Eustace Tilley
Until 1994, the original cover artwork was reproduced for the annual anniversary edition, but, since then, there has been significant variation in how his character has been embodied.
After editor-in-chief and founder Harold Ross was unsatisfied by the array of artist submissions under the theme of "a curtain going up on Manhattan", Ross turned to art editor Rea Irvin with the directive to produce a cover that "would make the subscribers feel that we've been in business for years and know our way around".
[3] Irvin, who had four months earlier drawn a magazine cover of a well-clad gentleman, added features to the 19th-century stylistic source image: a monocle to represent erudite intellect as well as a butterfly for "whimsey".
[1] Since advertisers were not filling the pages of the unfamiliar magazine at first, it commissioned Corey Ford to fill the pages with a series of humor pieces that "pretended to provide an inside look at the making of the magazine" with illustrations of the mascot, in which he was dubbed with the name Eustace Tilley.
[1] Ross believed Tilley was the highlight of the inaugural issue and each year that the magazine managed to survive, he acknowledged this by putting him on the cover again.
[1] By appearing on the cover exactly as originally drawn every year for decades on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, Tilley has become a kind of mascot for The New Yorker.
[7] The New York Times described him as follows: "The enduring symbol of The New Yorker magazine—the aristocratic, top-hatted Regency dandy, Eustace Tilley, studying a fluttering pale pink butterfly through a monocle".
[8] The Comics Journal says his depiction is incongruous: "a seeming sophisticated man-about-town who is so vapidly empty-headed as to find a fluttering insect an object worthy of minute inspection.
[2] The 1994 version broke with tradition by substituting for the dandy a drawing by R. Crumb of a contemporary city youth wearing a logo t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap and looking at – instead of a butterfly – a flyer for a pornographic theater.
The New York Times described this version as bearing mere resemblance to the original staid and wing-collared Tilley, rather than being a copy, but with similarities that included the "long neck, the pointy nose, the all-but-concealed eye, even the penciled arch of eyebrow".
[4] January 7, 2013, was the deadline for the sixth annual Eustace Tilley contest in which readers submit their own interpretations of the magazine's mascot.
[13] The 2008 cover was produced in homage to the ongoing 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries as a two-headed face card dubbed Eustace Tillarobama, with depictions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
[14] When interviewed by New York, 2013 contest winner Simon Greiner described his hipster work on updating of Tilley's physical cues based on the original as follows: "the sideburns into the beard, the monocle into the eyeglasses, the coat, and the hat".
The mascot had twice been manifested by contest winners as a female Eustacia (once on an anniversary edition cover and once in the summer).
