Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by the New Yorker's Cartooning Couple

What happens when two cartoonists for The New Yorker fall in love and marry? Lots of witty wordplay, skewering drawings, and a healthy dose of illustrative competition. For twenty years, veteran cartoonists Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin have been exploring in their work the ins and outs of marriage. From whimsical and wacky to risque and barbed, their humor allows us to laugh at our follies and foibles and the insanity that is inherent in the day-to-day workings of every marriage. From meeting, wooing, and dating to marrying, divorcing, and remarrying, from having sex to having kids, the course of true love never runs smooth–but it’s excellent fodder for talented humorists.

Here, Donnelly and Maslin offer a his-and-hers view of marriage, a cartoon conversation about all that love entails. From the wedding day (“And do you, Louise, take Jack to be your husband until really, really pissed-off do you part?”) to cohabitation (“And this is where I go to escape from where I go to escape”) to parenting (“Dad says it’s all right with him if I watch TV as long as it’s not all right with you”), husband and wife give us hilarious insights into the way relationships work. Cartoon Marriage shares clever takes on male/female communication (“You could at least acknowledge the fact that I’m ignoring you”) and renovation (“I’ve made a few improvements, but the way you see him now is pretty much the way I found Harold eleven years ago”). And of course, what view of marriage would be complete without a trip to the bedroom: “Owen, look, the good-sex fairy.”

Featuring more than two hundred hilarious cartoons, Cartoon Marriage is a deliciously witty true-to-life look at matrimony, children, happiness, connubial squabbling, and everything in between.

Liza Donnelly has been a cartoonist for The New Yorker for more than twenty years. She is the editor of Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love . . . in 200 Cartoons and the author of a history of women cartoonists, Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons. Donnelly is a member of PEN and the Authors Guild, and is one of the original participants in the United Nations Cartooning for Peace initiative, which began in 2006, and continues worldwide. She teaches at Vassar College.

Michael Maslin began contributing to The New Yorker right out of college in 1977. He has had four collections of his work published, and he co-edited Call Me When You Reach Nirvana and Husbands and Wives, both collections of his and Donnelly’s cartoons.

Lisa Donnelly and Michael Maslin live in New York with their two daughters.