A year or two ago when I sold this one, my original didn’t have the dash and I got an email to add the dash. OK!

I’ve been back at teaching high school for about three weeks now. It’s been super busy and overwhelming, so I really fell off of drawing for a couple weeks. I simultaneously felt mad at the world for not allowing me enough time to do my drawing, and mad at myself for not being disciplined enough to make it happen in spite of the outside pressures. 

You may recall a few months back I made a commitment to myself to draw for 30 minutes every day and I’ve pretty much stuck to that, but I completely failed when school started. Of course I know I should go easy on myself, but I also know that if I start making excuses and letting a couple days slide here and there, before you know it, it can turn into a week, then a month, and then I’m like, “Why am I so sad and angry all the time? Oh, because I stopped drawing.” 

It actually fell at an opportune time though, because it was an off week for The New Yorker. It was one of those 2-week double issues, so we had one week where we didn’t submit cartoons. Theoretically that would have been a great time to build up a backlog of cartoons that I could submit in the future, but instead I just ended up with my usual amount by the end of the two weeks.

This month I drew the cover for Antigravity, the local, New Orleans indie subculture magazine. 

There’s this invasive vine that’s prevalent in New Orleans called bushkiller that takes over my yard every summer. It’s called bushkiller because it climbs up bushes and trees and smothers them. I’ve been battling this stuff for years, so for my cover illustration I drew bushkiller completely consuming/obliterating the cover of Antigravity. I was really happy with it when I submitted it, but then I got a note back from the editor suggesting some major edits. I tried to fool with it a little but just didn’t really have the time and liked my drawing as is, so, in the end I was just like, “Sorry, this is what I’ve got. Take it or leave it.” And they took it. So yay!

For the last few years I’ve had this thing going on with my right arm, which happens to be my drawing arm. I have this nerve pain that shoots up and down the arm, and sometimes my pinky and ring fingers feel numb and tingly. My doctor told me it’s cubital tunnel, which is kind of like carpal tunnel but for the elbow. My hope was that with some rest and not using it too much it would eventually heal, but after like 3 years it seemed to actually be getting worse, which started to really freak me out since that’s the arm I draw with. 

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0 Days Since Last Accident 

I think this is the only time I’ve used this trope. The idea of a factory with a sign on the wall that says how many days since the last accident is a cultural trope, though I wonder if it’s becoming less known as factory type work is less and less common for most Americans. For this one I was trying to come up with a Daily Cartoon about cooling temperatures in the fall and wanted to use the term “sweater weather.“ In the end, it didn’t really work. Sometimes you take a stab and it falls flat. On to the next cartoon!

3 Kids in a Trench Coat 

I love this trope. I’ve tried so many variations on three-kids-in-a-trenchcoat, but I have yet to sell one. I submitted this one as a Daily Cartoon for the Fourth of July. No dice.

10 Commandments 

For me, almost all Judeo-Christian religious stories and imagery are rich material for cartoons, especially the 10 Commandments. Everyone has heard of the 10 Commandments, and there’s so much that can be said about the human condition based on this set of 10 rules that supposedly sum up everything we shouldn’t do: the direct communication with God, the authority figure of Moses, writing on stone tablets - so many possibilities! This was one of my first Ten Commandments cartoons I ever drew and it ran in Seven Days. To be honest, I’m not crazy about the drawing these days, but you gotta start somewhere.

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I think this one didn’t work because I was referencing biblical lines that aren’t well known enough to most people. At the last supper Jesus said something like, “Take this bread and eat of it, for this is my body… take this cup and drink of it, for this is my blood.” In Catholicism these lines are said every mass before communion, so Catholics might recognize it, but I think most people aren't as familiar with the specific wording. The idea of the cartoon was to think of what might have transpired after the last supper was over. Somebody needs to take away the dishes and wash them, and then after having a full belly, maybe Jesus would’ve needed a nap.

With the rise of right wing authoritarianism, I thought, what if there was a season of The Bachelor with the theme of fascism? Originally I tried a version where it was “white supremacist bachelor,” but when that was rejected I tried “fascist bachelor.” I still think it’s a decent premise, but then I was trying to add another layer on top of it, where, often on TV shows, there will be a token minority, which, in the fascist version, would be a left-leaning person, which I thought was a unique take. Maybe it was just too many things going on at once.

There’s a general rule I’ve heard people say that The New Yorker doesn’t publish cartoons about bodily fluids. I’m sure there have been exceptions, but in general, if a cartoon is about pee or poop or snot or pus or… period blood, it’s probably not gonna fly. And if it’s not going to fly at The New Yorker then it’s probably also not going to fly at most other magazines. There are exceptions though. I find that British magazines are willing to go more crude than American magazines, and occasionally Airmail will go a little provocative. Just the other day I actually sold a cartoon to Seven Days in Vermont that references “dog shit.” But maybe period blood is a bridge too far. I still think this is a decent premise. Storks deliver babies. If a woman isn’t pregnant, one way to be certain is if she has her period. So, logically, if, when women are pregnant, storks deliver babies, then when they’re not pregnant, the storks must deliver their periods.

So, which cartoon do you think is the worst? Let’s see which cartoon wins by failing.

The insignificant Father’s Day one started out as a daily cartoon idea in the wake of Trump‘s reelection that was rejected. Later I had the idea for the Father’s Day caption and just slightly switched up the drawing for it. Also rejected.

For the comic sans tombstone I wanted the font to look accurate, but it turned out I didn’t have comic sans installed on my iPad, so I had to copy and paste it from a JPEG. After Times Luxury bought it I got paranoid about the kerning and tweaked it so minutely I’m pretty sure no one noticed but me.

For the lost human flyer I had forgotten that I first tried to draw the person with sunglasses. I guess I thought it would make it look like they were frolicking outdoors or something, but it just looked weird so I abandoned it.

I like on the thinker one how I tried to freestyle it at first and it looked totally wrong so I had to bring in an actual picture of the sculpture. I may have ended up making it a little too tight and too close to the actual sculpture though, not loose and cartoony enough, but, whatever. It worked.

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My biggest news this past month is that I sold a cartoon to the New Yorker magazine - the actual print magazine! This is the Holy Grail. This is what I strive for when I draw every day and submit every week, to get a cartoon into the actual print copy of the New Yorker magazine. First of all, it carries the most clout, feels the most substantial and meaningful and like it’s part of a long history of incredible cartoons and cartoonists over the past 100 years. But it also doesn’t hurt that it pays the most. 

I’ve been traveling the last 2 weeks with my family and I saw the O.K. as I was about to pull out of a gas station in Connecticut while juggling grumbling kids, energy drinks, and Apple Maps directions, so I felt like I didn’t have much of a moment to really take it in. So let’s celebrate right now. Yay!

Though I’ve had some Daily Cartoons and my recent Shouts piece, it had been a good while since I last sold one to the actual magazine and I was going a little crazy over it. I was chatting with another cartoonist who also hasn’t sold in a bit and we were talking about how we’re constantly second-guessing our work because of it. Do we need to change up our style? Would we sell more cartoons if we made them less silly? More silly?

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I taught 4 different classes each day so I got the chance to draw myself in the same theme multiple times a day. Here are a few of my favorites:

As myself

In space

In the clouds

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I have chosen a winner for my latest caption contest, using the word “caption” loosely, as it should maybe more accurately be called a “fill-in-the-signs” contest.

Looking over the entries, I began to realize that there are two different ways of reading the image, which affected the types of captions submitted. First I’ll explain the way I understood the image. 

I picture this being in a bookstore and the signs at the top are labeling the genres of books that are being sold on the bookshelves below. On the left the shelves are full because these are some type of books that no one wants, that no one is buying. On the right the shelves are empty because these are some type of books that a ton of people want, that are popular or trendy, and thus they have almost all been bought. I stuck with this framing of the image because on the shelf on the left, there are multiples of the same type of book, as you might see if you went to a bookstore. For example, there’s 3 copies of one book, 5 copies of another, 4 copies of another. You can tell this because they have the same design and size of spines.

Unfortunately, operating on this assumption, some people’s captions didn’t make sense.

However they did make sense if you read this image in a different way than I intended. Instead, if you viewed these bookshelves more as a collection of books that someone owns, then the shelf on the left houses the books that someone actually wanted, that they purchased, that they own. The shelf on the right is empty because it’s books they have not purchased, do not own, aren’t interested in, and therefore don’t have many of. Viewing the image this way is almost the opposite of the way I intended it.

It seemed like a pretty even split, about half the people interpreting it one way and half the people interpreting it the other. I thought about considering captions from both perspectives, but in the end I just couldn’t get down with the second way. So that helped me narrow down the captions a bit. 

Many of the captions hit on common dichotomies and oppositions prominent in our contemporary world, but, for that reason, most of them felt a little too obvious to me. I “got“ them, but I didn’t necessarily find them funny. My original caption for this cartoon was similar. On the left I had “Non-Fiction“ and on the right I had “Post-Truth.“ I still think it’s decent, but no one bought it, so, oh well. 

In the end there was one caption that caught me off guard, that made me chuckle, and that is the one I have chosen as the winner. And the winner is…

“Self-Help” and “Help Yourself” by John Konno @johnkonno

I like this one because of the double meaning of “help yourself.” On the one hand “help yourself” could be thought of as a genre akin to “self-help,” but then the other meaning of “help yourself” could be, “take all the books you want.” Thus, the shelf is empty because people have “helped themselves.” I like that it played on the stereotypical genre of self-help books but then threw in an unexpected twist on the term that gave it a double meaning that made sense and caught me off guard. Many people played around with the idea of “self-help“ but John’s joke was original and unique. I also liked that it followed the correct joke structure of set up at the beginning and punchline at the end. Some people’s captions had the joke structure reversed, where the joke was in the sign on the left more so than the sign on the right, which just isn’t how jokes work. Formally I thought this one was structured nicely.

Very smart, very clever. I’m familiar with John’s name from The New Yorker and Cartoonstock caption contests, so I know he’s a heavy hitter. Once again he has “helped himself” to a win. I will make a print of his version, sign it, and mail it to him. Congrats, John Konno! 

A few runners up:

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Time for a new caption contest!

Here we have 2 shelves in a bookstore, one section is untouched, the other is practically empty. What might each section be labeled? What types/genres/categories of books might these be?

I’ll keep this open for entries through Monday the 20th, when I’ll pick my favorite. I’ll send a signed print to the person with my favorite entry.

I’ll be posting this to all of my social medias, but I will only be considering captions submitted on Substack when choosing my favorite. Yes, this is a shameless way to try to get more people over to my Substack.

This is an old cartoon from my very earliest days of gag cartooning that I could never get to work. Can you? Give it new life!

A little over a year ago I met in person with Emma Allen, The New Yorker cartoon editor, and one of her suggestions was that, in addition to submitting my usual cartoons, I try submitting some Daily Shouts pieces. She noted that before I started doing cartoons, I was drawing autobiographical comics, so perhaps the multi-panel format might suit me.

It took me a few months to get around to it, but over my winter break, I finally had a chance to sit down and focus on it. I spent some time looking at the previous few months’ Shouts pieces to get a sense of the kinds of things they typically do, and the kinds of joke structures and formats they tend to follow. I then spent a bit of time brainstorming various ideas. Before long I hit upon the idea of combining my experience as a person with misophonia with the upcoming holiday of New Year’s Eve.

Fireworks packaging has such great graphic design, so it made a lot of sense to do something with that. Plus you usually get multiple different kinds of fireworks, so the idea that I could draw multiple fireworks perfectly fit the format which is typically somewhere between 6 to 12 panels. I brainstormed a dozen or so ideas, drew up about four of them to a fairly finished state, and roughly sketched out the rest, then I sent them off to Emma. I had some other idea that I worked up as well that I now forget, but she rejected that one. I was pretty excited when I heard back from her that she was interested in the misophonia fireworks piece. It was my first time taking a stab at a Daily Shout and my first submission got accepted!

The next challenge was actually completing all of the drawings in the set. Emma already had things booked up through New Year’s Eve, so she suggested running it for July 4 which gave me a few months to get it finished. Still, I didn’t have much wiggle room for fitting it in. My usual routine is drawing gag cartoons every day, ideally finishing one cartoon every day or two, and then gathering up 10 cartoons to submit every week. Just doing that is about all I have time for in a week, so trying to find the time on top of drawing and submitting my usual batches to also draw these fireworks was a challenge. I just had to put in a little extra work here and there to eventually get them all done.

I knew I wanted to submit more drawings than would actually end up running in the piece. You never know when you do a drawing, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. I ended up submitting 15 fireworks drawings, but for the final piece, they edited it down to 12. Fine by me.

The rejects:

Now that I’ve got that piece under my belt. I guess it’s time for me to start working up some more Shouts ideas. I actually submitted another idea for Father’s Day, but once again I submitted it too late and Emma said she already had Father’s Day stuff booked up. I may try to resubmit it again for next year.

I wish I had more time to draw each day. Ideally I would love to split my time each day by 1. writing jokes for a while, 2. drawing a cartoon for my weekly batch, 3. drawing a Daily cartoon, and 4. working on a Daily Shouts piece a little every day. If someday I retire, and magazines still exist, that would be my fantasy of how I would spend my days.

Until then…

Probably the thing that I’m most excited about right now in my cartooning is a Daily Shouts piece I have coming out soon with The New Yorker. I can’t say much about it because it hasn’t come out yet, but I’m pretty sure it will probably come out on July 3. This will be my first Daily Shouts piece, so I’m very excited about it. Keep your eyes peeled!

Otherwise things have been pretty quiet for me with The New Yorker. I’m still drawing cartoons every day and submitting my batches, but The New Yorker has a hiatus on cartoon submissions for the next two weeks. It’s a bummer because that’s two weeks of no potential sales, but on the plus side, it will allow me to build up a backlog of cartoons to pull from in future batches.

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm working at the art summer camp for 7 to 13 year-olds this summer. 

It’s been good so far, but this job sure takes a lot out of me. I don’t know why this gig is so much more draining than my usual high school art teacher gig during the regular school year. Is it because the kids are younger and more high energy? Is it because the weather is hotter? 

One of my biggest hits with the kids has been this bulletin board outside of my classroom. Every week I cover it in a big, fresh, blank white sheet of paper, hang a few brush pens from it, then post a new drawing prompt. The kids go crazy for it. There’s pretty much a constant stream of kids huddled around the bulletin board drawing things on it. 

It’s amazing how such a small act on my part, designating a space and permission and a suggestion to draw something, leads to so much creative activity. This is one of my favorite things about teaching, creating a situation and then stepping back and seeing how people run with it.

The camp has a large format printer so I took some of my favorite of the kids’ drawings and blew them up humongous on the printer, like 4 to 8 feet, and hung them up outside my classroom. 

There’s something so amazing about taking a tiny little doodle and blowing it up gigantic. It’s epic.

I teach two classes. One is called Comical Comics where we focus on telling jokes in comics. The other is called Graphic Novelties where we focus on telling stories with comics. Just a week and a half left and then we’ll have a big showcase where we will show off zine collections of each of my students’ comics.

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I connected with the lady who teaches the newspaper class and convinced her to do a caption contest. She picked out a drawing one of my students did and published it in the camp newspaper. It’s a dog holding a leash in its mouth and a human angrily saying something to the dog. 

Any of the campers could submit caption ideas. The newspaper class narrowed the submissions down to the top seven and then my comics classes voted on the winner: “No. The fire-hydrants are traumatized enough.” Not bad!

The second and third place runners up were decent too.

2nd place: “Walking is a privilege.” I like this one because it seemed like something a parent might say to a kid when they’re whining or begging for something.

3rd place: “I told you, just because you can turn into a dog doesn’t mean I’ll walk you, skinwalker.” I like this one because it came at it from a totally unexpected direction. No one else submitted anything similar. A very unique and original take on the cartoon.

In my class we learned about how to write good captions. We did an exercise where I printed out some New Yorker cartoons without the captions. The students then passed them around, each taking a turn coming up with captions for each drawing. Some were pretty good!

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School is over! But I start my art summer camp job today. 

Thursday was my last day at my high school job, so I had last Friday off, and I was joking to myself that I had a one day summer break. And you know what I did with about six hours of it? Yardwork. My yard was a jungle, and it no longer is. This is what grownups do with their “free” time. 

Last week I celebrated six years of sobriety. 

I started drawing comics when I first was trying to get sober. It was weird because I was drawing autobiographical comics about my life, but I almost never talked about the drinking or the trying-to-quit-drinking going on in my life. I was ashamed and embarrassed and afraid. 

While I wouldn’t say it was a direct correlation, I do think that finally getting sober and staying sober and learning a lot about cleaning up my emotional and mental and spiritual chaos opened up my life in ways that allowed me, with a clear head and heart, to make the decision to fully dive in and try my hand at this gag cartooning thing and set my sights on such a seemingly impossible goal as getting my cartoons in The New Yorker. I got sober, I found something I loved, I buckled down and did it, and I achieved that goal and more. To be honest, if I hadn’t figured this out, if I had just kept drinking, I don’t think I would be around today to be making cartoons. It was getting that bleak. 

I am so incredibly grateful to be sober. I have a program and a community that help me continue to work my recovery and keep myself in check, which allows me to be a decent parent and husband and teacher and cartoonist.

I recently applied to two zine/comic fests I’ve never been to before. Both of them are fairly new. One is called Book//Zine in Atlanta and the other is called Pretty Good Fest in Chicago.

I have yet to hear back if I got accepted to either, but I’m trying to do more of these kinds of festivals. Looked at solely through a financial lens, they are not worth it, I pretty much always spend more than I make, but looked at for the sake of meeting other creative people, getting out of my routine and seeing what other people are up to, visiting other cities, finding new sources of inspiration and excitement, these kind of events are priceless. I always leave feeling so great and having had a blast. Some people take vacation to Disney World or the beach; I’d rather take mine to a comic or zine festival. 

I was excited this past month to start resubmitting to The Times Luxury again. The Times of London’s Luxury section runs a gag cartoon once a week. I guess they had bought a backlog of enough cartoons to last them a while so they had about a six month hiatus on buying cartoons. I love The Times Luxury not only because they have bought a pretty good number of my cartoons, but they also sometimes buy ones that can be a bit darker or more edgy. For example:

They pay pretty well too. They are the third highest paying of the dozen or so magazines I regularly submit to. I realized when I was tallying up my cartoon income from last year for my taxes that I made more money from British magazines than from US magazines. The Times Luxury, Private Eye, and The Oldie buy a pretty good amount of my stuff, but also they all pay decently. I don’t know what it is about my humor that appeals to the Brits. Maybe I should watch more British comedies to try to figure it out.

I subscribe to Michael Maslin’s Inkspill Substack @michaelmaslinsinkspill and he always posts such interesting and insightful things about cartoons and the history of cartoons. In April he wrote about how over the course of his career he has sold seven different cartoons to The New Yorker with the same exact caption: “It’s for you,” and all with the same set up: someone opening a door and the thing at the door humorously connects to the other character in the room. I find this pretty incredible. We talk a lot about recurring tropes in gag cartoons, but those are more about the subject: a Grim Reaper, a desert island, a therapist, but you don’t hear as much about recurring captions. In fact, I would think that in many cases the idea of repeating a caption would even be frowned upon. But why? The same line in different contexts can take on different meanings getting at different jokes from different angles. In Maslin’s case I think it’s an example of his mastery of the form, that he can return to it again and again, each time breathing new life into it. 

I found this so interesting that I decided to use it as an assignment in my Comics class. I had my students create their own gag cartoons using Maslin’s same set up and caption. A few of them had some pretty good results: an army guy with a bomb at the door, a mailman with another mailman at the door handing him a letter, a vampire with a head of garlic and a wooden steak flying at him through the door.

To wrap things up here are a few toons I had published last month. Thanks everybody!

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The drunker I get

the more these guys

rock.

Today is actually my six year sober anniversary. Though, I can still recall the rocking getting better the more I drank. That is, until it got worse again.

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I recently showed my Comics class the 2015 documentary about New Yorker cartoons, Very Semi-Serious. This was probably the third or fourth time I’ve watched it. There are a lot of insights and inspiration to be gleaned from it, so I decided to summarize the bits that spoke to me.

The Philosophy of New Yorker Cartoons

You know a New Yorker cartoon when you see one, but how exactly do you pin down what makes a New Yorker cartoon a New Yorker cartoon? In the film, Bob Mankoff, who at the time was the cartoon editor, said, “Cartoons either make the strange familiar or the familiar strange.” David Remnick, the New Yorker's chief editor said, in the earliest days of the magazine, the cartoons were there  to “provide delight.” Mankoff, using James Thurber’s “Touché” cartoon as an example, said New Yorker cartoons are “immediate, visual, and comic.”

Cartoons Are About the Way Things Feel

Mankoff, describing how Thurber‘s cartoons weren’t drawn “technically right,” said that they’ve had such impact despite that because they were “emotionally right.” I’ve heard cartoonist Zoe Si say something similar, that what she’s trying to do is get at how we’re all feeling in certain societal moments. 

Describing the mindset it takes to be a cartoonist, Mankoff said, “Being funny is being awake. It’s like living at two different levels at once. You’re in the world and you’re out of it and looking at it. You’re having an out of body or an out of mind experience where you’re looking at your own mind.” I find this is true. As a cartoonist I feel like I am both an observer and a commenter on the world that I am simultaneously living in. David Remnick described Mankoff’s work as the cartoon editor as “somewhere between being a coal miner and a brain surgeon.” I like that description for being a cartoonist as well. There is much rigorous labor involved day after day, but it also requires an acute attention to the world we’re drawing about. I often wish that I could cultivate that skill even more, consistently searching out the humor in day-to-day moments.

Drawing Technique 

One scene showed Mort Gerberg applying gray wash to a cartoon. He was so quick and loose, letting it puddle and flow where it may. I almost exclusively draw digitally these days, but when I saw that I thought, “I want to be able to do ink washes like that.” A big part of why I work digitally is because of time. I can bring my iPad with me everywhere I go and whip it out and start drawing at a moment's notice. Setting up paper and ink and gray wash materials is not as easy to do on the go or in a time crunch. With a full-time job as a teacher, my own kids at home, and trying to be a cartoonist on top of that, time is my most elusive resource.

Mort Gerberg’s first cartoon he sold to the New Yorker was two women looking up at the massively high ceilings of a cathedral, one of them saying, “I’ve always been partial to high ceilings.” In the film, he held the actual, physical drawing up and it was big! It looked to be about 18” x 24.” It also ran as a full page in the magazine. Quite a debut! I feel like my practice as a cartoonist simply doesn’t allow me to do a drawing like that. What I do is so much about quantity, cranking out as many cartoons as quickly as I can in order to submit a batch of 10 every week. I wish I had the time to do such large and beautiful and intricate drawings like Gerberg’s. Not that I’m necessarily even capable, but it’d be nice to try.

The documentary started off showing Bob Mankoff stippling one of his cartoons. I liked the way he talked about where his drawing style came from, essentially saying that it was partly innate, an outgrowth of his personality, and also joking that it was partly a way of covering for his self-perceived drawing inadequacies. I could relate. I just draw the way I draw. I never set out to draw this way. But also, sometimes my “style” is simply my inability to draw any better. At least that’s the way it feels.

Mankoff said that for him drawing is a meditative act and that the act of drawing leads to ideas. That approach has never really worked for me. I come up with my ideas first, then I sit down to draw them. I think that’s the way most cartoonists work, though there are some that do it the other way around, just doodling and drawing without knowing where it’s going and letting the idea emerge from the drawing. Once again I think this has to do with time constraints. I can’t imagine just doodling without being assured that I’m headed toward something tangible. Maybe if I had more time on my hands I would have more freedom to play like that.

The Real vs The Weird

Many different cartoonists were interviewed and essentially answered the classic question, “Where do your ideas come from?“ Different cartoonists had different answers, all of which provide insight to me into possible ways to approach cartoon brainstorming. 

Bruce Eric Kaplan said he treats his cartoons like journals, that his cartoons are how he processes what’s happening to him, what he’s thinking about, what’s bothering him, etc. I can certainly relate to that. Many of my cartoons, though not directly autobiographical, spring from my life. When I was in Amy Kurzweil’s class, this was actually an approach she used a lot for idea generation, doing a few minutes of free writing on things from our lives: things we were looking forward to or dreading or excited or upset or annoyed by in our lives. I found it generated a lot of good ideas. It’s not my usual process, but I could see where journaling regularly could be a good source for mining cartoon ideas.

Other cartoonists talked about drawing from everyday life. George Booth said that reality is funnier than something you could make up. Victoria Roberts draws the same couple in the same living room again and again exploring relationship dynamics.

But then of course many cartoonists don’t have their feet so planted in reality. Bob Mankoff said that humor isn’t about what’s real or true, it’s just based on a “grain of truth.” Some cartoonists can really get kind of weird and out there. A good example is Farley Katz who said that, because the New Yorker cartoon format has been around so long he’s trying to “make it a little weirder, take it somewhere it hasn’t gone yet.” Zach Kanin said that, while he does submit things he thinks are typical of what The New Yorker is looking for, he also intentionally submits things that stray outside of those expected tropes and approaches. This is something I’d like to try to do more, to get a little weirder in my cartoons.

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This cartoon ran in the Wall Street Journal recently. I remember this idea being inspired by a Liza Donnelly cartoon I saw in her book with her husband, Michael Maslin, Cartoon Marriage.

This was hers…

I liked the idea of having a funny sounding food in the caption, and the idea of it being a semi-catastrophe. 

I sometimes feel wary about my cartoons coming across as too similar to cartoons that already exist, especially if my idea sprang from seeing someone else’s cartoon. It’s a fine line between copying someone, versus being inspired by them or taking on a similar subject matter or joke structure. In the end I felt this one was different enough to justify it standing on its own. 

Recently I was reading James Thurber‘s cartoon collection, Men, Women, and Dogs…

And I came across this cartoon:

And I thought, “Hey, that reminds me of a Liza Donnelly cartoon I saw recently. This one:

Now, I don’t know for certain that Liza‘s cartoon was inspired by Thurber’s, but I do know that she is a big Thurber enthusiast, so it stands to reason… I thought, “If a great cartoonist like Liza is clearly inspired by giants like Thurber, I guess it's OK for me to be inspired by her!”

I actually briefly got to chat with Liza and Michael when I was in NYC last year for the New Yorker 100th anniversary. I couldn’t believe it. I basically just gushed to them about how great they both are. 2 of the best for sure.

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Thanks to Simon Rich‘s words of wisdom when I saw him speak at Tulane last month I kept to a pretty consistent drawing routine the past few weeks. His advice was to just put in the time, commit to a certain number of hours per week and just do it. You may produce a little, a lot, terrible stuff, or great stuff. What matters is just putting in the time. I committed to drawing 30 minutes a day and so far I’ve held myself to it and then some. 

Last year around this time I had the pleasure of sitting down face-to-face with New Yorker cartoon editor, Emma Allen. Reflecting back on her advice, I’d say I’ve followed up fairly well. I gathered from talking to her that selling a Daily Cartoon has better odds than selling one to the magazine, and I have sold a couple Dailies this past year. She also suggested I try Daily Shouts, the longer form comic pieces that come out online and in the Humor newsletter. I submitted 2 rough ideas and she took one! I really should try to come up with more of those. She also told me that every now and then I could send her some of my favorite rejected cartoons and ask for her feedback on them, kind of an email version of our face-to-face meet up. I’ve taken her up on that twice and every kernel of feedback has been insightful.

My school year teaching Art and Comics to high school students is winding down. It’s been a solid year, but I’m also pretty darnn tired and looking forward to the end. I shouldn’t really say the end though, more like a change of scenery, because four days after my job at the high school ends, I start up my summer job working at an arts summer camp for kids. It’s a totally different vibe, different kids, different environment, and I get to exclusively teach comics, so it’s pretty fun. It’s also nice that my kids attend the camp and my wife also works there too, so it’s a family affair.

This cartoon was the Daily Cartoon for the New Yorker on Earth Day. Someone get that planet to rehab!

I submitted these two alternate versions of this cartoon to the New Yorker as a Daily Cartoon for Record Store Day, but they didn’t bite. I posted them both on Instagram and they went semi-viral - at least viral for me. 1000 likes and 50,000 views each is a lot more than most of my cartoons get.

I was thinking how back in the 90s when I used to make photocopied zines and trade them through the mail, I would be stoked if I made a run of like 25 of them and got them sent out to 25 people across the country. Now there are thousands of people seeing my stuff? It’s unfathomable.

The Aboveground Zine Library has been around in New Orleans for, I don’t know, like 15 or 20 years? It comes and it goes. It’ll find a home for a while, then it will go into storage for a while. Well, it’s back, and Robb, the guy who runs it, asked me to draw something up for it. Looking forward to maybe getting some stickers or a T-shirt with this on it.

This cartoon ran around Easter in the Funny Times. I got a very encouraging comment from a favorite cartoonist, Bob Eckstein, saying that he thought it was great and it’s the kind of cartoon that, when you see it you wish you had thought of it yourself. Is there any higher compliment?

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This cartoon ran last week as the Daily Cartoon for the New Yorker on Earth Day. To be honest, I was kind of surprised when I got the email that it sold. I was frustrated pretty much the whole time I was drawing it. Looking at it now, I guess it’s perfectly fine, but it felt like a struggle: the proportions, the shading. I was sitting on my couch drawing it thinking, “This drawing sucks.” It was partly because I also thought the joke sucked. I thought to myself, “Is this just totally hack?” It’s kind of an obvious joke. You could use it in a variety of situations, any character who is not doing well in life, or bummed about something, buying a ton of booze or being an alcoholic. It felt too obvious. But hey, it sold, so shows what I know.

I guess I did still submit it, so some part of me thought there was some shred of something redeemable in it. I’ve come to not trust my judgment much at all. Cartoons I love don't sell, and ones I doubt do. I just feel like I have to throw everything out there and see what sticks because half the time I don’t even know.

This actually wasn’t the first iteration of this cartoon. This was actually my original idea:

Same image, but instead of the clerk speaking, the Earth is speaking, explaining/justifying why he’s buying this stuff. I think this caption actually is a little more hack and obvious than the one that sold. It’s a little “see say” as cartoonist Jason Chatfield says. It’s like the caption is saying what’s already in the image, so it’s redundant.

Putting them side-by-side I realized that they basically are before and after moments in a conversation. The Earth walked up with all the booze, the clerk eyed it then teased, “Someone’s having a party.” Then the Earth, feeling the need to explain his somewhat embarrassing purchases explained it’s for, “Earth Day.” 

It got me thinking that I could apply this to all my cartoons. Draw out the original idea and caption, but then think, what would have been said before? What would be said after? Perhaps those might work better and leave more to the imagination of the viewer. 

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