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Richard Decker's single-panel cartoons ran in several American magazines over the course of many years, but he will best be remembered for his affiliation with The New Yorker.
His work first appeared there in 1931, and he maintained a prescence in The New Yorker every year following, until 1969.
Decker was one of the quintessential New Yorker elite cartoonists of the era, along with Robert Day, George Price, Helen Hokinson, Whitney Darrow, and Peter Arno, not to mention some of the more familiar names.
In addition to his regular panels, an ongoing feature that ran for a time in The New Yorker was Decker's full-page advertisements for The Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper.
The premise was always the same; One individual witnesses something spectacular, while everone else is engrossed in the newspaper, the caption always stating 'In Philadelphia nearly everybody reads The Bulletin'.
To differentiate the ad from one of their regular cartoons, The New Yorker would run the disclaiming '(Advertisement)' at the bottom of the page.
See also:
Available for viewing at Google Book Search is text from
'Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present', By Philip Stevick.
If you'll follow the link and 'turn' to page 130, at the beginning of Chapter 9, 'Dreaming Philadelphia', there is a discussion of Decker's Philadelphia Bulletin advertisements that ran in The New Yorker.
The passages provide some background, a critique, and a further example of the ads.
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