418. New Year New Digs, Annual Self Portrait, Cartoon Exodus at WaPo
+ Your Poll Results & Morris wishes you a grumpy new year
I hope your 2025 is starting off with a bang! (hopefully not in a Cybertruck.)
The poll results are in: You all voted, and I’m thankful to you for punching in your favourite sections of the newsletter. You seemed to like the ‘Sketchbook’ and ‘Around New York’ sections the most. Oh, and Morris (of course).
Accordingly, I’ll be shuffling the order of the sections around for 2025. Except Morris. You’re still going to have to scroll to the bottom to see his ridiculous little face. Sorry.
New Year, New Digs.
On New Year’s Day, I moved to Hell's Kitchen – the Alphabet City of Midtown West. My new apartment is a fifth-floor walk-up in a 126-year-old tenement building with a stoop, a fire escape, and a boiler pipe that clangs like it's trying to communicate in Morse code. The super has already taught me the building's quirks with the kind of pride usually reserved for showing off a vintage Jaguar. When sirens and drunken Broadway audiences wail past my window at 3am, and someone inevitably screams, "SHUDAFUGGUP!" out the window, I feel more at home than I ever did in that pristine tower.
Read more about my time living in the fancy glass castles in Hudson Yards in my piece below:
Every year for the past 10 years, I’ve used my 'warm-up sketches' time on New Year’s Day to scribble a self-portrait.
It’s the only time I do it. The style depends on whether I’m at the drawing board or sitting at the Cintiq. I don't meditate much on these; I just start drawing and see what emerges. It’s usually a reflection of my feelings about that year. I’ll be sharing this year’s with paid subscribers this week. Here are the previous years’ efforts:
2023:
After much grunting and grousing, this is what fell out of the pencil… I chose the very specific, life-changing moment this year when I first laid my eyes on a Bloomin’ Onion. I’m so upset at what happened next.
2022:
A frantic mess of book deadlines, comic strip problems, endless texts, emails… a frazzled mess of a year.
2021:
I seem to be trepidatiously opening my eyes to see if another shitty year is over.
2020:
Pretty obviously the end of a harrowing ordeal of a year: Becoming overly familiar with masks, gloves, and social distancing, coming out the other side of a battle for my lungs.
2019:
Working on deadlines right up until Christmas morning. Again.
2018:
Fulfilling a lifelong dream (nightmare) of becoming one of the Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD Magazine.
2017:
The year of the GIF.
👇
See more below:
“Why I’m Quitting the Washington Post”
On New Year’s Eve, I found my badge from the annual American Association of Editorial Cartoonists conference. I joked on Instagram, “I wonder how long this will last in 2025.”
Turns out, the answer was: four days.
( Read the post below from
)
I’m simultaneously nauseated and terrified by what this portends for America in the coming years. Dread. I feel pure dread.
The loss of Ann’s voice from WaPo is sad. The silver lining is that she will be sharing her crucial, Pulitzer Prize-winning work here on
. Subscribe to Ann’s substack if you care about cartoonists being able to share their work without being censored by tech billionaires and their spineless flunkies.Democracy dies in darkness, the darkness of a coal mine where a very talented canary just went quiet. She was silenced.
I just cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. I suspect I won’t be the only one.
This week on Process Junkie, we look back on the best of the posts from 2024
Dispatches from NancyFest 2024
Ernie Bushmiller's iconic, sassy American comic character finally had her own festival this weekend at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library, where we got a very special tour!
