goodrich, and Anita Kunz.
Barry Blitt’s “Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley” accompanied a piece about Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The cover prompted some difficulty: the magazine needed clearance from the United States Postal Service in order to mail an issue that featured only a Cyrillic logo. Thankfully, the U.S.P.S. ruled that the magazine was still familiar enough to satisfy mailing requirements.
See below for more variations on Eustace Tilley:
Find Sergio García Sánchez covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.
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