NYC Mayoral Portraits, The Taste Gap, Mason Currey & Liana Finck!
#442: Plus! KAL joins Substack, Remembering Sam Gross, Puppy diarrhea, & Morris finds his favourite spot, which also happens to be the most inconvenient.
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Hey again, friend.
Welcome to Issue #442 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, I’m nursing a bit of a hangover from the Best-Seller drinks last night. The Substack Summer Solstice event was at the Brooklyn Grange Farm and featured a lot of writers, artists, musicians and other eager, angry, creative minds comparing notes on how long we’ve got before we get shipped to an Equadorian prison for writing the wrong words about the Dear Leader. What a vibe.
How was your weekend? Get up to anything interesting? Any military parades or protests?
By the way, if you enjoy getting my emails each week, please FWD them with as many friends as you can. I don’t advertise or anything, so it’s people like you who make it possible for me to keep doing this work.
Speaking of which: I’m really excited about this week’s guests on Draw Me Anything: I’m speaking with the author of one of my all-time favourite books,
—and one of my favourite New Yorker cartoonists, . Both of them have great Substacks. Click on their names above to subscribe.If you want to add the Mason Currey event (today at 1pm) to your calendar, click here, and while you’re at it, click on this link to add Liana’s chat (Thursday at 3pm) to your calendar, too. They’re going to be fun!
Last week I spoke with
about joke writing, the psychology of comedy and group dynamics, and the cure for the weird online disinhibition effect that has crippled our ability to talk to each other properly. You can see our chat here:Matt Ruby on Comedy, Mindfulness, and Why Algorithms Are Ruining Everything
Yesterday, I sat down with Matt Ruby, a comedian who's somehow managed to turn drug experimentation into art, philosophical wisdom into punchlines, and crowdwork critique into a manifesto. What started as a chat about joke writing quickly devolved into an exploration of why we're all slaves to Chinese algorithms, how meditation is the antidote to everything, and…
On Thursday, I spoke with Berlin & London-based cartoonist
about his career, about Instagram vs. Substack, about writing and drawing, and we both drew together live on camera. It was really fun. You can watch that one here:Prison Shivs, Pigeon Blue, & the Art of Spoonist Forks with Chaz Hutton
Yesterday I got to hang out with Chaz Hutton, the architect-turned-cartoonist whose stick figures have somehow conquered the internet through what he cheerfully admits might just be "laziness."
Adventures in political portraiture for Substack's coverage of the New York mayoral election.
I spent Tuesday morning doing what any reasonable person does at 3am—hunched over my drawing board in my New York studio, drawing portraits of (mostly) grown adults who aspire to run this here city of New York.
Substack had commissioned me to create hand-drawn illustrations of some mayoral candidates for The Substack Post, which went live Thursday morning, and naturally, I'd left it until the last possible moment to turn them in.
This is how I work best: caffeinated, ink-stained, panicked and making artistic decisions with the deranged confidence of someone whose caricature of his landlord was so accurate it got him evicted. (Different story. Different apartment. Different decade when I could still afford rent without selling a kidney. I really shouldn’t have hung it on the fridge. I knew he’d see it.)
The assignment seemed straightforward enough: Eleven challengers, one incumbent, draw 6 of them. But as I started sketching, I realised I was essentially drawing a lineup of people auditioning for the role of captain on a sinking ship—except the ship is also on fire, and half the passengers are arguing about whether water is wet.
Spoiler alert: it’s not water…
Read the rest here:
The Mayoral Candidates Ranked by How Much Ink They Cost Me.
The New York Mayoral Circus: A Portrait of Political Delusion
The Taste Gap: You know your work sucks. You’re not wrong.
But it’s not because you’re bad—it’s because your taste is good. Let’s talk about that weird little hell…
When I first started out as a cartoonist, I thought I was pretty good. Not, like ‘Pat Oliphant hot shit’—more like ‘Mid-2000s Gawker hot shit.’ Which is to say: confident, under-edited, and mostly noise. Emphasis on shit.
I was pretty sure I had taste. I knew what good looked like. I knew Richard Thompson1 could draw a fencepost with three lines and make it feel like the whole emotional weight of suburbia hinged on that fencepost. I knew a Roz Chast squiggle could hold more neurosis than a whole year of tele-therapy. I knew what worked. And then I tried to do it myself…
Spoiler: it did not work. At all.
The punchlines were obvious. The drawings were stiff. Everyone’s arms looked like soggy churros. I once drew a hand that looked like an undercooked prawn trying to dial a phone. I knew it was bad—and worse, I knew why.
Keep reading:
The Taste Gap (And Why Your Art Is Trash at First... But That’s Okay)
When I first started out as a cartoonist, I thought I was pretty good. Not, like ‘Pat Oliphant hot shit’—more like ‘Mid-2000s Gawker hot shit.’ Which is to say: confident, under-edited, and mostly noise. Emphasis on shit.
Gross But Not Forgotten.
Talking with fellow New Yorker cartoonists this past weekend, I got al nostalgic for the cartoonist parties we used to have on Long Island at Bunny Hoest’s place. Here’s a photo of me with Ellis Rosen and
bothering our favourite pal, Sam Gross.
He was one of the all-time greats. I wrote a little something about him when he died a couple of years back:
#27: Sam Gross: The most absurdly funny gag cartoonist to ever wield a pen.
I really hate that this post comes days after a post about losing the great Al Jaffee, and moments after the passing of the great George Booth, and Ed Koren but here we are.
If you liked that, the editors of Toonstack wrote about how much we miss him in this post below:
The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is the finished scribble of that dog I started sketching last week. I just realised all the other ink on the page looks like he’s allergic to chicken and just ate a bowl of nuggets.
KAL Joins Substack!
I discovered Kal's newsletter last week when he emailed me with the good news that he’ll now be posting his cartoons on Substack. Here's a guy who's been drawing political cartoons for 47 years at The Economist—longer than I've been breathing—and he writes about it like he's genuinely surprised anyone still pays attention.
This is what I love about seasoned cartoonists: they've seen enough political cycles to know that today's earth-shattering scandal will be tomorrow's trivia answer, yet they keep showing up with their pens, every single day. KAL has that beautiful mix of institutional memory and zero pretension that you only get from someone who's drawn 11,000+ cartoons and lived to tell about it.
His backstories are the real treasure here. There's something deeply comforting about reading someone who's been through multiple decades of people being absolutely certain the world is ending.
If you're looking for someone who can make you laugh about politics without making you want to throw your phone in the Hudson River, give Kal a read. The man's earned his stripes, and more importantly, he's earned the right to be funny about it.
Morris knows I need to sit precisely in this spot for my live streams. About ten minutes to showtime… this is where he decides to do his Roadkill Frog impression.
Thank you for introducing us to Kal (well, the man and the Substack—have loved his cartoons/commentary for years)!! PS Love your portraits!!
You’re killing it with the guests man!