Did you know about this story? I sure didn’t.

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Well, that lends a lot more richness to the familiar nickname, right? I thought so, too.

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The growing archive of whisperbubble stories is always here if you’d like to go back and revisit them.

Enjoy the last month of summer, and see you in the first week of September!

What if Manhattanites had their own personal scaffolding in addition to that which is constantly foisted upon every pedestrian?

*****

So… fighting is not necessarily against the law, but cockfighting is, right? We’re calling out you roosters by name! By that name! In addition to being just plain fun to say, I was amused by this idea of adding cock- in front of a word to see how this prefix changed it. I thought I had to set up this ridiculous gag by including the fact that he was a fighter in the beginning of the caption, otherwise people might not get it. Did I need to do that? Would it work without it? Who knows. Is the world better off because this didn’t get printed in a literary magazine? Yes, definitely. Plus, the cop looks weird and I put my signature into a police shield logo.

*****

Too accurate?

*****

This is from way back in the former times–remember those?–when there was a guy running for president who apparently just told it like it is! And who said all those things people were thinking but didn’t say! But there’s a very good reason why you don’t just say every stupid and gross thing that comes into your head, especially if you aspire to be a leader. This was supposed to be about that, but I’m not sure it works, logically. It should probably be more like “he says all the things I am thinking when I’m drunk.” It makes it sound like this guy’s got a drinking problem and not a thinking problem. But I liked the snappiness of the caption and I didn’t think too much about it, maybe because I was drunk.

*****

This idea was bad from the start, but it was cemented when the only name I could come up with was Richard Nixon, inexplicably.

*****

This was my answer to the classic philosophical question: what if the camera added more than ten pounds?

*****

Thanks for indulging me once again! Enjoy your summer. whisperbubble will return to its regular format next month.

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This month’s story is based on a nugget from “The White Noise Boom” episode of Decoder Ring, a podcast in which Willa Paskin examines the origins and meanings of various cultural habits. It’s long been one of my favorites, and if you’re looking for a podcast that’s consistently interesting in covering a broad range of “Oh-I’m-glad-you-asked-that!” topics, you’ll find a lot to listen to. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading! If you liked this story, the White Noise Boom episode of Decoder Ring goes into a lot more depth about our current moment with sleep apps.

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Until next time. Be well!

News flash: I’m finishing a book! It hasn’t been officially announced yet by the publisher so I won’t give away any details, but it will be available in March of next year. Here is a teaser collage from it:

This is relevant because I am in the throes of my last looming deadline, with very little time to spare, and so there is no “new” whisperbubble this month. But I will leave you with something nonetheless.

Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to be included in one of the Flight anthologies, the comics collections curated by bestselling graphic novelist Kazu Kibuishi (who authored the Amulet series). He published a kind of experimental story-within-a-story of mine titled B.L.T.

This is one of the stories that didn’t make it into that volume. I had been thinking of the humorous possibilities of the old philosophical thought experiment “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" And this silly-but-tender short story is one of the things that came out of that.

These are the rough sketches for the story—which I did with good old markers on paper!—because it was just before I started drawing on a tablet.

I know, I know.

I’ll be back next month with a new installment of whisperbubble and have some really fun things lined up for the rest of the year.

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Cuba is in the news these days, but that’s not why I chose this story for this month’s edition. Annie Rauwerda posted an item about it awhile ago on her fantastic Depths of Wikipedia Instagram page, which is a truly unique account: funny, fascinating, bizarre. She is diving deep into the weeds of Wikipedia and pulling up all kinds of strange and amusing threads, and if you like the kinds of stories I am posting here you will definitely want to follow her.

Anyway, my curiosity was piqued and I read about this story further on Wikipedia and Vice and other sources. It’s a good one, so enjoy.

If you liked this story, there is a lot of good reading out there about it and some of it will make your jaw drop - the perfect thing to do if you are sitting in front of a bowl of cookies n’ cream.

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Until next time!

I can’t find any information about whether any of those letters found recipients or not, but it’s fun to imagine disembarking from a ship and reading a note someone had left you in a tree months ago.

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If you liked this, please buy or request The Aviator and the Showman from your local bookseller. Amelia’s mysterious disappearance, it turns out, is the least interesting thing about her story, and I’ve gained a new appreciation for her after reading the book. Thank you, Laurie, for this great piece of work.

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Thanks for reading! I’ve got some great things already lined up for this year so if you’re not already a subscriber, don’t miss out!

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And, the archive of whisperbubble stories is always here if you’d like to go back and revisit them.

You might know that I’ve been a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, with close to 400 cartoons published. You all know a good New Yorker cartoon when you see it, mine or anybody else’s. Clever! Witty! Nuanced! Observant! Hits the nail on the head! Works on multiple levels!

I’ve also had a lot of them rejected. Way more. Thousands. Maybe 5,000! The cartoons that don’t make the pages of the New Yorker aren’t just ones that aren’t clever or nuanced, sometimes they’re the opposite of those things: dumb, obvious, in poor taste. But some are still amusing in their own way. Maybe. Sometimes a groan is just as good as a laugh.

Here, then is a small collection of ideas that the editors at the New Yorker rejected, for obvious reasons, but still worth a peek. Enjoy.

When I originally submitted the above idea, the former cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, said it was one of the dumbest ideas he had ever seen. I didn’t really have a counterargument.

This one is probably off the charts in the dumb category as well! But when the FitBit came out, it occurred to me that something like this would be pretty useful, maybe for the elderly? I mean these devices are meant to count something, and if not steps…?

Too “on the nose,” as they say?

The story behind this is that in (former editor) Mankoff’s book, he had this little gag about how if you want to come up with a cartoon idea, just take a drawing and turn it sideways, and it automatically becomes something else. You rotate the chair, and it becomes “budget recliner.”

So I actually turned a bunch of sketches I was working on upside down, just to see. And when I turned this magic carpet rider upside down I said to myself “a-ha!” But, yeah, it’s pretty idiotic.

Sometimes you know they’re never going to publish it but you have to send it in anyway.

For the longest time, I have thought it would be hilarious if those giant head statues on Easter Island weren’t symbolic monuments of some kind but were accurate likenesses of the inhabitants of the island. I’ve tried about 20 variations on this same idea. Many of them involve the Easter Island guy being clueless about his giant rock-shaped head. For example, he gets his 23 And Me results back and is like “huh! I have ancestors from Easter Island! Who knew?” It’s possible the magazine didn’t want to support giant-rock-head shaming, but it’s more likely that it’s just a dumb concept.

Who can deny that some creature might exist today because there was some freaky who-cares-it’s-the-end-of-the-world interspecies action going on on Noah’s Ark?

Thanks for indulging me! And Happy Holidays. whisperbubble will return to its regular format next month.

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Further reading about these Parkinson’s-sniffing dogs here.

The original pigeon story is here. The joke about the pigeons was consciously or unconsciously influenced by my friend Matthew Diffee.

Because of this we could have self-cleaning cars? More on this phenonemon here.

Here is a link to this Orca story.

Vulture study findings published here.

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(btw, you can read this in the Substack app instead of your email platform.)

Crazy, right?

You can browse through the pages of the Illuminated Quadruple Constellation online at the Stanford Digital Repository, where they have a copy that’s been scanned. That’s where I got the screenshots.

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I read Kelly Clancy’s book Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World this summer and I was fully absorbed by it. It’s a fast-moving, engaging and wide-ranging exploration of game theory that weaves a path through chess, Go, and SimCity, but also eBay, military strategy, biological evolution (a lot of it is admittedly over my head), urban planning, economics, and yes, AI. There are a lot of ideas in this book. I have chosen to illustrate only a single chapter, Chapter Three: Dice Playing God.

In order to keep this to a reasonable length (there are nine panels, a little bit longer than usual) I’ve had to omit a wealth of worthy details and greatly oversimplify, hopefully without doing damage to her material. If you’re curious I’d urge you to read Playing With Reality for yourself, all the way through.

And let me know what you think of this. Enjoy!

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And, the (admittedly small) archive of whisperbubble stories is always here if you’d like to go back and revisit them.

Until next time!

Thanks for reading! If you’re not yet a subscriber, click the button below.

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And, the (admittedly small) archive of whisperbubble stories is always here if you’d like to go back and revisit them.

Until next time!

(btw, you can always read this in the Substack app instead of your email platform.)

Enjoy!

As Dubbins tells it, each brother thinks that he is the real After Dark Bandit mastermind, and so we may not have heard the end of this story quite yet.

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See you next time!

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This business of naming things reminded me of what has been happening with Spotify, of all things. But that will be for next time.

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