The ’00s were an unusually dark decade, at least if New Yorker cartoons are any indication. At the magazine’s website, cartoon editor Robert Mankoff tracks the number of murders depicted in them by decade, beginning in the 1930s — and finds that the first ten years of the 21st century featured more homicides than every other era besides the ’40s (which makes some sense, considering that’s when the US was involved in World War II). Cartoon characters were safest from violent crime in the ’70s and ’80s, when the magazine’s comics included two and zero murders, respectively. See the data graphed after the jump, then visit Mankoff’s New Yorker blog to read his entertaining analysis of the fluctuation from decade to decade.
