Friday 16th October, 2026
New York, NY

I was at my desk this afternoon when Emily swung around in her chair and said, “Oh my God...”

One of two things: it’s either a very cute frenchie video on Instagram Reels, or Trump did something.

“What is it?” I asked. “She’s been fired already.”

I didn’t need to ask who. I did need to check my wallet.

I’d lost a bet. When Katie Zacharia was named White House press secretary last week, I gave her 11 days. (A full Scaramucci.) My friend Mike said 21, which in hindsight was adorable.

We were both wrong.

She lasted five days. In that time, she gave one briefing. It ran about 14 minutes. (It felt like 57) She took three questions. Somewhere in there, a reporter asked how she’d balance the job with raising four kids, and she said this, out loud, from the podium of the White House briefing room:

“So my president, excuse me, my husband.” Then she added, “That’s a good one.”

It was. It really was.

There’s a phrase every official reaches for on the way out the door. Politicians use it. CEOs use it. Her own predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, more or less used it in August. You’ve heard it a thousand times:

So what if, in her farewell address, she did it again?

“I’ve decided to step down to spend more time with my President, err, husb—family.”

I scribbled it on the back of a yellow legal pad with a crappy old pen and sent it to The New Yorker.

Within minutes, they wrote back: we’d like to buy this.

Within minutes! That never happens. I’ve had cartoons sit in that inbox longer than she sat in that job.

So I raced into the studio and drew it up properly, dip pen and ink, by hand, at the drawing board, and turned it around in under 2 hours, which I’m fairly sure is a personal record. No time to fiddle too much. No time to redraw the nose eleven times. You have to send it before the news cycle eats it. (The news cycle ate her in five days. It would have eaten me in four hours.)

I have a rule about political cartoons: make fun of what they do, not what they are. ( I stole that from the writers’ room at the Chris Rock show.)

What she did, in fairness, was turn herself into a giant Barbie who spent more time on her hair than on the briefing book. Or on any book, really.

She was unqualified for the job. She was arguably unqualified for any job. For years she called herself a lawyer: on LinkedIn, on Fox News, in the President’s own announcement of her hire. Reporters went looking for the bar exam she’d passed and couldn’t find one. When they asked her where, she said it was “When I moved to China.” Which is the legal equivalent of “she goes to a different school.”

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October 11, 2016
New York, NY

Tired of waiting for things to magically happen for us in our comedy careers, Tristan and I phoned a bunch of clubs in the Midwest and booked a week of road gigs for October.
A bunch of them said yes.

When I broke the news to Sophie that she wouldn’t have me around for a week she was really upset.

And so began her private 7-day pizza and Chardonnay festival.

On The Road

October 12, 2016
New York, NY

First thing Monday morning, we punched “Indianapolis” into Google maps and hit the road. The journey was longer than we’d anticipated… 12.5 hours to be precise.

We whizzed past thousands of giant haulers and fuel trucks while listening to old O&A episodes from YouTube. The one where they dissect Joe Piscopo’s comedy special “Club Piscopo” was a particular highlight.

As we hurtled West into the sun, on the various pot-holed highways between New York and Indiana, we kept in touch with the booker for our first spot for the week: The Comedy Caravan. Our ETA was 11pm, and the show started at 10:30 pm, but he said we’d be fine- he’d just put us up last.

As we finally pulled into Indianapolis right on the dot of 11pm. We hurled our stiff, crumpled bodies into the bar to find they’d just decided to cancel the gig.

Off to a flying start.

We decided to have a whiskey and check out the local Indianapolis bowling scene before checking into our swanky 5-star hotel1 for some rest and recuperation.

We were the only people in the bowling alley and had to keep watching each others’ backs when we went for our shot to ensure we weren’t stabbed.
Tristan won.

We retired to our lofty lodgings, excited to get a good night’s rest.
Nothing but the very best for the ole’ Half-Ass Comedy Tour boys.

The following is an actual Yelp review we found for our motel:

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October 13, 2016
Indianapolis, IN

We were awoken at 8am by a giant black gentleman banging on our window telling us he needed the chairs in our room because he aimed to replace them with new ones. He didn’t really explain why, or why indeed he had to do this at 9am while we were in the room sleeping, but we weren’t keen to argue with him.

We dragged our groggy lumps of flab to one of the greatest dining experiences available to the locals. (No, not Outback Steakhouse, which… by the way, go fuck yourself America.)
No, we journeyed across the highway exit… to Cracker Barrel.

By the end of this trip, I suspect the car suspension will give out as a result of our new-found Midwestern girth.

After breakfast, we stopped by an old abandoned local mall that had “self-defense” scrawled on one window, and “Glock Warehouse” on the one next door. We wandered into the building to find this little hidden gem.

It is true what they say. Indianapolis really is the home of dreams.

We performed at Crackers Comedy Club that night. It was a good show. I learned a lot about Trump and the local politics while waiting with the other comics to go on. One of them said he was going to ‘take us back to Jesus days.’ Another, a young comic in a hoodie said, “He’s the worst. He’s gonna win, too.”

A couple of local cartoonists -Jeff Knurek (The Jumble guy!) and Bob East- came out to see us. We had a few drinks with them after the show and returned to our extravagant lodgings.

October 14, 2016
Louisville, KY

We arose the next morning and jumped onto the road and hurtled forth to the bustling metropolis of Louisville, Kentucky.

We arrived at our destination just in time to check-in. Tonight we would be performing at the Laughing Derby Comedy Club. It was at the back of a parking lot and had a big sign painted on the front.

A few of the locals and other comedians took us back out through the parking lot (There was a Trump Pence 2016 sign on nearly every bumper in the parking lot.) to hit the town for a few drinks and local nightmare comedy stories. One of the people we were with was banned from the bar for punching someone last week, so she couldn’t come in.

They waited outside, which felt bad. So, we left, snapped up some street-jerky, and hopped over to the karaoke bar next door. I sang real good. Everybody loved it.

October 15, 2016
St Louis, MO

On a whim, we decided to head West to St Louis, Missouri. We found a show that ran on a Thursday night and showed up with one of Tristan’s old pals.

St Louis is a pretty cool city! We drove in and looked at the big arch. We got a $37 deal on a great hotel room through Kayak and had our first good shower of the trip. Separately.

When we got to the show, we discovered the audio system made all the comedians sound like they were yelling underwater and we could only make up vague, monotone vowel sounds. Perfect for jokes.

Some of the other comics were making Trump jokes but nobody could hear them. The ones that did come through the speaker got a titter, but people kind of felt ‘on edge’.

Obviously, with the combination of my Australian accent and out-of-town material, I did real good.

October 16, 2016
Muncie, IN

This morning, Tristan took us along for a nice St Louis breakfast of BBQ smoked ribs and burnt ends at Bogart’s Smokehouse. My belt snapped.

We put a hitch in our giddy-ups and hit the road to Muncie, Indiana…

We arrived in town to find the venue was an empty basement bar. We performed for a small handful of folks before the headliner got up and just played some Metalica songs on a cassette tape player and sang over it for a bit. #Comedyyyyy

We had a few drinks at the local bar called “Brothers” which, incidentally, was full of college bro’s. I tried to take a trick shot at the pool table and crushed my iPhone with the enormous weight of my newly bloated rear end.

We trundled on back to the local waffle house for a 4am snack before bed. We were served by one of the angriest waitresses in all of Indiana called Heather. Pretty sure she spat in our waffles.

October 17, 2016
Russellville, IN

Our old 1970s motel phone rang at 12pm to jolt us awake before the motel owner banged on our door telling us to skedaddle.

We piled into our wheels and rattled past some hitch-hikers West towards Russellville, Indiana… a remote town of 300 people we’d be performing in tonight. This is the town center:

The show was epic. The whole town came out on their four-wheeler motorbikes and red hats, and we performed to a full smoke-filled house of big, generous laughers.

The whole venue was just a giant shed that three guys in the town pooled together and purchased for a song, installed a stage and 3 makeshift bars, and used it for shows.

The headliner, who had puppets, props, and a ukelele, went for 3 hours. The Cubs game was playing at one of the makeshift bars (they’re in Western Indiana, so pretty much Illinois) and when they won the game —meaning they’d be in the world series— the whole place exploded with roars of happiness. The owner shouted everyone at the venue a round of drinks.
(The Cubs went on to win the World Series for the first time in 108 years.)

I tracked down Tristan in one of the rooms, playing (and losing) a game of pool to a young man in a wheelchair. We piled into the car in search of a place to sleep. We were not successful.

October 18, 2016
Columbus, OH

I had burgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today. I’m really getting used to this Midwestern food. You get 27 days worth of grub for 0.13c

The last stop for the tour was a couple of guest spots at the Funnybone in Columbus, Ohio. This may have been the only blue bubble (in a red state) that we played to the entire tour.

The room of about 200 people was largely made up of super-liberal college students and a smattering of grey nomads.

Before Tristan could even get his first words out he was attacked by an aggressive woman in the front row for being an insensitive sexist bigot. It really helped get the set off to a great start.

This is literally word-for-word how it went down the second he stepped on stage:

Tristan loves it when people do that.

Exhausted, we piled into the car and headed back East to New York, through thousands of driveways with Trump/Pence signs in them, then Trump billboards all along the highways.

The sinking feeling in our gut meant we were skeptical of the polls but were holding out hope all the same. From what I gleaned, these people seemed so sick of being piled and talked down to by the Coastal “elites” and there was a ‘change a-comin.’

Turns out, they weren’t wrong.

Follow my Facebook page for upcoming gigs.

1

This is the worst place I’ve ever breathed air in, in my life. Ever.

PAID SUBSCRIBER CONTENT:

Some of you know I’m the cartoon editor at The Metropolitan Review, one of the great young literary magazines in the country. (I mostly argue about page three.) The real magic comes from , and the rest of the team.

On Thursday 15th October, we’re throwing our big fall bash: The Metropolitan Review Reading Series, Vol. 5, from 8-11pm at The Bench, 49 Elizabeth St. You’ll hear from , , , , , and , and then you get to party deep into the night. Maybe the morning.

We’ve already sold a bunch of tickets, but there are still a few left. $10 suggested donation; pay what you want. Sounds like a decent deal? Grab your ticket here.

Anyway. I wrote this back in May.

Then I rewrote it in July.
Then again in September. Eventually I figured I just have to hit publish.

Here ‘tis.

Hurley’s Bar, Midtown NYC
A Blurry Thursday in May 2026

One foggy Thursday, I wedged myself into Hurley’s -an old Midtown bar that smells like spilt whiskey and the ambition of men who died before I was born -to celebrate the launch of The Metropolitan Review’s first print issue.

We planned for a crowd. What showed up was a biblical flood.

You could measure the night's success by how impossible it was to move. Two hundred bodies crammed into a room that would’ve been cosy with sixty, all of us packed in like straphangers, except the train never came and nobody wanted it to.

The drinks came like a flooded water main. You couldn’t move three feet without baptising a stranger in gin. I personally anointed a New York Times reporter (sorry, ), a Booker Prize nominee, and the sleeve of Jay McInerney himself, who looked like he’d stepped fully formed out of a first edition of his own novel and was now, regrettably, slightly damp.

I apologised. He said something gracious. I have no idea what, because the room was louder than a tarmac.

For one night, we all got to live inside the literary world we’d been fantasising about for years -the one that exists in old documentaries and biopics (and nowhere else, really.)

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

The old guard was there too, mind you. But the thing that got me, somewhere around drink two, was that they’d come to us. Into a too-tiny upstairs bar with no guest list and no velvet rope, where the only way to reach the great man was to spill a drink on him. Nobody in that room was being granted an audience. We’d simply stopped waiting for one.

That’s the bit nobody tells you about the act of tearing down the gate -the people who used to guard them still turn up. They just have to queue at the same bar as everyone else now. No secret handshake at the door. No bullshit Ivy League password. No agent pedigree check. The prestige came to the party; the party didn’t have to go begging for the prestige.

That realisation was intoxicating. (Or that was the scotch.) By that point, the two had formed a working partnership.

Look to the edges of any good New York literary party, and you’ll find the bones of it, sulking in a booth. Past the grinning faces and the clinking glasses, writers had gathered in the classic dark leather booths, lit from above by bulbs the wattage of a dying firefly. It looked like a still from a 1970s noir, the dialogue costumed to match. They were trading war stories from the front lines of publishing, (and the front lines, I regret to report, is a fucking mess.)

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Hello again, friend!

We did it. Scott Dooley and I birthed a book!

You’re Not a Real Parent Until... is out today. It’s pub day! (Publication day, for those of you not in the biz. For those of you in the biz, my condolences.)

Earlier today, Scott and I went live here on Substack for our official virtual launch. Thank you to everyone who tuned in live and shared your parenting experiences! (Watch the full replay above.)

First, the winners... We promised to give away one free copy of the book. Then, mid-show, without checking with Scott, I gave away two more.
Congratulations to: , Rhonda, and

If that’s you, reply to this email with your postal address (or a PO box, whatever you’re comfortable sharing with two strange men who draw children wearing underwear on their heads), and we’ll get your copy in the mail.

Everyone else: you can buy it right now at yourenotareal.com!

The experiment.

Normally, when you put a book out, you do press. Podcasts, TV, radio, guest articles, reviews.

We’ve done none of that.

Instead, we’re trying to sell this book using only Substack. No ad spend, no publicist, no begging an algorithm for mercy.

This isn’t a “help me become a New York Times bestseller” thing. (Those are GoFundMes with extra steps.) It’s that we’ve talked to a lot of friends with books out, some with huge publishers, some self-publishing, some with a million followers, and none of them has found a marketing method that reliably works. Worse, the second they post a link to something they’re selling, the platforms quietly bury it.

Substack is different. You opted in. You signed up to hear from me about the things I make. So we’re going to see whether a couple of lower-to-middle-rung cartoon-makers can sell a book by talking directly to the humans who actually want to hear from them, and showing you how we made it.

We’ll document all of it here, so if you’ve got a book (or anything else) to sell, you’ll see what works and what doesn’t. (We should point out that we have not cleared this with our publishers. This experiment may be career-limiting.)

The book follows parents from babies to toddlers to tweens to teens to “all grown up”. Every page is a gag that starts with You’re not a real parent until... and a cartoon underneath.

We pump three or four hundred punchlines into a spreadsheet, all with the same setup. Then we hash them out over a series of meetings at bars around Manhattan: the wording, the image, which ones live. (One of the rods for our backs: not starting every single punchline with the word “you”.)

Every drawing was done by hand. Pencil, dip pen and ink, then colour. For the first time in my life I used a colourist, the brilliant Nahia Mouhica, and I’ll never go back. We printed it on matte paper so it feels like an art book rather than something you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room.

Scott is a parent. His son Leo is two, and the book is dedicated to him. (Technically, Scott says, it was for Messi. He was going through a whole Barcelona thing.) I am not a parent. So we built out families. Divorcees, same-sex couples, mixed-race couples, widows and widowers, all with names and kids of their own, so the gags could run as stories across the book. There’s even a death in the middle. Scott is the guy who dies. (Why not?)

Our favourite image in the book is from that storyline:

A couple of gags got gentle pushback from the publisher. One was, in the technical language of the industry, “a bit nipply”. Another was “This too shall pass”, which has been said in reference to something a child has swallowed. That one made it in. (You’re welcome.)

The whole point of the book, underneath the poo jokes, is that there’s no single right way to do this.

Everyone’s figuring it out as they go, and you don’t have to be perfect. As Scott pointed out, the people most outspoken about bad parenting usually don’t have children. It’s like being told how to stack your dishwasher by someone who doesn’t own a dishwasher. (I would like to reiterate: I am not a parent.)

From the chat...

We asked you to finish the sentence You’re not a real parent until... and you delivered:

Rhonda (three kids, two grandkids): ...you’re perfectly fine with your three-year-old’s fashion choice of undies on her head, as long as it keeps her ears warm.

This sent us down a rabbit hole about leg holes. Y-fronts leave the ears out. Boxer briefs offer full coverage. And somewhere in there, a cartoon was born: two kids with underpants on their heads, one of them in Calvin Kleins. (Rich Dad, Poor Dad.)

Darlene has three daughters and now three grandchildren, which puts her firmly in the book’s “all grown up” section: the parents whose children come to them for advice and then completely ignore it.

Another viewer shared that becoming a parent cut the time it takes to get dressed in the morning from an hour to 10 minutes. Which, as Scott pointed out, puts parents on par with pop stars doing backstage costume changes.

And Tracy asked me to draw a bee. So I drew a bee.

It was, by general consensus, a B minus.

What’s next?

We’re going to do more of these lives, and we’ll announce them in advance. (Tracy, you asked. Done.) If you’ve got a Substack and want us to come on and chat, reply and tell us. We’ll document that too.

I’ll also be writing more here about how the series started, how a premise becomes a book, and what happens to this experiment. (and all the behind-the-scenes drawing stuff you know I love yapping about.)

And if you can’t wait, Scott and I do a podcast about coming up with cartoon ideas, Is There Something In This?, where you can watch us do the same thing every week with less paper.

Please buy the book!

The single best thing you can do for this experiment is buy a copy today, ideally two. One for you, one for the parent in your life who has stepped on a Lego in the dark and said nothing.

BUY IT HERE

And if this experiment doesn’t work, we’ll document that too. (Career-limiting, remember?)

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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A couple of weeks ago, I snuck out of a cartoon festival and wandered into an ancient bookshop called Un Livre pour Voyage.

It was in a small village called Limoges. (A town, really, but I’ve seen Subway stops bigger than this place.) It was the kind of bookstore that appears to have been there forever. The owner, too. Bound Bibles stacked to the ceiling. Yellowed newspapers. Old cartoon magazines. First edition Asterix and Tintin in the original French. Spiderwebs strung between shelves like Peter Parker had a dust-induced sneezing fit.

It was silent in there. A deep, vacuum of space silence. All that paper soaks up the sound. And it smelled incredible, the way only old books do.

Emily asked the owner, “What’s your oldest book?” He disappeared into the back and came out holding one from 1636.

No white gloves. No glass case. He just handed it over, and we flicked through it like a magazine at the dentist. Someone set those words in type nearly four hundred years ago, and there we were, two tourists, reading them over a Negroni-adjacent afternoon.

That’s the thing about books that I really love. They’re the closest thing we have to time travel. They’re how a person who’s been dead for centuries can still talk to you. Transmitting their thoughts- writing them, drawing them, making them. It’s all we’ve got as a species to outlast ourselves.

I loved this dusty old bookstore. A mausoleum of thoughts.

…Which brings me to a much less ancient book:

On Tuesday, Scott Dooley and I release You’re Not a Real Parent Until…, more than 100 hand-drawn New Yorker-style cartoons about the good, the bad and the sticky of raising tiny humans. Babies, toddlers, teens, adults. The whole gooey, noisy, chaotic arc.

The central idea is simple: nobody really knows what they’re doing. There’s no correct way to parent. There’s just you, three hours of sleep, and a child who has decided the chicken suit was a mistake. (See photo. Scott is laughing. His son is not.) Join us live: Tuesday at noon, right here on Substack.

Scott is a parent. I am not. This is what qualifies us to write and draw about this topic. We wrote this thing with a lot of love. We’re going to be sharing a lot with you this week about how we made this thing...

Scott and I will be drawing, talking and taking your questions. Come tell us your parenting stories, your book stories, the moment you realised you were a real parent. The more you share, the better it gets.

ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW

Get the book here, with a sketch of your kid: You’re Not a Real Parent Until…

See you Tuesday.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spread

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Sunday, 11th October 2026
Booth 3810, Javits Center
New York Comic Con

Hello again, friend! I won’t keep you long…

I’ve been going to New York Comic Con for 12 years. Long enough to know the Javits has its own weather system. Long enough to have been photobombed by the same Deadpool six times. (He’s aged. We both have.)

Then I took a little break. Nobody noticed.

But this Sunday, I’m back. I’ll be at the National Cartoonists Society booth, number 3810, with a pen and a stack of books, doing sketches of Your kids, in You’re Not a Real Parent Until… which comes out this Tuesday and/or Your dogs, in You’re Not a Real Dog-Owner Until…

Kids and dogs. The two things I’m reliably told I can’t control. (Accurate.)

Plenty of other cartoonists will be shuffling through the NCS booth over the weekend, so come by and support human artists. Real people. Real ink. Alarmingly real back pain.

In a building full of people dressed as someone else, come meet a bloke who still draws with his human hand.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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Michael Maslin has been in The New Yorker for 49 years…

He has catalogued every cartoonist who ever drew for the magazine, and wanted me to know that, off camera, he is surrounded by “a lot more books.” (Not his books. Just books. A man after my own heart.)

Thank you to everyone who tuned in and left comments during our live stream— a reminder: the live streams are, and will always be, free. If you missed it live, the replay is above. And the recap is written out below.

Here’s what happened, (with the links down the bottom…)

(This takes me a long while... so I paywall this part. I hope you understand.)

First, a correction to my own promo post (oops). I told you the magazine didn’t let him draw his first sale. Wrong. He did draw it. It went in with a regular batch, Lee Lorenz saw the drawing, and then came the note: “We’re just taking the idea.” Whitney Darrow Jr. would draw it instead…

“You want your foot in the door, but this wasn’t the foot in the door. This is a toe.”

He didn’t even tell his friends. Too confusing to explain. These days, people get a credit line beside the artist; back then it was “kind of hush-hush.”

The cartoon, you’ll remember, was a fortune teller telling a man, “Nothing will ever happen to you.” Decades later, asked if Michael still had his own drawing of it, and ran it online. “So it got its day in the sun.”

His first cartoon under his own name, in April 1978, was a man at a deli counter: “I’ll have a quarter pound of your most reliable cheese.” It would not have been his pick. (Same, Michael. They never take the one you’d pick. Mine was “Vlad The Employer ffs) But he said, “I was extremely glad, of course… that my life changed.”

Michael told me he submitted for something like six or seven years before anything sold. His very first batch was drawings with no captions at all, nothing to do with cartoons, sent in because a friend told him to. It came back with the standard rejection slip, and someone at the magazine had pencilled a note along the bottom: next time, send an SASE.

He didn’t know what an SASE was. He was a kid. “But the next time you send in is what I focused on.”

They haven’t stopped hearing from him since. They created a monster.

He moved to New York for one reason: to get into The New Yorker. He was sending 50 or 60 ideas a week on index cards. (He still has the index cards. Of course he does. He’s Michael friggin’ Maslin.) After many, many… many months of nothing, he got a phone appointment with Lee Lorenz and asked what he was doing wrong.

“You’re just not right for the magazine.”

End of discussion. He thanked Lee for his time and hung up.

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Hey, friend.

Every so often, I share a post about people I think you might like. I like them all. Very much. I figure, if you like me, you’ll probably like them.
The series is called “Someone You Might Like”, and you can find the entire archive here.

#26: Tom Gammill

You may have seen a couple of articles in The New Yorker and the New York Times this week about a show that’s just opening in Brooklyn. It’s called A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller, and it was written by (and stars) my old friend !

I write that with an exclamation mark because every time he introduces himself to someone, he uses his full surname and exclaims it like he just discovered his own name. (“Hey, I’m Tom Gammill!”)

If you’ve laughed at a television in the last forty-odd years, there’s a decent chance Tom had something to do with it. With his writing partner Max Pross, he wrote for the original cast of Saturday Night Live, helped start Late Night with David Letterman, then went on to Seinfeld and 22 years on The Simpsons. He’s the guy who came up with George’s fiancée dying from licking poisoned wedding invitation envelopes. He and Max also wrote “They Took My Show Away”, the after-school-special parody that a lot of comedy writers consider the greatest sketch in Letterman history…

None of which is why he’s in this newsletter today.

He’s here because he’s one of us. Tom is a cartoonist. He draws a comic strip, The Doozies, makes gloriously inept Learn to Draw videos, and has spent around forty years building one of the great Nancy collections. He started in the early ‘80s, buying original strips for about $40 each. (Try finding one for $40 now.)

You’d struggle to find a better person to put Ernie Bushmiller on stage. (He even performs in a tie that belonged to Bushmiller.)

For decades, Tom’s comedy-writer peers have been baffled by his love of Nancy. How could a guy behind some of the most irreverent comedy on television worship a gentle strip about a girl with frizzy black hair, her pal Sluggo, and a lot of dropped ice cream cones?

Anyone who’s spent time with Tom knows the answer. He loves sophisticated comedy, and he loves a cornball, dead-centre gag, and he sees no contradiction between the two. (Neither did Bushmiller.) Nancy was breaking the fourth wall long before Letterman and The Simpsons made a career of it.

Tom’s comparison with Peanuts sums it up. When Charlie Brown drops his ice cream, you get a sigh and some existential despair. But, as Tom puts it, “Nancy just licks it off a globe.” Funnier.

Tom and I go back a long way. We met in 2013, writing and filming sketches for the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards, back when we were both doing hosting gigs for the show. You can see some of our handiwork here and here.

In May 2024, I flew to Columbus for NancyFest and wrote it up from a departure lounge while the airline kept pushing back my flight “due to small tornadoes and lightning.” The closing act of the whole festival was the world premiere of Tom’s play. It blew the roof off!

It’s 1976. Ernie is at the drawing board trying to wring four gags out of Nancy and Sluggo, while a parade of unexpected visitors keeps interrupting him. In Columbus, every one of those visitors was played by curator Caitlin McGurk, and she was hilarious.

Seeing it in a room packed with Nancy devotees was something else. These are people who can tell you the date of a 1959 daily strip from memory, and they were friggin howling. I counted about 6,217 jokes in the first minute. I stand by that figure.

I got to do the animation for one of the show’s big sequences: the bit where Ernie draws on four drawing boards at once. (He famously worked on four strips at a time. If he were alive today, he’d have far too many tabs open.)

Along the way, I sat in Tom’s apartment with Patrick McDonnell, Owen Kline (who’s directing) and Steve O’Donnell (who’s producing), poring over the show and trading notes, edits and suggestions. It’s very humbling to be in a room with people that talented, and to be part of the process of making something like this.

I ended my NancyFest post with: “It was a lot of Nancy. But still not enough.”

Well. Here’s more.

This version has grown since Columbus. Lauren Servideo plays everyone who isn’t Ernie, including Nancy herself, Bushmiller’s wife, and at one point Tom Gammill, opposite the real Tom Gammill playing Bushmiller. There are songs, props, cymbals, a bucket on the head, and plenty of cartoons on screen. It also takes on the time SNL put Bushmiller on a list of people “definitely not as smart as dolphins,” which is a strange thing to dramatise when you used to write for SNL.

If you love comics, or Seinfeld, or the idea of a man spending fifty years chasing the Perfect Gag, get yourself a ticket. As Bushmiller once admitted, “I never quite seem to find it.” He came awfully close.

It’s on at the Mark O’Donnell Theatre in Brooklyn through October 17.
I’m going on Saturday, with a hefty clump of fellow cartoonists.

🎟️ Grab your tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-morning-with-ernie-bushmiller-tickets-1988133453679
(Oct 8,9,10 are all sold out - still tix left for 15,16,17)

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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In August 1977, The New Yorker bought an idea from a kid fresh out of college…

They didn’t let him draw it, mind you. They gave it to the veteran Whitney Darrow Jr., and it ran that December:

Forty-nine years later, Michael is still in the magazine. Worst prediction The New Yorker ever printed.

In August 2007, he did something nobody asked him to do and everybody now relies on. He started , a blog about New Yorker cartoonists past and present. Nearly 20 years on, it’s the closest thing my profession has to a journal of record: who sold what, who has a book out, who we’ve lost, written up with more care than most obituary desks manage. His New Yorker Cartoonists A-Z holds a bare-bones bio of every cartoonist who has ever contributed to the magazine. Every single one. (I check it more often than my bank balance. It’s less upsetting.)

He also spent 15 years researching and writing Peter Arno: The Mad Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist, the first full biography of the man who more or less invented the New Yorker cartoon (he sent me a copy… I learned more about New York from that book than anything I’ve ever read!) -Oh, and Ink Spill now lands on Substack, with the Monday Tilley Watch, Thurber Thursdays, and a lot of beautiful old junk from the attic.

He also happens to be married to , who’s been on the show twice, (and the cartoonist with whom I spent a weekend in France at the St Just-le-martel cartoon festival last week.) Together they wrote Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple. So on Friday I finally get the other side of the story.

Full disclosure: Michael does not own a smartphone. He owns a flip phone. So instead of our usual set-up, he’ll draw on actual paper and hold it up to the laptop camera, like a hostage proving he’s still alive. Then it’s your turn: lob requests into the chat, and he’ll draw those too!

Draw Me Anything with Michael Maslin. Friday, 9 October, 12pm ET (5pm London, 6pm Paris, which is what my body clock still insists it is), live on Substack at drawmeanything.com

Add it to your calendar now!

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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Hey again, friend. Sorry for turning up twice in one day. (I know. Like a houseguest who leaves, then comes back for his umbrella and stays for dinner. And Dessert.)

I’ll keep it short. The response to this morning’s post caught me completely off guard. My inbox and the comments filled up with artists from all over the planet, and honestly I’ve been sitting here having a bit of a moment about it... More than a bit. I suspect there are plenty more to come. It’s made me think about the long-term goals of these deranged tech utopian overlords who think that the ability to churn out slop is the key to global happiness.

So please, sound off in the comments. I read every one of them, and this is a conversation worth having out loud. For this post, I’ve opened the comments to everyone, not just paid subscribers, because I think it’s important that people see and hear this, and that it’s date-stamped.

With that said, here’s what happened after this morning’s newsletter went out…

Okay.

So.

I did NOT expect this morning’s post to get the mail it got… It went a little nuts. (Normally my inbox is three podcast pitches and an irate man in Ohio who wants me to draw his boat with a face on it.)

But since ‘Aaaaand Now The Robots Are Forging Our Signatures’ hit everyone’s inboxes, the replies haven’t stopped pouring in. Public comments, private emails, DMs, and nearly all of them say the same thing, more or less…

They’ve stopped posting their work.

Illustrators. Cartoonists. Painters who’ve had their stuff online for 15 years. They’re pulling it down, or never putting it up in the first place, because Instagram, Facebook, DeviantArt, Google, the stock libraries and their own little Wix/Squarespace portfolio websites have all been quietly hoovered up into a mosnter that spits their style back out. Even worse, with their fucking name scrawled in the corner.

That’s the thing that gets me the most. Not the theft. We’ve had theft since the cave paintings. (Someone always copied the good captionless bison cartoon.)

It’s the signature in the corner.

Your name used to be the one thing you still had control over. Your legacy. The wobbly autograph at the bottom that said: I made this, and I’ll answer for the bullshit that comes with it.

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That’s gone now. Welcome to the post-credit world. (Not post-credits, the bit after a Phase 6 Marvel film when everyone’s now already in the car park scraping popcorn butter off their lap. Although, that too.)

For 25 years, someone in a bedroom in Perth / Lagos / Lima could draw something on a Tuesday and by Wednesday it was stuck to a fridge in Reykjavík. I know, because I was that bloke in Perth, and the internet was the only reason anyone outside my postcode in the suburbs ever saw a single drawing of mine. (Most of them saw one and stopped there. Still counts.)

Now the only way to see some of these artists will be to be in the room. A gallery in Chelsea. A festival in the Lake District. A bar where someone’s drawing live with a crappy old pen…

Which is lovely. If you live there.
If you don’t, you’ll never know they existed.

The internet was the greatest gallery ever built. Turns out it was also the loading dock for slop.

And somewhere tonight, someone is finishing the best drawing they’ll ever make… and putting it in a fucking drawer.

Sorry to be a bummer.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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Hey, before we get going…

My dear friend is on a panel this Thursday at the Society of Illustrators, talking about satire and why it matters while American democracy is (how do I put this delicately?) ..uh, on fire?

She’s joined by and (My doppelganger, I’m told by the French.) Historian Nan Wolverton will cover satire’s long history in American politics, and Pedro X. Molina will explain how his native Nicaragua slid from democracy into autocracy. Ann has heard Pedro’s story before and warns you’ll be horrified by how familiar it sounds.

Moderating is Roslyn Mazer, who wrote the cartoonists’ amicus brief in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the Supreme Court case that protects satire in America. (She’s the reason I’m legally allowed to draw politicians the way I do. For now. Thank you, Roslyn.)

Thursday 8th October, 6 to 9 pm, Society of Illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street. It’s free, but you need to RSVP at societyillustrators.org/event/republic-of-satire

Can’t make it? Ann and I have had some wonderful chats on Draw Me Anything, and you can go back and watch them here:

Now, on with the show…

On September 4, published a post on his Substack called What’s In A Name Anyway? ChatGPT and Me.

It’s his story, and he tells it better than I can, but basically he was at a wedding when his brother texted him a cartoon. Dolly Parton and Tim Curry had just died (the wrong people keep dying). Someone on Facebook had asked ChatGPT for a New Yorker-style cartoon tribute, with Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter walking Dolly up to the pearly gates. (Real original shit.) It went viral. In the bottom corner, perfectly legible, was BLOPER, Brendan’s signature.

His brother knew Brendan hadn’t drawn it. The text still ended with the best line of the whole mess: “everyone makes a stinker now and then.” It was the second time it had happened. Earlier in the year, a random stranger had sent Brendan a ChatGPT therapy cartoon with his name on it. He wrote that it made him afraid to post new drawings online.

I shared his post that day. I’d already watched AI do shithouse impressions of Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein, and Will McPhail, but adding a real artist’s signature was a new low. I wrote that now when people google our names, viral slop now comes up, not the body of actual artwork we’ve painstakingly produced over decades. I was furious for Brendan. I also assumed it was mostly happening to Brendan. Then I checked in with some other New Yorker cartoonist friends… it was, in fact, not just Brendan.

Then, yesterday Nieman Lab showed it’s waaaay worse than we thought.

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Andrew Deck’s well-researched story documents more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures Open AI has put on cartoons they never drew. , , , , - even deceased legends like George Booth and Saul Steinberg. Warren Miller, who was publishing in the 1960s also showed up with a ghost signature on a blob of slop.

I’ve been writing recently about the already diabolical disappearance of professional cartoonist positions around the world, and how recently in Australia and the US, they’ve been replaced with AI slop cartoons.

Pat Byrnes has signed his work with a full stop after his name since he was a teenager. Deck found more than a dozen ChatGPT fakes with Pat’s name on them. (Every one of them has the fucking full stop.)

That’s the detail I can’t shake. The model learned how one human signs his name, right down to the punctuation, and it vomited it out like it wasn’t shitting all over his entire legacy.

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Quick one, friend.

There are only a few tickets left for my Lectures on Tap event in Brooklyn next Wednesday, and I’d rather they went to you than to some dumpy schlub who thinks it’s a craft beer tasting.

(It is partly a craft beer tasting.)

I’ll be telling the story of how a chubby kid drawing with rocks on a rural Australian dirt roads ended up arguing with New Yorker editors about an elephant buying peanuts with a credit card. There’s the afternoon a media mogul killed the 102-year-old comic strip I was drawing. There’s rejection, lots of it, and how to survive it. And there’s my only real career advice: find the people doing what you want to do, and annoy them until they teach you everything they know.

It’s one hour, there’s a bar, and the exact address arrives in your confirmation email, which makes it feel like either a speakeasy or a kidnapping.

Grab a ticket here before they’re gone

‘til next time!
Your pal,

This weekend I’m heading back to Kendal in the UK for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, my first time back in 7 years.
I’m very excited to be back.

The festival has asked me to captain Team Asterix in the opening night debate at Brewery Arts on Friday night. Fellow ex-NCS President Bill Morrison is captaining Team Tintin. He’s a lovely man, and he is wrong, and I intend to prove it with slides.
And props.

In October 2017, instead of recuperating from the four most sleep-deprived days of my life at New York Comic Con, I decided to immediately fly to the UK for four even more intense days at an international comic art festival.
Because of course I did.

I kept a sketchbook diary of the whole trip…

July 1st, 2017

I popped across the pond to help plan bits of the festival, a 24-hour Manchester trip during which I slept a grand total of 0 hours. That flight was with the infamous Thomas Cook Airlines, a company that provided only a seat and a fart-filled fuselage (and an airline that has since ceased to exist) I’d like to think I contributed. I sat next to a screaming baby the entire way.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Wednesday. I got a haircut, pulled on my crappy suit jacket, over-packed my bag, and boarded another Thomas Cook flight to the motherland, where I sat next to the smelliest human on earth, who decided my lap was a perfectly reasonable place to rest his foot, and directly in front of (you guessed it) another inconsolable baby. I swear it was the same one. This baby was following me around the world. The baby’s father slept like a log, as it wailed for five straight hours and I attempted to sleep… and failed at it professionally.

Friday, October 13, 2017.
(Yes, Friday the 13th.)

I landed with a thud in Manchester at 9:55am, was met by Karen, a lovely gardener from Kendal. I ingested a year’s worth of caffeine and was driven two hours directly from the plane to Kendal College to teach a full theatre of students how to make art on a Wacom tablet. I could barely assemble two consecutive sentences, but I managed to cover the most important advice.

Karen patiently drove me through the centuries-old town of Kendal, educating me on the local wool industry and the many lakes* of the Lake District.

*There is one lake.

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By now I’d been awake for 24 hours straight and was hoping to count imaginary sheep instead of real ones, so she dropped me at my lodgings for the weekend: Stonecross Manor Inn. Or, as the locals call it, “Fawlty Towers.” Or “Flowery Twats.” Or something.

The place was built in the Jurassic period. The walls burbled with boilers and snoring septuagenarians. The power sockets crackled ominously whenever anything was plugged in, and the wifi only worked if you sat at the bottom of the staircase holding your laptop at exactly waist height. Also, it was haunted. It used to be an orphanage.

Because of course it was.

We weren’t even meant to be there. The nice hotel in town was hosting a wedding that weekend, so the festival guests got relegated to the haunted boiler-factory on the edge of town. I checked the guestbook to see who’d stayed before us.

After a nap (interrupted by a screaming baby in the next room, yes, actually the same baby) and a full hour negotiating with a showerhead that required me to solve a riddle and answer three questions to a troll before dispensing a slow drizzle of lukewarm, off-brown water, I ambled downstairs to find my National Cartoonists Society compatriots: Steve, Luke, Joe and Deb McGarry, Tom and Anna Richmond, and the inimitable, legendary Sergio Aragones, all swapping horror stories about their own first encounters with the plumbing.

Then we were shuttled off to be received by the Mayor. A man of few words.

At the welcome dinner, I fanboyed out meeting Manchester’s own Stanley Chow, whose portraits you’ve seen at the top of every online New Yorker article next to the writer’s name. (If you've ever seen my avatar, you’ll know exactly how big a fan I am of his style.) He somehow defies every convention of asymmetry in caricature and distils a person’s entire aura into a few perfect shapes. He’s a wizard. With a Manc accent.

I found my table with Graham Dury from VIZ (the UK’s answer to MAD), Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and Sergio Aragones (Living God). After mains, there was a 26-question trivia quiz for each table, projected onto a giant screen directly behind my head. At one point there was a question about me.

Every other table got it wrong.

Because of course they did.

From there we spilled out into the night and down the streets of Kendal to terrorise Ruskins Bar, where we sang karaoke and drank locally brewed ales until the wee hours, because body clocks be damned. I sang Drops of Jupiter by Train.

I maintain they liked it.

Then back to the haunted lodgings in seemingly the only cab in town, for a nightcap and a few spooky hours of sporadic shut-eye.

The next morning, after a full English breakfast of baked beans on toast with sausages, we were whisked to the Mayor’s Parlour at the Town Hall to learn about Kendal’s history and its rare, priceless artifacts.

A tall gentleman named Simon hovered about in white cotton gloves, nervously cradling centuries-old relics, then offered us our own gloves so we could hold the various shiny things while he told us fun facts about them.

From there we walked through the rain to the local tap house for ales and ham sandwiches. They love their beer very much in this town. They’d brewed several specifically for the festival. For dessert, we had chocolate cake. Made from beer.

That night was the big live drawing event at the Festival Hub, the Brewery Arts Centre (I told you they liked their beer). Steve McGarry and I co-hosted, with two artists working on Cintiqs hooked up to giant screens while Sergio drew by hand under a live overhead camera. The theatre was completely full, and demand was so high they simulcast it to an adjoining venue.

Seeing Sergio draw live is like seeing all seven wonders of the world at once. He was 80 that year, which remains statistically impossible. That night we awarded the inaugural Sergio Aragones Award for Excellence in Comic Art to Dave McKean, and officially launched the UK chapter of the NCS, something that had been years in the making.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. I moderated a talk with the great Lynn Johnston about For Better or For Worse, demonstrated at the Wacom café, and taught a kids’ cartoon-a-room session immediately after Charlie Adlard, the artist of The Walking Dead. Lovely guy. Tough act to follow.

The highlight of the whole weekend was doing signings next to Sergio. I sold about five cartoons, mostly because I spent the entire time leaning over watching him draw and sign his way through towers of books and prints.

At one point he told me he liked my Wacom video, and I smiled like a goofball for the rest of the day. He is my favourite living cartoonist.

Saturday night was the Knockabout Cabaret, a variety show of music, comedy and humorous slides from all corners of the globe, at which I’d been booked to do a 15-minute stand-up set. I re-jigged my material for a UK audience. It was futile. They liked the bit about my dad’s friend lopping off his hand, but I lost them the moment I started ragging on the Queen. (She was alive at the time. I maintain the two events are unrelated.)

I was saved from being the night’s biggest bomb by the act that followed: an enormous gentleman in a skin-tight unitard, mask and goggles, who screamed mercilessly into the mic while strumming his Fender until the strings broke, then asked the audience to take a beer break while he re-tuned his fractured axe on stage.

It didn’t end well for him either.

The final night’s farewell at Ruskins gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, a Britney medley, and old English folk songs from actual old English folk, until we turned in around 3:30am. I got three 2 of sleep, discovered my airport ride had gone to the wrong hotel, crawled 2.5 hours to Manchester in peak-hour traffic, and spent one solid hour in security while a man insisted we put my laptop through the scanner another fifteen times.

By the time I reached the plane, I was a husk of a human. I collapsed into my seat and passed out before we left the tarmac. Not even the screams of the baby in the next row could keep me from my coma. (-and yes. I’m pretty sure it was the same baby.) I got home finally to sleep in my own bed and stared at the ceiling, jetlagged to buggery with my mind racing. That’s when I drew all of the cartoons you saw above.

So anyway, I’m coming back this year!

Seven years later, I’ll be on stage on opening night, Friday 2 October at Brewery Arts, defending the honour of a small, indomitable Gaul in front of a room full of people with strong opinions about ligne claire. I’m bringing the sketchbook. The full diary of the trip will land here first.

If you’re anywhere near Cumbria, come along and cheer for the correct side. If you’re not, subscribe, and I’ll bring the ghosts to you.

See you in the Lakes.

(There’s one lake.)

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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Hello again, friend!

I won’t keep you long. I know you’ve got other emails in your inbox waiting to bother you. I just want to extend an offer of sending you some original art, in return for one small…

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Bonjour!
This was originally published 3 years ago at Christmas in Paris.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

~ J

👆 Play this while reading. It was recorded on location.

December 23, 2023
Rue de Rivoli, Paris

Thawing out for the afternoon, I’ve decided to order the cheapest thing on the menu and take in the show of the lobby bar in Le Meurice, a hotel bordering the Tuileries.

If there’s a New York equivalent, it would be the Plaza Hotel, A hive of opulence. A place to be seen. The kind of iconic establishment the clenched class comes to grudgingly tolerate their relatives over expensive champagne and high tea. Rich fodder for eavesdrawing:

A daughter tries to explain to her mother —through a tower of finger sandwiches— why her new boyfriend won’t be coming from Normandy to join the family for Christmas lunch.

Mother is incensed.

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To my right, the concierge rolls his eyes and mutters about a wailing infant as a shrill teenage girl asks “what the point of high tea even is?” Her boyfriend apologizes to the frazzled waitress for toppling the scone tower.

Signing the bill, the aggrieved mother forgets her room number —daughter says “Just make one up.” with the confidence of someone who’s definitely done it before.

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May 7, 2024
Musée Picasso, Paris

A loud pop could be heard from the rooftops surrounding the balcony café.

My prefrontal cortex had given up and decided to explode. I stared into the middle distance as I chewed away on a lukewarm quiche Lorraine, pondering Picasso.

It was Tuesday. I’d eked out precisely half an afternoon —a halfternoon, if you don’t mind— to slink away from my book deadline and do something interesting. The sun was finally out, so I took a very sweaty jog along the Seine and back through the Tuileries, followed by a visit to the Musée Picasso; My first time. Don’t ask me why it took me so long.

“I'm not really that interested in the fidelity of appearances. I'd rather draw my idea of a bird than what a bird actually looks like.”

I know, right? The balls on this guy! This quote doesn’t belong to Picasso, though: it was the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, the indispensable Bill Watterson, in his exploration of process on his most recent book project.

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I bring it up because it echoed throughout my cavernous skull every time I ascended another staircase. A puzzle piece clicked into place in each room, and now I can’t see anything the same way again.

I have Christoph Niemann’s famous ‘Abstract-O-Meter’ pinned above my drawing board in my studio, but it never really clicked until now. If you’ll afford me one last exasperated analogy— it’s like someone just handed me glasses with a new prescription. (Ok that’s probably not the last one. Sorry.)
Needless to say, you’re going to see some weird shit from me in these coming months, dear reader.

Let’s take a beat.

Pablo Picasso. The man, the myth, the inventor of Cubism. A pioneer in Surrealism, and arguably the most renowned, the most viewed, the most studied, as well as the most controversial artist of the 20th century. He has several museums dedicated to his work. The one in Paris is excellent. It is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district.

My favourite thing about him was his constant ability to reinvent himself;

To experiment and explore new ways of representing reality throughout his art. As the museum puts it: Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and prints from all his various periods testify to the breadth of these explorations.

I spent three hours dragging my jaw along the tiles, each room presenting the next stage of the evolution of the artist. It’s all very carefully curated to unravel as you ascend the building to the attic.

Everything I’d come to understand about building a lens through which to interpret the things I see through words, lines, shapes, even sound— it all kind of started to take shape. This is something basic that I’ve known all along; it just all finally became something very clear as the hours passed. It took gazing into dozens of Picassos to get there, but I got there: It’s a nice feeling, but also overwhelming. (and I didn’t even drop acid!)

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It wasn’t just Picasso on display. There were works by Renoir and by Picabia, and other artists. There were paintings, sculptures, mixed media pieces, scribblings, sketches, poems— a smorgasbord of tangible, wildly inventive art across creative lifetimes.

One of my favourite rooms resembled a real-world post: a small, darkened room hidden to the side, with Picasso’s mad scrawlings, poetry, and notes on various surfaces. Some of the work looked like it was falling out of him. Other pages looked like they were being extracted with all the grace of a gallstone.

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December 27th, 2023
Montmartre, Paris

I first hit the summit of Caricaturist Everest 13 years ago. I had no idea what was waiting for me (or how naive I was about it)

At the time, I didn’t realise what a tourist trap it was, more akin to Times Square than some bastion of fine art held in high esteem. Still, Montmartre wasn’t a place I knew about beyond glimpsing it in Amélie, so I was very curious to see it for myself.

It was 2010, and I was on my way to the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival in the UK. I stopped in France for just two days. I’d never been to Europe, so everything I experienced was so mind-bendingly new to me. I read my naive diary entries from back then and laugh at how the smallest things sent me into raptures; cartoons on billboards, movie posters, bookstores full of comics (bandes desinée), and exhibitions dedicated to comic art.

I’d only just moved to Melbourne from Perth, my only exposure to other working artists being at the annual shindig of the Australian Cartoonists Association. My teeny 20-something brain exploded when I discovered there was a culture on the other side of the planet that revered cartoonists the way Aussies worship cricketers. Uttering the names Sempé, Uderzo, or Hergé in Belgium to the French elicit gasps of excitement usually reserved for Taylor Swift fans.

Cartoonists aren’t really a well-respected bunch in my homeland, sadly— we have to scrap and beg for every inch of space we occupy, and even then it’s not enough to make a living. In France and Belgium, however… cartoonists are celebrated as actual artists; it’s a real, legitimate job. It’s not easy, but it’s actually possible.

Speaking with a couple of artist friends here in Paris this week, I learned there are very distinct tiers of professional work available, and if you don’t know the right people/have the right agent/publisher/style/attitude, it can be made even more challenging. With that said, there are grants, exhibitions and residencies for cartoonists in France that I could never even have dreamt of in Australia, let alone the US.

I revisited Place du Tertre today with Sophie (video above) to try and find the caricaturist I’d met all those years ago.

Considering the words above, you can imagine my disappointment at discovering that the few remaining cartoonists had been relegated to a tiny corner of the square. The majority of the people set up to draw were doing realistic portraits and watercolours of Paris landmarks and people’s pets from smartphone photos. I guess whatever sells is what they’ll favour most; Nothing new about that, I guess. (Just take a look at what sells at Comic-Con and you’ll see the same trend-chasing tendencies.)

When I asked about the guys you’ll read about below, I was told that some were dead, and others only worked in the summer, if at all. The heavily unionised and regulated square of artists seems to be less of a tightly-knit group of colleagues and more of a smattering of disparate mercenaries.

After the story you’ll read below about 2010, it was disappointing to see the cartoonist contingent recede.

April 17th, 2010
Montmartre, Paris

This morning I set out North in search of the artists’ Mecca known as Place du Tertre. Okay, some say “Tourist Caricature Mecca” others say “God’s waiting room for old French cartoonists.”

I marched up the cobbled streets towards Montmartre, getting higher and higher as my kneecaps ground further and further into a fine powder. After thousands of steps, I finally made it to the top of the Sacre Coeur Basilica to find breakdancing soccer tricksters entertaining crowds of onlookers. Just like Jesus would have wanted.

The view from the top of Sacré-Cœur is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. On a clear day, you can see all of Paris from these steps.  The only place you’ll get a higher vantage point is the top of the Eiffel Tower.

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It only registered after I wandered out of the cathedral how cold it was. Despite the bright sunny skies, the air had a deep chill to it. I couldn’t feel my face. Literally: my hands were touching my cheeks, but I couldn’t feel either one. I was lucky to still be able to operate my camera.

I walked the cobbled streets, jaw agape at the amazing neighbourhood of the great artists and writers who once thrived here when rents were cheap. These are the streets Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso called home. The Moulin Rouge, the little restaurants and cafés amid tiny cottages on winding roads.

I eventually made my way to the place I’d been really hanging out to see since I arrived in Paris - Place du Tertre. I remember reading about Tom and Anna Richmond’s account of their experience there in 2006, and it helped me know what to expect when I arrived. I rounded the corner to find a scene even more overwhelming than I’d imagined.

Dozens of artists- caricaturists, portrait painters, landscape painters all with their easels propped next to one another, samples of their work (and in some cases, other people’s work) presented proudly at their stand, enticing passing tourists to trade a hefty wad of Euros for a one-off piece of art.

The main interest I had was the caricaturists. The people who do exactly what I do for a job (minus the tacky tourist part) and some of them are truly amazing. Others… eeehh notsomuch.

According to Tom’s friend Rick Tulka, this seemingly loose collection of artists is actually a very tightly controlled union ruled with an iron fist. Trying to just show up and start drawing is a good way to get your fingers broken. Doubtless, to have a spot in the Place de Tertre itself, you pay a lot of euros in rent and have to have seniority.

In any case, there were other artists wafting around the streets of Montmarte trying to get a look-in to be considered for the ‘all-prestigious’ Place du Tertre. I wandered slowly through the square, stopping to look at each artists’ work, interested to see what samples they had displayed.

The guy who’d been displaying Tom Richmond’s caricatures of Busta Rhymes, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts and Joe Bluhm’s caricature of a co-worker were still up there. Without someone telling him to take them down, I suspect they’d stay up there as long as the Mona Lisa will stay up in the Louvré.

I’ve always found it bizarre that that scammy caricaturists will put up samples of other artists’ work. Surely when the person has theirs drawn and finds it’s not of the same standard, they realize they’ve been had. (and have no real obligation to pay, since the ballsiest of false advertising was the reason they sat down in the first place?)

As I continued wandering through, I came to a bustling corner where four caricaturists of varying ages had their work set up.

It was like a hierarchy - with the old, bearded Gandalf-like caricaturist sitting, smoking an endless chain of cigarellos and watching over the younger caricaturists around him. He was watching on in approval as the skinny old guy in leather next to him (I call him Skeletor) was finishing off a portrait of a young girl in charcoal.

I moved in to take a picture of him working, when ‘Gandalf’ moved in and started speaking some beard-muffled French in a raised tone about not taking photos.

He pointed at the girl’s father, who was standing behind me with a disapproving look - like I was trying to take photos of his daughter like a creep. I apologised to the dad and explained I was just taking a photo of the portrait as the guy was working on it. The dad was American, so he understood me just fine - and said, “No, that’s fine. I was just under the impression these guys didn’t want you taking photos.”

I looked around at the other caricaturists, all of whom now weren’t working, and were squinting at me, curiously. Gandalf slowly sat back down and lit up another cigarello, laughing to himself as he took the first puff. I felt kind of guilty about the whole photo debacle, so I wanted to make amends. I walked over and said, “How about you draw me?”

He raised an eyebrow at me, as if I’d asked something silly of him- almost as if I’d asked Mozart to just ‘play me a tune.’ He said something in French as he pointed to the caricaturist off to his right who quickly picked up his drawing board and charcoals and nodded at me.

As he gestured for me to sit down, he said, “He doesn’t speak English. I, uh— un peu— speak a little.”

This guy was friendly, very polite, and could clearly draw. I later found out he’d studied as an art student and was drawing caricatures because they paid well. He was passionate about the craft and considered it an art form worthy of respect. A Daumier devotee.

I made a very conscious decision before I’d sat down, not to mention that I’m a cartoonist, if I get my caricature drawn.

Not only am I way below par to these guys, but it felt presumptuous to just stroll into these guys’ territory and say that I do what they do. These guys have been doing it way longer, and its pointless to bring it up. What are they going to do - give me a job? Get me to fill in on their break?

Above all else, I didn’t want to sit for a caricature and tell the other caricaturist, “Okay - I do this for a living. You’d better be good… Go!”

The moment I sat down I realised it was the first time I’d sat for a solo caricature. I mean other caricaturists have drawn me at gigs…

…and Tom Richmond used my dorky face as the example for his caricaturing workshop at the Stanleys Conference last year - but I’ve not sat for a solo caricature as a punter, one-on-one with a caricaturist I’ve not met.

The Questions

The funny thing about caricaturing someone live is that people tend to ask you the same old questions while they’re sitting there; no matter where in the world they’re from, no matter what age - it’s always the same:

“So, how long have you been doing this?”

“What’s your REAL job?”

“What, are you like an art student or something?”

“What do you look for when you draw someone?”

This seems to ease the subject’s nerves to try and distract them from the fact that you’re staring at all of their features - and it is unnerving when someone starts looking at every inch of your face before grinning or squinting as they look back down at the page and scribble away.

So you always have the standard answers to these questions ready to go so you can keep drawing while you talk and put them at ease. You don’t want to have a whole bunch of caricatures of people looking uncomfortable.

Then, of course, you have ‘The Heckler.’

The Heckler is the person (usually a guy) who walks behind the artist, looks at the drawing and then at you, then back at the drawing and say something like “His ears aren’t THAT big!” or “Her eyes aren’t THAT far apart!” -and laughing hysterically - quickly undoing all the work the caricaturist has done to put the subject at ease.

These are the people who would never in a million years sit for a caricature themselves, but are more than happy to sit back and make fun of the artist and the person being drawn. Threatening to draw them next is a pretty effective method of dispersing said douchebag.

That all said - we had all the regular players this day.

Three or four different American tourists came up and did the ‘look at caricature - look at me - look at caricature - “Oh, his nose isn’t THAT big!” followed by an incessant cackle. Another passed by, said roughly the same thing, laughed and moved on.

The third heckler walked past and said “God, he’s really missed the likeness there. He’s way off - looks nothing like you!”

Now, when someone says that, there are two things you can do as the caricaturist: You can pretend you didn’t hear it, ignore it, and keep on working.

Or, you can say something.

The caricaturist drawing me decided to take option 1, but I could see in his face when he looked up from then on, he was worried and it had clearly affected him. He gave an awkward and uncomfortable chuckle and drew a little bit slower - pulling the page back to look at it more carefully.

The heckler gave one more “Nope. That’s not him at all.”

I then decided to take option 2.

“Sorry, chief - I didn’t hear him ask you what you thought. And I certainly didn’t.”

His devious grin promptly disappeared. In my book, his final jab entitled me to a free “Respond to the douchebag” token.

“Well, it doesn’t look like you.”

“Right. But you could do a better job, yeah?”

“Well no, I..    But I’m not an Cari.. caricaca… carickick..”

“Caricaturist.  Exactly. Now, shut the fuck up.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but instead just grumpily moved on. The guy drawing me had to stop drawing from laughter.

I looked over at Gandalf and Skeletor who were both having a big laugh. Gandalf pointed back at the caricaturist drawing me, so I turned and he was ready to go -this time with a smile.

He hadn’t smiled til now, and in doing so, he revealed two, big, widely spaced front teeth.

My hand twitched.

As his face stretched out from the smile, it revealed a whole new dimension to his previously stony face. Cheek wrinkles started to present themselves, crows feet, his chin shape changed, his eyebrows went from straight across, to a new sort of perfectly flowing, almost aesthetically pleasing shape across his brow.

I gritted my teeth.

This guy was a caricature and I hadn’t even realised it. He would make a fantastic subject, (and I’m sure he was aware of it too.)

I found myself studying his face for more detail: for proportions, for relationships between the features (til now I’d consciously switched off the part of my brain that does this with people. It can get distracting,)

I tried to distract myself by talking to him. I told him I realised caricature isn’t meant to be kind, it’s meant to exaggerate and distort and parody the person being drawn - not airbrush out features they’re uncomfortable with.

But saying this was only making me focus more on how I’d draw this guy. My brain started sketching the shape of his face exaggerating his jaw-line, his teeth, his bulbous nose, and those freaking eyebrows.

A good 25 minutes had passed as he started drawing the obligatory Eiffel Tower in the background, and asked, “Where are you from? You English?”

“Non, je suis Australien” (I winced, as I worried he’d put something like a shrimp, or a kangaroo in the background.) “Aah Australien! You are on holiday oui? What do you do in Ozzie?”

I bit my lip. Smiled. Thought of anything else - “Taxidermist” “Hitman” “Accountant”…

“Uh. I’m ….I uh.”

Ah, fuck it.

“I’m a cartoonist”

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This week I’ll be writing to you from Paris (France. Not Texas.) Expect some terrible clichés and excessive use of French words. Like cliché.

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The invitation arrived on a Tuesday,

wedged firmly between an email from my accountant (subject line: “Call me.”) and a receipt for a sandwich I have no memory of eating. It was in French. It informed me that I’d been invited as a guest of the 45th Salon International de la Caricature, du Dessin de Presse et d’Humour, which my phone’s Siri dictation insists on rendering as “the Saint Julie Motel festival.” I’ve stopped correcting it. Saint Julie sounds like a lovely woman. I hope her motel has decent water pressure. (And those little soaps.)

For this I have to thank. Liza, New Yorker cartooning veteran and previous Draw Me Anything guest, put my name forward to the organisers. I owe her a drink. Possibly a cow. More on that in a moment.

The festival’s real name is Saint-Just-le-Martel: a village of about 2,700 people in the Limousin countryside, 10 minutes outside Limoges. For 50 weeks of the year it is, by every account I can find, a quiet little place. Then autumn arrives, and it becomes the largest gathering of cartoonists on this here planet.

This has been happening every year since 1982, when Gérard Vandenbroucke and a handful of villagers decided that what their idyllic corner of France really needed was satire. The early pilgrims included Cabu, Wolinski, Plantu, Loup and Wiaz: names that mean nothing to most New Yorkers and everything to anyone who has ever tried to draw a politician into submission. Word spread. In a good year the village hosts 15,000 visitors and a couple of hundred cartoonists, all drawing, arguing and laughing at each other in a dozen languages. (Ok, imagine Comic-Con, if Comic-Con were run by farmers and had opinions about press freedom.)

They give out 10 prizes. The grandest is the Grand Prix de l’Humour Vache, the grand prize for “cow humour,” which in French means *savage*, and the winner receives an actual Limousin cow, valued at about €1,000. Not a trophy shaped like a cow. Not a bronze cow. An entire fucking cow.

The Pulitzer committee gives you $15,000 and a certificate. Saint-Just gives you livestock. I’ll let you decide which is the more serious civilisation.

Still.. I don’t know if I’ll enter. I don’t want to end up like Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

This year is the 45th edition. It runs from 26 September to 4 October, open 9am to 7pm, every day, continuously, meaning it does not close for lunch, which in France is bordering on a federal crime. There are 32 exhibitions under one roof, close to 1,500 drawings, another 7 exhibitions scattered around Limoges, more than 150 cartoonists in attendance, live caricature, signings, round tables, an apéro-jazz, and a prize called the Crayon de Porcelaine, a porcelain pencil, Limoges being the porcelain capital of France. A pencil made of porcelain: the most breakable possible version of a cartoonist’s only weapon. I refuse to believe that isn’t deliberate.

Oh! Here’s the part I’m still metabolising along with my cheese pasta from Delta Economy Plus: some of my New Yorker cartoons will be hanging in the exhibition. Mine! Drawings that started life at my drawing board in New York, with a dip pen and horrendous posture, will spend a week on a wall in rural France, being squinted at by people who read Le Monde and know what a subjunctive is.

Better still, the village doesn’t put its guests in hotels. (There aren’t enough hotels.) The families of Saint-Just take the cartoonists in to their homes.

Now, I’ve been to France more times than my accountant would like (I really should calL him back). I love France. France and I have an arrangement: I keep coming back, and it keeps pretending my French is charming. But in all those visits I have never once lived with a French family, and for the week of the salon, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing: a 40-something Australian exchange student with grey in his beard, a suitcase full of pens, and restaurant French that peaked in Year 9. I can say “je voudrais un croissant” and “où est la bibliothèque,” which should cover breakfast and precisely one emergency.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was this excited to pack a suitcase.

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There’s a comedy show in Paris where you pay on the way out.

Not the way in -the way out. You watch the whole show, laugh your face off, and then, at the door, you decide what it was worth to you. It is the most honest business model in entertainment and the most terrifying one I’ve ever agreed to be part of.

On Thursday, I’m on it.

This will be my 5th time in Paris and my first time performing there. On the previous 4 visits, I was a civilian. I ate the cheese, I dawdled along the Seine, I mispronounced “croissant” in ways that made Parisian waiters cringe. I got to simply like Paris, with no strings attached. This time I need Paris to like me back, out loud, in a room, on a schedule.

Emily is on the bill too. (My girlfriend is also a comedian, which means that on Thursday night one of us will have a better set than the other, and then we’ll walk home through the streets of Paris hand in hand, both quietly doing the math on what worked and what didn’t …and why.) Comedy is not a competition. It is, however, rated and scored every 12 seconds.

Book tickets here

The show is Coucou Comedy at La Pomme d’Eve, 1 Rue Laplace, in the 5th. Doors at 8pm, show at 8:30pm, and there’s a 1-drink minimum: a rule I have never once in my life needed to be told. Entry is free -you reserve a ticket, watch the show, and pay what you think it was worth on the way out. Suggested €15, though I assume the scale runs from “generous” to “a single centime placed in my palm while maintaining eye contact.”

If you’re in Paris this week, or know someone who is, come along: reserve a free ticket here.

I’ll report back next week and let you know what I was worth…

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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On a yellow legal pad, in handwriting that could generously be described as medically concerning. (Genuinely looks like the handwriting of a doctor on a rollercoaster).

I own an iPad. I own software that could transcribe my thoughts, organise them, and probably file my taxes. But there is nothing (nothing) like a hand holding a pen on a piece of paper. Specifically: a black clear-barrel Bic on a yellow legal pad. The cheapest tools in the building doing the most important job in the building.

When I read Draft No. 4 by John McPhee I learned about essay structure and getting the first rough draft out before you start noodling around with specifics.

Everything starts here. The shape of the thing, the serial killer arrows, the one word circled so hard the pen nearly goes through to next week’s ideas. Then I sit down and decipher it like the Rosetta Stone, (except the Rosetta Stone had three languages and I can’t read any of mine. It doesn’t help that I write in Australian.)

Usually I’ll print out a copy of the next draft and read it out loud (learned that from Sedaris) then mark up the edits in pen/pencil to do the final rewrites.

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This morning over my birthday coffee, I read a note from the writer that ruined the coffee. (But not the birthday).

An author releases a book he wrote, and within a few weeks Amazon is selling dozens of AI rip-offs with almost the same title. Dozens. Per book.

My book with comes out on 13th October. I asked my publisher what we do about this. The official position (from the people with the lawyers) is that nothing can be done. Great meeting. See everyone at the launch.

So… somewhere, a server farm in Russia is already warming up to publish “You Aren’t a Genuine Parent Up Until...” by Jasen Chatfeild & Scort Delroy: 180 pages of bullet points about cherishing your little ones, cover art with 11 fingers.

Here’s our sophisticated legal countermeasure:

you.

Buy the real book directly from the actual humans who wrote it. Preorder You’re Not a Real Parent Until... from me, and Scott & I will sign it with our own hands. For a bit extra, I’ll draw your kids into it. Their actual names, their actual cowlicks. Let’s see a plagiarism bot manage that.

PRE-ORDER WITH A SIGNED SKETCH!

Every copy you buy from a real author is a small vote for a version of publishing where humans get paid for the books they write. That used to go without saying. (Now it’s a legit business strategy.)

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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First order of business: it’s Noth, rhymes with both. He’s been letting people say “Nawth” for decades out of Midwestern politeness. Gosh. Consider yourselves corrected on his behalf. If you missed it live, the replay is above. Here’s what happened, with every link we promised on air down the bottom…

You know Paul’s most famous cartoon even if you don’t know his name: the flock of sheep gazing up at a billboard of a wolf, captioned “He tells it like it is.” It’s among the most shared cartoons in the magazine’s history; it’s now the cover of his book, and Paul has mixed feelings about its immortality. “It should be a historical document by now,. he said, a little wearily.

Here’s the detail that should be laminated and handed to every rejected cartoonist on earth: The New Yorker rejected it the first time he submitted it. So did they reject his other most popular cartoons, first time ‘round. Paul resubmits. He always has, fortified by a story he’d heard about Saul Steinberg, who supposedly used to take his rejected cartoons, put them straight into a fresh envelope, and post them back to the magazine. (The balls on this guy! I love him.)

Paul sold to The New Yorker in 2004. The cartoon: a White House press secretary holding a torch under his chin like a kid telling a ghost story, while a reporter asks how he responds to critics who say he’s just trying to scare people. He’d worked on that batch for the best part of 2 months under the wing of Matt Diffee, whom he’d met at the Rejection Show and who walked the batch in to Bob Mankoff.

Noth Things

Killed Cartoons #2

Lately, New Yorker cartoonists have been sharing their “first five” cartoons published in the magazine. For me, this means taking a look back at my older drawing style…

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a month ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Paul Noth

At Paul’s first look meeting, surrounded by his heroes (Gahan Wilson among them), Mankoff greeted the new arrival with two sentences that became his entire art education. The first: “Don’t get cocky.” The second: “I want to see 10 a week from you, even if they’re shit.”

Paul has done 10 a week ever since, through every all-nighter, every TV job, every book. “It was my art school in a lot of ways,” he said. Like me, he’d never been to one. He’d never had art in public before. He learned to draw in public, 10 at a time, and eventually stripped away his early etching-style hatch marks when he realised the truth every gag cartoonist arrives at eventually: “The best style for me was the best execution of the joke.” Or as Lee Lorenz put it in The Art of the New Yorker, which we both worship: a cartoon is beautiful the way a sailboat is beautiful. It has exactly what it needs to function, and nothing else.

Mankoff gave me my version of that lecture too, around 2014, back when I wore a suit jacket to the offices like I was auditioning for a bank. He looked at my batch of borrowed styles and asked what I think about when I do my hair in the morning. “Try and think about your drawings as your hairdo. It’s a style you’ve arrived at. You’re not trying to copy Johnny Depp.” This from a man with famously luxurious amounts of hair. It worked, though. It worked on both of us.

Read that story here

The Pale Force story is even better than I’d hoped. , it turns out, is Paul’s brother-in-law; he’d married Paul’s sister a year or two before. Paul, not yet a New Yorker cartoonist, pitched Jim an animated bit for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, modelled on Steve Martin turning up to Letterman with something weird in his back pocket. When the head writer asked whether he’d done animation before, Paul said yes. (He had made flip books, so… technically not a lie?)

The budget was roughly what a guest gets paid for sitting on the couch, which is not a number that produces animation, and his first delivery came back with the note that a 16-megabyte video file cannot be broadcast on network television. The night the first episode aired, running on no sleep, he watched it freeze for a single millisecond and briefly died. Then it killed, the series got Emmy-nominated, and Paul got a comedy education by osmosis: Robert Smigel, Brian Stack and Demetri Martin down the hall, Conan’s face providing the biggest laugh of every episode no matter what Paul animated. His conclusion, having vowed never to do low-budget animation again:

Worth it.

The Laureate Report…

I put the important questions to Wisconsin’s inaugural Cartoonist Laureate, and I can now report the following to the people. There is no salary. There is no diplomatic immunity. There is, crucially, no sash: “I have to make the sash myself, apparently. Like a Mayor McCheese-style sash.” His opening list of demands included full access to the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. His actual duties, in his own words: “to figure out what the hell the cartoonist laureate does.” So far that means cartoon classes for kids, library outreach, trying to attach a cash prize for whoever comes next (”that’s what cartoonists actually need let’s be real”), and a retrospective of 175 of his originals opening at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in January, sharing a title with the book. When the museum’s president first floated the laureateship, Paul assumed she meant Lynda Barry, P.S. Mueller or Craig Thompson. She meant him.

His process, for the process junkies: 10 ideas written first thing every morning, “usually bad”, purely to switch on the part of the brain that notices things. Voice memos through the day, transcribed the next morning. And this, which made my week: Paul had listened to Tuesday’s episode with Brian Biggs and co-signed the boredom sermon. “If I keep the stimulus away, I just keep things mentally kind of quiet; I will start entertaining myself after a while.” Three episodes ago this was my crank theory. It is now, I’m declaring, the official position of the show.

Somewhere in here Matt Diffee himself materialised in the chat, speak of the devil, and was informed we’d been blaming everything wrong in Paul’s life on him. For the record: Diffee ushered in a whole generation of cartoonists, Paul among them, and his Rejection Collection books are the sacred texts of everything above.

Paul’s dad was a lifelong newspaper man who brought home cartoon collections from the feature desk for his cartoon-obsessed kid, and who gave him one piece of career advice: don’t go into print media. He could see the writing on the wall. So Paul didn’t pursue it. He tried screenplays, plays, other lives. “I look back at an old notebook where I was trying to write a screenplay,” he said, “and the margins are just full of cartoons. In retrospect, it should have been obvious.”

At the end, Paul described what this show apparently is: “It’s basically like a digital cartoonist lunch.” The magazine’s cartoonists used to eat together every Tuesday. We don’t anymore. I suppose I’ve been rebuilding the table an hour at a time, and I couldn’t be happier about who keeps sitting down at it.

Now, the promised links…

Pre-order I Am Going to Eat You... and Other Awkward Truths

Out 13 October, 200+ of his most-loved cartoons plus 50 never published, and Paul says the unpublished ones “are usually the funniest ones, to be honest”.

Pre-orderers get a signed bookplate posted to them! Just shoot him an email at paul@paulnoth.com with your mailing address and your desired inscription. (A proof-of-purchase screenshot is also much appreciated.)

Pre-orders are everything in publishing now, so if you were going to buy it anyway, buying it today is the whole ballgame. And since our books share a birthday: pre-order You’re Not a Real Parent Until... (👉 Pre-order here )

Oh! —and I’ll draw your kids, or grandkids, into the book!

Order your sketch here!

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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I’ve been very doomer-y this week. Sorry. I thought I’d cap the week off with something positive…

October 27, 2024
Lincoln Centre
New York, NY

My ol’ pal Mo Willems1 is on stage, killing. (A troubling verb for a room full of children, but there is no other word for it.) Several hundred people under the age of eight, screaming for a man who draws a pigeon live at Lincoln Centre. I’m in the balcony, among the only adults who arrived without a child as cover, in awe.

He’s a great role model, and a prolific artist. The kids excitedly run up to him to show them their artwork (yes, drawn on screens, but let’s meet them halfway) as he sits at the edge of the stage, trying to cultivate a new generation of humans who don’t sit in front of a laptop all day and learn to ‘vibe code’.

Anyway. This week Austin Kleon posted something Mo says about ants.

The short version:

I have never felt so seen by an insect.

I’ve been stepped on a fair bit this year. But nobody finds new food by walking in a straight line …and that’s the job now.
That’s. The fucking. Job.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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1

I first met Mo at the NCS Reuben Awards, where we got to shoot some funny sketches together. We’re part of the very small ‘Reubens Hosts Club’, pictured below:

He’s a prolific author and an inspiring guy. You can watch his whole episode of The Idea Garden below.

2. You can watch my episodes with Austin Kleon here:

We’re back with another episode! This week:

• Vale, Airmail: Puck pulls the pin on cartoons

• Spirit Halloween takes over a rib cage

• Jetstar, Bali, and bottomless mid-flight brawls

• Rat mazes at the polling booth: the midterm cartoons begin

• Democracy sausage vs “I Voted” stickers

• Martini levels: from “happiest I’ve ever been” to “texting my ex”

• NYPDA

• The fortune teller who sees her own future

• Robot nesting dolls

• Scraping 101, and the return of the Home Contents Aggregator

• Condé Nast, OpenAI, and cartoonists finding their signatures on work they never drew

• Owls in glasses

• What’s the dress code at a penguin wedding?

• The boomerang store: strictly no returns

…and not much else!

▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or jasonchatfieldcomedy@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

Copyright Disclaimer: We’re inviting you into our living room, don’t walk out with our lamp. Please refrain from selling our jokes. All original content is © Copyright 2026 Jason Chatfield & Scott Dooley for “Is There Something In This?” All rights reserved. We welcome you to download and play the podcast and share it with others for personal use; please acknowledge the “Is There Something In This?” Podcast as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

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Wednesday, midday… is alone in his Philadelphia studio, an old garage he describes as a hermit cave, holding his phone in one hand and a pen in the other. I’m at my drawing board doing the same. For the next hour, 90 people watched 2 grown men show each other their doodles.

If you missed it live, the replay is above. What follows is what you missed, with links to everything we held up to the camera.

Brian has made more than 80 books. The Everything Goes series, Tinyville Town, the New York Times-bestselling Frank Einstein books with Jon Scieszka. So naturally, when he started his Substack, the imposter syndrome turned up anyway. “I had to give myself a break,” he said, “and get past my oh-no ego and just let it happen.”

“All I want to do, man, is just draw.
I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories… and I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.

The turn came on an exercise bike in his basement, listening to Giuseppe Castellano’s podcast episode with myself and Adam Ming, where said to stop treating Substack as the road to being published and start treating it as being published. “It just was one of those ding moments,” Brian said. He got off the bike and got to work.

The work is The Walk, and the story behind it is every author’s recurring nightmare. In 2019, Brian published a picture book with Penguin called The Space Walk: an astronaut, alone in space, who just wants to go outside. It came out, in his words, “to the great yawn of indifference of children’s publishing”, and was out of print within a couple of years.

But out of print means the rights come home. So Brian is now turning that orphaned story into a full graphic novel, and serialising every step of it on his Substack: thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles, all of it. “Every stupid thought I’m having about this is going onto my Substack,” he said. The story is already mutinying. “The story has decided it wants to be something bigger than I think I want it to be,” he told me, having informed his wife that morning it might be three 200-page volumes. “I’m 58 years old, man. Do I have a 600-page graphic novel in front of me?”

The logic, though, is sound: last time, the book arrived to silence. This time, “at least it’s going to be a thing that there’s an audience built in already following it. And they care about it.” Every page will be hand-lettered, incidentally, because Brian letters the way you’d read it aloud, and he’d rather do that than make a font. He’s seen his hand-lettering redrawn by translators into Hebrew and Chinese, stroke by stroke. “I would love to meet those people one day,” he said, “but I’m afraid they would punch me in the face.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this I made him explain the line in his bio about being calligrapher to a princess, and I’m pleased to report it’s all true.

Junior year at Parsons, 1988, studying in Paris, he answered a job-board ad to address envelopes for a man in a cravat who threw parties for people like the Rothschilds. Which is how a kid from Texas, whose calligraphy career began with a drugstore Speedball set and the Renaissance Fairs of early-80s Houston, ended up hand-lettering the guest book for Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, whose family had been friends with Marie Antoinette, and who hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan a few weeks later. Brian was escorted out as the Reagans arrived. He did the work at his apartment drawing table, Enya on the stereo (not sure which album…), his roommate’s Akira comics all over the futon.

A year or 2 later, he was waiting tables at a Bennigan’s, telling anyone who’d listen: “I was a calligrapher for a princess for a month.”

Shit Brushes and Other Filing Systems

Then I flipped the camera, and we got into the pens, as is my tradition. Highlights of the show-and-tell: his Kuretake brush pens, my Hunt 101, the ink bottle I suction-cup to train tables, and his filing system of labelled coffee cans reading “new brushes”, “good brushes” and (after asking the stream’s permission to swear) “shit brushes”. He keeps a box labelled “used but might be useful on a rainy day”. He made it in 1994. It’s bloody full.

Related Reading:

This is also the man whose YouTube channel features a cheap pencil challenge (three pencils found on the street, one illustration) and who once sawed a Blackwing in half to fit his pencil case (who among us?), to the horror of his commenters. His position: “Just make the damn illustration.” We’re both ambassadors. Neither of us wore the merch. We apologise to our sponsor-adjacent overlords.

Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies
Brian’s YouTube channel, home of the cheap pencil challenge

One sermon we both delivered, and mean: before you buy pens on Amazon, try JetPens or Goulet Pens. They stock what artists actually use, and they’re the closest thing to a local art store most of us have left.

Fine, It Was Doodling

Earlier in the week, I told you not to call it Doodling. Brian would like to complicate that. The hands essay started because he was, in his own cheerful admission, doodling: drawing hands like stone monuments in a field after rereading The Lord of the Rings. (”What if Frodo had come across a giant hand?”) Then he misdrew one. Five fingers and a thumb. He went for a walk in the park, came back, and realised the mistake was a plot device: it’s science fiction, after all, and now there are six-fingered gloves in the book, and a reason for them. “The doodling became a door opener,” he said. The ideas never arrive at the desk. They arrive on the bus, in the queue at the bagel shop, on a run in the woods.

Which led us both onto the soapbox: “I’m not your mom,” Brian said, “…but put your freaking phones down and turn off notifications!” Long-time readers know I’ve been yelling this at clouds for years…

And then, quietly, the bit I keep thinking about. In the summer of 2022, for the first time in his career, Brian had no contract in front of him. He went to Iceland, raced bicycles, caught COVID, came home and, in his words, “curled up in the fetal position for about a month.” (again- who among us?)

What came out of it wasn’t a new hustle. It was a recalibration.

“All I want to do, man, is just draw. I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories. And I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.”

That’s the whole show, really. That’s all of us.

Watch the full replay above, then go follow the book being built at Random Orbit. Brian says if you have questions about any of it, his messages are open. He has a deadline. Ask anyway.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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• The Walk, serialised in progress

• It’s not “Doodling”, the essay

• The Space Walk, the original 2019 picture book; Brian has about 40 copies for sale

• The Illustration Department Podcast, episode 318, the one Brian heard on the exercise bike

• JetPens and Goulet Pens, buy your pens like a person

• My rant about letting your brain just “be” in the world:
  

I learned this week that the state of Wisconsin has a Cartoonist Laureate.

An actual one: 3-year term, a museum behind him, official recognition at the State Capitol. I’ve been president of two diffe…

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I am divorced.

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment, the way my literary agent did.

In my defence, every good research team n…

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Brooklyn, NY
14th September 2026

I was reading the latest edition of Inkspot this week: the club magazine of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, the oldest cartooning society in the world, and the one I grew up in. I edited Inkspot myself for a time in the early oughts, back when the scariest thing in its pages was the treasurer’s report. (It’s now done by the industrious Steve ‘Noz’ Panozzo- and has been for a LONG time.)

For an expat, it reads like a letter from home. You pour a scotch, you settle in at the drawing board, and you catch up on who drew what, who won what, and who said something unrepeatable at the annual dinner. That’s what I sat down expecting from the new Autumn/Winter number…

Instead, somewhere between page 6 and page 9, a pattern emerged, and by the back cover I was deeply unsettled, a thing the treasurer’s report never once achieved…

Pages 6 and 7: The Herald Sun in my old home of Melbourne has been running AI-generated cartoons.

Page 9: Cathy Wilcox is leaving the Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years. Near the back: a review of Dave Blumenstein’s book about AI and cartooning, rereleased in a new expanded edition, on account of everything in it coming true.

One issue. One quarter. One country. The little club magazine I used to edit now reads like a casualty list with production values.

Let’s start with Cathy, because Cathy is the reason I put the scotch down.

The news had already reached me in August, the way cartoonist news travels now: a screenshot in a group chat, followed by the word “mate”, which in Australia carries roughly the emotional payload of a 21-gun salute. But we’re print people, our lot. Nothing is properly true until it’s been typeset. And there it was on page 9. Typeset.

Cathy drew for the Herald for 37 years. She announced it on stage at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, at a sold-out forum about free speech, which is the most Cathy Wilcox way imaginable to resign: mid-sentence, in public, on topic. The paper, in her telling, had developed a case of “editorial timidity”, and she wasn’t about to make herself smaller to suit it. She spent 37 years drawing lines. The last one she drew was under the whole arrangement.

WHen the Herald Sun ran that AI slop above, Cathy drew this:

The List.

She isn’t the first. She’s just the latest, and I want to be clear that I’m not being poetic when I tell you I keep a list now. I do. It’s a real list, and it is not a fucking fun one.1

January last year: quit the Washington Post after 17 years, when the paper killed her cartoon of tech billionaires kneeling in front of Trump. One of the billionaires was Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. You couldn’t submit that as fiction; any decent editor would bounce it back for being too on the nose. 4 months later, Ann won the Pulitzer Prize, largely for the work she did on her way out the door…

Related Reading:

5 months after Ann, the Baltimore Sun let KAL go. Kevin Kallaugher. 31 years at that paper, a 2-time Pulitzer finalist, and he’d been drawing for The Economist since before I was born. The Sun’s managing editor explained that they had decided to “allocate our freelance budget to other areas”.

Remember that phrase. We’re coming back to it.

Around the big names, there are the quiet exits. Fiona Katauskas, named Australia’s political cartoonist of the year in 2023, now freelancing after The Guardian didn’t re-up her longtime gig as editorial cartoonist.

Fiona: So, I found out on Friday that my gig at the Guardian is coming to an end in late August. Needless to say I’m rather bummed by this development AND in need of a new job so if anyone’s looking for a cartoonist HMU…

Emma Cook, let go from Stuff in New Zealand after 8 years. Colin Wicking retired from the NT News in 2022 and was simply never replaced, which is the preferred method these days: you don’t fire the cartoonist; you just wait for them to leave and quietly brick up the doorway behind them. (That’s without mentioning the ouster of people like Rob Rogers and Michael DeAdder under the first Trump Admin.)

Related Reading:

Nobody calls it a purge, because it doesn’t need to be one.

The door only swings the one way. Nobody is being hired to fill these vacant desks. The desks are being wheeled out. This is not a run of bad luck. It’s not a blip, or a rough patch, or a “challenging media environment”. It is the end of an era: the era of the staff cartoonist, which ran roughly 150 years, from the invention of the halftone to the invention of the quarterly earnings call.

And no, this is not just ‘the death of print’ -News media has moved online along with everything from crosswords and puzzles, horoscopes, job listings, editorials, and everything in between. But somehow, cartoons are the thing being jettisoned at a rate unlike anything else. (Daily comic strips were the canary in the coal mine, because they always are.)

Now.. for the part that really stings. Back to pages 6 and 7.

In August, Melbourne’s Herald Sun ran that AI-generated illustration of the Victorian Premier you saw earlier, and took great pains to point out that it was clearly labelled as AI-generated.

Ah. Well then. It’s not a burglary, officer; it says “burglary” right there on the sash. The paper added, by way of reassurance, that it had been quietly doing this for 2 years.

And then, just weeks ago, the Baltimore Sun (yes, that Sun, the same one) published an editorial cartoon with a caption noting it had been produced by the editorial staff using artificial intelligence tools…

Other areas.

They found “other areas.”

They let go of a man who spent over 30 years learning to draw exactly what he thinks, and filled the space with a machine that has never thought anything. called the result slop, which I felt was generous. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists published an open letter in protest, which is our profession’s equivalent of a strongly worded fist.

said watching AI illustrations spread through the papers felt like “a punch in the gut”. She’s right, and I’d only add that this particular punch works for free and never asks about superannuation.

Oh, and that book from the back pages of Inkspot? David Blumenstein (longtime Deputy President of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association) has literally drawn the book on this racket: Octane Render: Cartoonists Talk About AI Art. He lays the business model out in 3 tidy panels: scrape everybody’s art off the internet without asking, use it to teach a machine to draw, then launch a for-profit company selling the output back to the people you scraped. He published it in 2023 as a warning. It has just been re-released in a revised and expanded edition, which tells you precisely how the warning went.. (Almost as well as mine that year.)

Cartoonists exaggerate for a living. It’s the whole kit. So let me be uncharacteristically precise: we are not imagining this:

It is actually happening, on three fucking continents, to the best people we have.

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I’ve been introduced at parties, more than once, as a “bloke who doodles for a living”.

Nobody does this to other p…

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Some of you will remember Carly. She interviewed me on her Substack, A Good Omen, a while back. This week I got to return fire.

Four years ago, Carly reached out to the writer . When she interviewed him, she asked who she should talk to next. He said me. She sent me one email. I said yes. Then I sent her one email (”I know how busy you are, but...”), and she said yes. Somewhere since then, I also filled out the intake form for her next Reach Out Party cohort, which means I am now both her interviewer and her student, a conflict of interest I intend to exploit fully.

She told me my ask landed as a gift, not an imposition: “I ran outside and told my husband. You know what’s so cool? The chain of events that can happen from one email or DM.” That’s her entire body of work in a sentence. One email. Everything else is scaffolding.

Carly is a former actor. Broadway community, Hell’s Kitchen, 44th Street, the whole catastrophe. At about 25, stuck in a coffee shop job she hated and hunting for an agent, she did the thing that would become her life’s work without knowing it: she reached out to 1 stranger a day for 100 days.

It worked, in the boring, verifiable way these things sometimes do. She found an agent she’s still friends with. She booked a national tour. And around day 82, she finally mentioned the whole scheme to her acting coach, who was appalled. Not by the project. By the secrecy. “You have to tell people you’re doing this!” Then: “When you get to day 100, you should throw a party at the studio. I’ll host it. You can call it Carly Valancy’s Reach Out Party.”

She ran the 100 days again at 30, and the second lap taught her the lesson hiding inside the first:

Carly has a phrase I’ve been carrying around like a lucky coin: increasing your surface area for luck. More reach-outs, more rooms, more chances for the universe to trip over you. Lately she’s refined it into something even better: “placing yourself in the current of serendipity”…

I asked her to define a good omen, given she’s named an entire publication after one. She gave me a visual instead:

“I’m going to give you a lava lamp. It’s constantly moving, and there’s some kind of glow about it where you’re just like, what is that thing? It’s got texture, and it’s alive.”

Then she gave me a better one, borrowed from the theatre director Anne Bogart, whom she cold-emailed (of course she did) with the same question:

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Double-post today!
This is a repost of last year’s essay on the attacks on New York and DC. This is obviously a topic I’m very close to, having li…

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Thank you to reader David Rickert for calling my attention to this guest essay in the Times on Thursday. It really gave me hope amid the doom of the past week of AI-fueled nightmares.

For anyone in class who hasn’t done the reading, it’ll be helpful to have seen this, heard about this, and quietly lost your shit over this.

Let’s begin.

10th September, 2026
New York, NY

I know, I know. In April, I spewed 2,000 words about AI regulation and promised we’d get straight back to sketchbooks and psychotic pigeons. I’m nothing if not a man of my word, in the sense that I have once again broken it.

But hear me out: published an essay in Thursday morning’s Times, and I read it the way I read most news of the coming apocalypse: hunched at the drafting board with my coffee going cold at the same rate as my optimism.

Oren. You know what? I’m calling him Cass from now on. Cass sounds more better-er. Anyway, Cass is the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank. I am a Liberal expat cartoonist who once lost an argument with a self-checkout machine. We are not natural allies. So, when the two of us find ourselves nodding along at the same paragraph, it’s fair to assume something, somewhere, has gone properly fucking awry.

His argument (as a bit of a TL;DR) is:
Silicon Valley spent 20 years treating the public like lab rats; the public has finally noticed, and now the AI industry has turned up asking for our trust with the confidence of a man who walked into the subway car and ripped a huge fart while wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

By the way, excuse any typos or glaring errors in the following tirade… I’m writing a bunch of this on my phone in the subway. (And the smell from Airpods guy is real bad.)

So, you might have read that Americans are revolting against data centres (the buildings that, as covered in April’s rant, guzzle the electricity of 4 million homes and send them the bill) so fiercely that support has collapsed roughly thrice as much as support for nuclear power did after Three Mile Island. Yep. We are now more spooked by the sheds where the internet does its homework than we were by an actual partial nuclear meltdown.

Fewer than 1 in 4 Americans expect AI to improve their kids’ education, their jobs, the economy, their relationships or their happiness. Those are approval numbers normally reserved for jury duty and mosquitoes. When I sounded this alarm in April, I only got about 30 likes. The apocalypse, undeterred, continued apace. So it’s nice to finally have company, (even if the company is a conservative dude at a think tank.)

The President’s contribution to the debate was to post that anyone opposing data centres wants America to end up backwards and poor; the sales technique of a man in a tweed suit pounding on your screen door at midnight, yelling “Only an idiot wouldn’t want these encyclopedias!”

Cass digs up Zuckerberg’s old motto about moving fast and breaking things, then lands the cleanest line in the essay: “WE were the things being broken.”

20 years of feeds engineered like slot machines, of executives shipping apps to our kids that they wouldn’t let near their own, and now the same postcode would like us to believe the next product, the one they cheerfully describe as the most powerful in human history, is being built with our best interests at heart.

Sure, Jan.

And this time the goose really is golden. (The goose can share a paddock with the horse. The horse, long-time readers will recall, remains out, and remains shitting.)

The Prophets Would Like More Profits Pls.

It’s worth remembering what the founders themselves say. Out loud. Into microphones. On purpose.

Anthropic’s chief executive has suggested half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish within 5 years. (Remember that interview?) Musk, the man who deleted my X account after I got blocked by the President, says “Eventually, no job will be needed at all!”, and vocal-fry Altman has said “Wages for many kinds of labour will head toward zero”, then, in the same breath, promises “a future where we’re all freed up to spend time with loved ones and appreciate art.”

Cool.

Appreciate whose art, exactly, Sam? You fed the artists into the machine in Chapter 1. That’s like torching the orchard and promising everyone more time with apples. Nothing you do matches what you croak. (And that’s the common thread with everything Altman has said/done since the beginning.)

The fallback plan is a universal basic income, which Cass correctly clocks as a bribe to shut up and go away: pocket money from the people who took your job, redeemable, presumably, at the company store. He has a much better idea, which I’ll get to below, because it concerns your actual retirement, and I am saving it for after the paywall like the shameless little goose I am.

Meanwhile, as the film I reviewed in April (above) pointed out, there remains more regulation on selling a sandwich than on building the machine that 5 labs cheerfully agree might end the fucking world and all human life as we know it. Since April, precisely nothing about that has changed (except the sandwich now costs $19).

“These are the brilliant researchers actively working on the technology who casually admit they do not expect their own children to make it to high school.”

Read more.

The people building these machines openly admit they don’t fully understand how they work. They tip massive amounts of data and ‘compute’ into a digital brain, and the machine starts teaching itself things it was never programmed to do. It learns to do arithmetic, it answers advanced physics questions, and it figures out research-grade chemistry all on its own… oh, then it solves Navier-Stokes before breakfast.

My stake in this is not particularly subtle. I make my living doing the two things this technology automated first and most enthusiastically: drawing pictures and writing. Last week, it was Air Mail quietly closing another cartoon market; increasingly, its clients who used to call an illustrator are now asking a robot for “something similar” at a fraction of the price.
(You think I’m catastrophising? Read KAL or Cathy’s latest)

And Cass makes the point I’ve been shouting into the bottom of my empty scotch glass for over 3 years: The labs built themselves an exquisite, endlessly refined tool for writing code, and then, he asks, where’s the plumber’s version? Something to sort the schedule, the parts list, the invoices, the bloke ringing about his boiler at 6am? Nothing.

Speaking on behalf of cartoonists, I can report that we did get purpose-built software. It just doesn’t do our invoices. (The QuickBooks plugin for Claude is rubbish.) It does our job. Badly, and for free, which in this economy is a devastating portfolio.

You’ve seen the results. They’re the Canal Street Gucci handbags of art: convincing from 10 feet, and then you lean in, and the shoddy stitching says GUCCHI, the man in the drawing has 7 fingers, and the caption reads like it’s been written in Finnish.

Alright. I need to take a breath. My station’s coming up, and everyone’s still looking at me.

Look, I take ages to write this stuff, and I hope it’s of some use to you. If it is, I’d love you to consider throwing me six bucks, or even just a dollar a week by taking out an annual subscription. I spend most of my time working on my Substack these days, so this is my main gig now. It’s not a side hustle or a hobby. Anyway. Thank you all the same for reading. I appreciate you!

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10 September 2026
TriBeCa, New York

Last night I put on a shirt I’d ironed 3 times, which is 3 more times than I’ve ironed anything since the divorce, and walked a red carpet in Lower Manhattan. Someh…

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Scott Dooley and I have some news, and we’d like to do this properly.

After roughly 9 months of labour, we are finally giving birth to a book. It’s a follow-up to our first, award-winning book, which …

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Add it to your calendar NOW!

Last September, a woman I’d never met sat me down and extracted confessions I’d never said out loud.

That I once needed my mum’s boyfriend’s cousin’s wife to smuggle a note to a cartoonist I was too …

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8th September, 2026
New York, NY

The email arrived this morning while the coffee was still doing its job busting me out of hangover prison…

You can tell bad news before you open it. Good news comes with an exclamation mark in the subject line. Bad news opens with “I’m very sorry to pass along…”

Air Mail has stopped buying cartoons.

Not paused. Not “restructuring the humour vertical.” Stopped. No warning, either: cartoonists were asked for their last batches and drew them in good faith, right up until the moment the shutters came down. The only omen, in hindsight, was that no cartoons had appeared in the last 2 issues. “The handwriting was on the wall,” Mankoff said. We just assumed someone was going to letter it properly and add a caption.

If you don’t know Air Mail: it’s Graydon Carter’s weekly, launched in 2019 by the man who ran Vanity Fair for 25 years and co-founded Spy, which means he’s spent an entire career knowing precisely what funny costs and paying it anyway. It was one of a very short list of publications that still ran gag cartoons the way they deserve to run: handsomely presented, promptly paid, and set among writing good enough that the cartoons had to earn their spot on the page.

Cartoonists noticed. We always notice. We’re like dogs; we can hear a tin of quality being opened from 3 boroughs away.

Over the past 7 years, I’m reliably informed that more than 1,700 cartoons ran there. That’s not nothing I guess. .it’s a body of work: a whole archive of drawings by working cartoonists who could, for a while, point at a classy publication and say “I’m in that” to their mothers, their landlords and, in at least 1 documented case, their divorce lawyers. (aherrrm.)

Here’s the part that actually stings. Air Mail didn’t fold. There was no tearful farewell issue, no liquidator carrying out the Eames chairs and foozball table. (Is that how you spell Foozball?) The online magazine sails on, weekly, full of Rolex watches and villas and profiles of people with good bone structure. It’s still there. Only the cartoons went overboard..

Which means this wasn’t a death. It was a decision.

I haven’t seen their books, and I won’t pretend to know their margins. But I know what cartoons cost a publication, because I know what publications pay me, and I can tell you that a gag cartoon is reliably the cheapest thing on any page it appears on.. A single panel costs less than the flowers at the launch party. Considerably less. The flowers don’t even have a punchline. (Unless they’re those really smelly ones that only open once every fifty years or something.)

So somewhere, in a nice room, someone looked at the budget, ran a finger down the column until it reached the funniest 4 square inches in the publication - the thing readers actually screenshot, forward and stick to the fridge - and decided that was the fat to trim.

The fat. We’re the fat. (As if I don’t already have image issues about my dad bod.)

If you’d like to keep 1 working cartoonist at his drafting table while the markets do whatever the hell this is, a paid subscription to New York Cartoons (that’s me, by the way) does exactly that. That’s the whole ask.

Subscribe now

Anyway. Before the drawer claims everything, here are a few of mine (some that were collabs with my friends Joe Dator and Scott Dooley) that got to land in Air Mail while landing was still permitted:

It lands, as everything lands now, on top of ‘the AI of it all’ - you know? Software trained on decades of our drawings published online, wringing out an endless grey slurry of almost-cartoons, while the shrinking handful of places that pay for the real thing quietly close the window. It’s a pernicious little pincer movement. The machines take the style; the markets take the space; and the cartoonist is left standing on 9th Avenue holding a dip pen like a man who’s arrived at a gunfight with a fucking quill.

I’m not imagining any of this. Look at what happened with Cathy Wilcox and Kev KAL Kallaugher this past month.. both replaced with AI slop. Here’s KAL’s report on that today… Absolutely galling shit.

Kal Draws The Line

General Mayhem

I am very grateful for the backing of my subscribers. Thanks to you, I can endeavor to keep the flame of satire alight in these darkening times…

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a month ago · 99 likes · 15 comments · Kevin KAL Kallaugher

This is not a new feeling, of course. I’ve been kvetching about this for a while now.

Ask any gag cartoonist over 40 to name the markets they’ve outlived and watch their eyes go somewhere far away into the middle distance, like a grizzled war correspondent. The trade has been shrinking my entire working life. But every closure used to come with a story attached: the magazine died, the money ran out, print collapsed. Sad, but sad the way weather is sad. This one is different. This one had a budget. It just found something else to spend it on

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This?

Outside, seaplanes kept coming down the East River like they’d been thrown, and every twenty minutes Scott and I stopped mid-sentence to watch one not crash. One aborted, came around, and hit the water hard enough that we both made the noise. Nobody plans these segments.

I’m back from Columbus, where actual listeners turned up and forced us to describe our audience out loud. Here’s what we landed on: you’re pretentious, but you’re dumb enough to know you shouldn’t be. You want Barry Blitt on trade deficits, but you also want to know if the mouse has a really big dick. You are, in other words, exactly like us. (btw here’s a thing: I’m now live-drawing the ideas as we go, so the video version on Substack and YouTube is where you can watch me ruin a perfectly good joke in real time.)

Then we did the jokes. A jester’s head in the guillotine bucket, and the salesman who pitched the guillotine to the king as a workflow disruption. A MoMA guard with a new sign about muttering AI slop near the Van Gogh. A snowman in couples counselling, his wife a bucket of water: “I just think this summer has changed her.” A moth has an idea, and every moth for miles descends on it…

Somewhere in there, we stopped writing jokes and got onto the Flock cameras, the licence-plate network that lets cops look up their exes without a subpoena.

Also: the balls on the Big Merino, a pigeon with a hustle, a Borg water tower in Greenpoint, and a Gallagher courtroom gag from which Scott has formally removed his name. Because why not?

Our new book, You’re Not a Real Parent Until..., is out on October 13th and available for pre-order now wherever you buy books. It has, I’m reliably informed, already reached one bookshelf in Moscow.

By the way, if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, you can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

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▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Buy our new book at: www.realdogowner.com

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

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Columbus, Ohio
Saturday, 29 August 2026

I spent this morning hungover, on a panel with a magician and a man who professionally writes for a bird.

The bird is a puppet. The man is Josh Zagoran, the bird is Chad, and Chad has spent seventeen years delivering ten-minute news rants every Saturday at a Chicago bar called the Green Mill. The magician was Hanowell (One word. Like Reacher- just… Hanowell), who moved to Columbus to work for a magic company, got laid off, and now does it full-time: the origin story of every artist you’ve ever met, minus the top hat.

The topic was the hustle: the sideways ways people like us pay the rent. I was there as the cartoonist and the stand-up comic, which meant that in a line-up featuring a puppet and a deck of cards, I was the normal one.

Yeah, sit with that.

The moderator opened with a number I haven’t verified and don’t intend to: Roughly two-thirds of comedians make less than $100 a month. The room laughed… the way you laugh when someone reads your checking balance aloud.

Here is what I learned from the other two-thirds of the panel…

A magician can eat anywhere.

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Magic, Chris said, is fluid: a restaurant floor, a kid’s birthday, a coffee shop, a television set as a consultant. Ask a comic at a party for a joke, and we want to murder you. Ask a magician for a trick, and he’s already behind your ear with a coin.

“We’re just whoring ourselves,” he said, cheerfully. “All the time.”

He has one talent priced for six rooms. I have one act and a wobbly bronze nib.

Writing is not typing…

Josh writes Chad’s ten minutes on a Saturday morning, mostly away from the keyboard: in the garden, cleaning, doing anything that looks exactly like not writing. (Kind of like how I write mine in the bathtub.)

He structures every rant like a medieval town crier: ring the bell, hold the scroll, deliver the news, lock it in with a rhyme so the village remembers. Big opening, the goods, a callback. Which is a comedy set. And a cartoon. And this newsletter, if I’m being honest, which at a hundred dollars a month I’m not obliged to be.

“Quit your day job is something your stupid uncle says.”

That’s Josh, and I’ve stolen it. His years as a short-order cook were still the comedy career. Tom Hanks gets to just do his art. The rest of us do book illustrations, live caricatures, portrait commissions, comedy writing, New Yorker cartoons and comic strips… “Say yes to everything and figure it out later.”

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Columbus, Ohio. Thursday.

I got here on the second flight, because the first one was cancelled by a biblical flood in New York, the second weather event this week specifically engineered to sabotage my comedy ‘career’. I’m beginning to feel like a deleted scene from Geostorm.

So it’s a Hail Mary flight that hits the tarmac roughly as the shows are starting. Hotel, dump the bag, sprint to Seventh Son Brewery for the nine thirty. And the strangest thing happens when I walk in.

People know who I am…?

This never happens. Usually I’m the grey bloke in the middle of the line-up nobody can place. Is he South African? British? Why is he here? But I was in town three weeks ago for the Reuben Awards and headlined a show while I was at it, and now comics are saying oh, you’re the guy from the thing. It’s pleasant, and I don’t entirely trust it.

My girlfriend featured for me on that show. I stood at the back and watched her do fifteen minutes that felt like five, a full house that wouldn’t let her go, and then I had to follow it. I waited for the small mean voice every comic keeps in the back of the skull for exactly this situation when you have to follow a kill, and it never showed up. Just pride, in an amount that felt slightly insane. Then I went up and closed strong, which is easier to be gracious about.

She’s not here this time. I’m on my own in the same city, out front of the same brewery, and a truck is making wood-fired pizza. I order a margherita and a margarita, eat the entire pizza myself, and the truck drives off before I can tip them. The festival director, Walker Evans, introduces me to a photographer who has spent twenty years watching Austin curdle into ground zero for American bro comedy, and we have a serious conversation about the state of the art.

Three feet away stands a comedian named Eric Boso with two black eyes, a split forehead and a wad of tissue jammed up one nostril. He got hit by a car while riding his bike. He looks like hell. He’s still doing shows this weekend. A true comedy addict. He’s already posted the whole thing on Instagram with a link in his bio so you can help fund his facial reconstruction. Fun!

Walker takes me upstairs to the main room where I’m on tomorrow night and asks me to sign the wall behind the stage. I graffiti it and add stickers, because why not overdo it before I’ve set foot on the stage.

Then it’s a hop, skip and a schlep past a sea of Buckeyes flags to Hashtag Comedy Club, which contains more comedians than I have ever seen in one room. I’m fifth on the open mic list until the fourth guy doesn’t show, so suddenly I’m up with no notes, no recording running, and a stomach full of pizza and tequila. I did well, I think? Who knows. Sometimes the comedy gods are generous to out-of-towners.

Out the back everyone is smoking and working out how long until we migrate to Sweeney’s, an old house in a row of old houses that have been converted into coffee shops and wine bars and, in this case, the unofficial festival headquarters for after Seventh Son yells last call. I bump into my pal Johnny Mocny and some other comics I met in Traverse City in the spring. This is the thing about us. We’ve never really met; we’ve shared a green room and a line-up, and that’s enough. Turn up in any city on the planet and there’s an instant shorthand between comics, a race to say the most appalling thing the fastest, because the shortest distance between two people is a laugh. Or a cringe. Possibly a well-timed fart noise.

And behind all of it, spray-painted across the entire back wall, forty feet of Alfred E. Neuman with an eyepatch.

Mad Magazine. The place every one of my heroes worked. The thing I read under the covers in Perth with a torch, thirty-five years and ten thousand miles from this yard. I think maybe three people out there knew who he was. I stood with a beer going warm in my hand and felt the way you feel when a stranger on the subway is wearing your dead father’s coat.

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This? Dools and Chatto are back in the writers’ room, slinging zingers, avoiding Obvious Ocean Liners and vying for the Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-Week®!

Outside, a lightning storm walked down the East River, and every news helicopter in the tri-state hung in the rain like blowflies over a bin.

Scott and I hadn’t made a podcast in two weeks. I was away winning an award and then losing a dog, and you can’t record a comedy podcast in the fortnight between those two things without it sounding like a hostage video. The award: You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until... won the Reuben for Best Book Illustration. The book is dedicated to Morris, who died the same week.

Then we did the jokes. A production of Death of a Salesman cast entirely with horses. A dragon that’s been yassified rather than slain. A Scrabble box held aloft at a lake house, chalk poetry on Bedford Avenue, and whether even chalk is too permanent for it.

Somewhere in there, we stopped writing jokes and had a proper argument about opinions versus comedy. Scott wants to be a mirror, not a megaphone. I want a strong opinion, even a wrong one. Bob Mankoff and Dolly Parton were both invoked. We didn’t resolve it, which is why the podcast works.

Also: pigeon divorce, witch daycare, a man in a kiddie pool at the office, and the four rounds of notes I’ve had on a goblin-porn book cover. Because why not?

I’m at the Columbus Comedy Festival Friday through Sunday. Ohio, come. Book early.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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I went to Columbus, Ohio, a few weeks ago for the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards, which are the closest thing my profession has to the Oscars, if the Oscars were held in a Renaissance b…

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August 26th, 2026
The PIT, Chelsea

I spent last night doing two jobs badly at once, which is at least one more than I usually manage.

Henry Cruz asked me to host his show at the People’s Improv Theatre.…

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I started writing this post a while back, and the original title was “How I Write My Substack Posts” because people kept asking. But since then, I’ve noticed on Instagram and other platforms an increasing volume of posts encouraging people to just feed their writing into some kind of AI generator to mimic or artificially reproduce their voice, resulting in multiple fist-shaped holes in my wall.

This is, once again, like someone feeding their art into an AI generator and just having it pump out slop, missing and losing the lesson, process, and growth that come from making mistakes and iterating..

Anyway, below is a confession of how I still feel like a dilettante as a writer, but how I worked my arse off to write without a prosthesis, without using AI (except, admittedly, to spell-check, proofread, and fact-check. Let’s be honest, I’m doing that for you, not me.)

Anyway,

On with the show.

I have a confession, and I’d like you to keep it between us and the nineteen thousand six hundred and fifty-two other people I’m about to tell.

.

I am not a writer.

.

I draw for a living. I stand in front of strangers in basements and say things until they laugh or the light goes red. Writing is the thing I do in between those two jobs, the way some men take up fishing: alone, early, with a thermos, and with no real expectation that anything will bite.

I’ve told anyone who will listen that I find writing much like passing a kidney stone; it really doesn’t come comfortably and is quite painful… and yet every week I send you a few thousand words, and every week a small number of you reply, and a smaller number of you pay for the privilege, which is either very kind of you or a cry for help. (Seriously, thank you.)

So this week I thought I’d tell you how the sausage gets made. Specifically: how a cartoonist with a drafting table and a highlighter tried to teach himself to write by reading every book about writing he could find, and how that went.

It started, as most of my bad decisions do, with Stephen King. My gateway drug.

I read On Writing on a plane, expecting a how-to. A list. Something I could highlight and add marginalia, and ignore. Instead I got a man telling me about the nail he hammered into his bedroom wall as a teenager to hold his rejection slips, and how the nail eventually couldn’t take the weight, so he replaced it with a spike.

I was three chapters in before I realised what he was doing. He wasn’t telling me how to write. He was writing, right there in front of me, and letting me watch. The memoir bits were the lesson; the toolbox at the back was just the receipt.

(Sidenote: I plastered my wall with these for years. Depraved, yes, but it spurred me on.)

That was the moment I went from “bloke who types” to “bloke who would like to type gooder.” A low bar, but I cleared it, and I’ve been clearing progressively higher bars since, like a show pony with a drinking problem..

No?

Well.

After King, I went looking for rules, because rules are comforting to a man who’s just been told there aren’t any. Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir came first. She teaches at Syracuse, and the book reads like her course, if her course were delivered by a recovering Texan who has seen things. I read it in the dead of winter after a blizzard upstate in Albany… it was the perfect place to do so.

Her big idea is what she calls carnality: get the body on the page first, the smell and the sweat and the specific brand of cigarette, and the meaning will follow. The other big idea is that the person who comes off worst in a memoir should be the one holding the pen. (I couldn’t agree more. All of my jokes have me as the butt. No exceptions. Mostly.)

Anyway, I took this to heart. Some of you have written in to suggest I’ve taken it too far. Noted.

Then the Strunk & White. The Elements of Style, fourth edition, the one with the Roger Angell foreword (RIP).

If you don’t know the lineage: Strunk taught White at Cornell, White revised his old professor’s pamphlet forty years later, and Angell, White’s stepson and a New Yorker editor, wrote the foreword. It’s three generations of the same family telling you to omit needless words, which is either charming or a cult.

I became insufferable about it. I was the man at the party correcting “less” to “fewer.” I’d like to say I’ve recovered. I’d be lying, which Strunk & White would also have notes on. (I’m kidding, I don’t get invited to parties.)

’s Bird by Bird is the one everyone tells you to read, and everyone is right, which is annoying.

The title comes from her brother, aged ten, paralysed by a school report on birds he’d had three months to write and hadn’t started. Their father sat down beside him and said: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

That sentence has got me through more Tuesdays than coffee and whiskey.

Her chapter on shitty first drafts is the most useful thing anyone has ever told me about writing, and I say that as a man who once paid actual money to learn it from David Sedaris (more on him shortly). The idea is simple:

Everybody’s first draft is rubbish. The professionals aren’t the ones who write good first drafts. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with writing bad ones.

(I used to have this above my desk, written less eloquently by Hemingway. Probably while drunk.)