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All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall
A retrospective celebration of the long career of one of America's leading illustrators and humorists.
- GenresHumor
120 pages, Hardcover
First published October 21, 2003
About the author
Bruce McCall
32 books5 followersBruce McCall was a Canadian author and illustrator, best known for his frequent contributions to The New Yorker.
Born and raised in Simcoe, Ontario, Canada, he was fascinated by comic books and showed an early aptitude for drawing fantastical flying machines, blimps, bulbous-nosed muscle cars and futuristic dioramas.
In his memoir, Thin Ice Coming of Age in Canada, McCall admitted that he was never good at physical activity as a boy, but could count on his mother to encourage his creativity. Bruce's father T.C. was imperious and unemotional, and left his alcoholic wife Peg without the attention she needed. Peg and the children tried to strike an attachment to him, but his stormy moods frequently pushed them aside.
Without any serious technical training, McCall began his illustration career drawing cars for Ford Motor Company in Toronto in the 1950s. After several decades in advertising, he sought opportunities elsewhere in the publishing industry.
He went to New York City, and was hired by National Lampoon and made a name for himself as an artist with intelligent and whimsical humor. McCall also spent a brief period writing sketches for Saturday Night Live.
McCall illustrated magazine covers, regularly appearing in The New Yorker and other magazines. He has been a contributor to the magazine since 1979.
McCall was also a humourist, and had written essays on some of the social ironies of modern life. He writes frequently for the "Shouts & Murmurs" section of The New Yorker.
McCall lived on the Upper West Side of New York near Central Park.
Born and raised in Simcoe, Ontario, Canada, he was fascinated by comic books and showed an early aptitude for drawing fantastical flying machines, blimps, bulbous-nosed muscle cars and futuristic dioramas.
In his memoir, Thin Ice Coming of Age in Canada, McCall admitted that he was never good at physical activity as a boy, but could count on his mother to encourage his creativity. Bruce's father T.C. was imperious and unemotional, and left his alcoholic wife Peg without the attention she needed. Peg and the children tried to strike an attachment to him, but his stormy moods frequently pushed them aside.
Without any serious technical training, McCall began his illustration career drawing cars for Ford Motor Company in Toronto in the 1950s. After several decades in advertising, he sought opportunities elsewhere in the publishing industry.
He went to New York City, and was hired by National Lampoon and made a name for himself as an artist with intelligent and whimsical humor. McCall also spent a brief period writing sketches for Saturday Night Live.
McCall illustrated magazine covers, regularly appearing in The New Yorker and other magazines. He has been a contributor to the magazine since 1979.
McCall was also a humourist, and had written essays on some of the social ironies of modern life. He writes frequently for the "Shouts & Murmurs" section of The New Yorker.
McCall lived on the Upper West Side of New York near Central Park.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 19, 2019
Underrated humourist.
November 8, 2009
All Meat Looks Like South America is an alternate history book with a focus on the engineering and marketing from future histories that didn't happen. Some are silly, some are bizarre and some are nostalgic.
The paintings are in the style of 1930s through 1950s marketing material and propaganda. The lines are clean, the colors are crisp and everything is either vaguely art deco or bauhaus.
Then on second look and with reading the accompanying text, it's obvious that these plausible looking things aren't possible and have never existed. For example the page of WWII airplane designs are full of ridiculous contraptions.
The book is oversized and a perfect coffee table book to keep guests amused. My son and I look at it together to get ideas for our own projects or stories.
The paintings are in the style of 1930s through 1950s marketing material and propaganda. The lines are clean, the colors are crisp and everything is either vaguely art deco or bauhaus.
Then on second look and with reading the accompanying text, it's obvious that these plausible looking things aren't possible and have never existed. For example the page of WWII airplane designs are full of ridiculous contraptions.
The book is oversized and a perfect coffee table book to keep guests amused. My son and I look at it together to get ideas for our own projects or stories.
June 10, 2019
This is McCall’s fourth book and I own them all, having been a fan of his work since he first began appearing in National Lampoon more than thirty years ago. His art is satire of a particularly sly sort, taking things to unreasonable extremes -- planes that are too huge or too heavy to fly, but which helped win the war, etc -- and his style combines realism with absurdities of scale. He’s not above being political, either, as “Mr. Bush Has a Dream” will show. McCall produces knowing grins rather than wild laughter, but that’s okay with me. He’s the reason the word “wacky” was invented.
January 3, 2017
Bruce McCall images a delightfully twisted world in the style of art-deco advertising, where speed rules, Albert Speer designs roadsides attractions, and Howard Hughes delivers three star meals from prototype racing planes. The joke is stretched like tafy, but manages to hold together. I particularly enjoyed the discourse on Golf Carts of the Third Reich, which is a spot on parody of actual Nazi procurement.
March 18, 2008
Yeah, I guess all meat DOES look like South America!!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews