Summary
- The New Yorker's most popular comic, featuring two dogs at a computer, has set a record after selling for $175,000 at auction.
- The comic, published in 1993 by Peter Steiner, predicted the issues of identity and authenticity that would arise on the internet.
- The comic's success and high auction price highlight the enduring relevance and impact of the internet on society.
The most popular comic in the history of The New Yorker just broke a major record. Since 1925, The New Yorker has published some of the best writing and journalism in America, as well as hilarious comics. In 1993, The New Yorker featured a comic that was highly prescient and quickly found its way into pop culture. Now, the original version of that comic has set an all-time record.
Heritage Auctions, a major auction house, featured the cartoon on their website. First published in July 1993, the comic by Peter Steiner features two dogs at a computer. One, with his paws on the computer, turns to the other and says: “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Steiner’s original copy of the comic has fetched a record 175,000 dollars at auction after being the subject of an intense bidding frenzy. This amount set a new record for a sale on a single panel comic.
Steiner's Cartoon Had an Ironic Beginning
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is an internet phenomenon. Released just two years into the World Wide Web’s existence, the comic predicted the pitfalls of the internet era. Peter Steiner, who had been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for 14 years at the time, had different intentions for his comic. Speaking with Heritage Auctions, Steiner recalled he had no real interest on the internet when he drew the comic, and yet it still presages very real concerns about identity in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. To this date, Steiner has made nearly 200,000 dollars in reprint rights.
Steiner's Cartoon Predicted the Future
At the time The New Yorker published the cartoon, the internet was still largely the province of techies and scientists, although that was rapidly changing. The development of web browsers, as noted by Heritage Auctions, brought more and more people online. Heritage also stated that the historic Mosaic browser was just a few months old at the time, and Netscape was still a year away. These two programs helped revolutionize the internet, paving the way for browsers such as Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. These first browsers, while clunky by today’s standards, were game changers at the time, allowing those with no experience to partake in everything the internet had to offer.
And it was this influx of people onto the internet in the mid-1990s that led to concerns of identity that “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” perfectly articulates. As more signed on and the internet became harder to police, experts began raising the issue of people pretending to be something they are not, and it was a fear that was well-founded. Catfishing and identity theft have become a sad reality of the internet today, and horror stories surrounding terrifying encounters with people met online have only stoked the flames. This 30-year-old New Yorker cartoon saw the future, and has now set a major world record.
Source: Heritage Auctions