467. My Style Guide, A Graphite Anchor, Pulped Books, Margreet DeHeer, A Literary Reading at a KGB Bar, & AI Rulings in the Supreme Court!

Plus! My talks with Sarah Hill and Jenny Lawson, & of course, Morris.

Hey again, friend.

Welcome to Issue #467 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, Morris has his head on my leg, keeping me pinned me to the couch for an undetermined number of years. For that reason, I’m going to just keep writing until he wakes up/farts/wakes himself up from farting.
Thank you as always for subscribing. I’ve been working hard over here, sharing an ungodly amount of writing. Here’s what you might have skimmed past this past week…

Talking with fellow New Yorker Sarah Hill
I recently sat down with Sarah on her podcast to rant about the sheer, masochistic absurdity of drawing pictures for a living. We covered the ruthless pragmatism required to actually survive in New York, why I abandoned guilt-trip to-do lists for strict calendar blocking, and the soul-crushing reality of having a hundred thousand copies of your book pulped by a bankrupt publisher. It was a deeply cathartic chat about trading romanticised notions of an art career for a waterproof notepad in the shower. (And yes, we attempted to justify my stationery budget).

The Style Guide in My Pocket
My friend Anthony recently asked me why I don’t just use AI to write my essays, seeing as I find writing to be an excruciating process of untangling my own spaghetti-bowl of a brain. It’s a fair question. I don’t consider myself a “Writer” -I’m just a cartoonist clutching a copy of Strunk & White like a life raft. In this piece, I lay out exactly which ethically-trained digital tools I do use to keep my sanity intact, and why setting guardrails on my own prose is the only thing keeping me from wandering into a forest of day-old oatmeal words.

How to Survive Farting at the Queen
If your brain occasionally feels like a hostile work environment, this recap of my chat with the brilliant Jenny Lawson is for you. We talked about her new book, " Surviving the Daily Gauntlet of ADHD”, and why the “Spoon Theory” is the only way to explain executive dysfunction to a neurotypical person. More importantly, we discussed the 17th-century Earl of Oxford who farted in front of Queen Elizabeth I and exiled himself for seven years. It’s a masterclass in giving yourself permission to be a messy, imperfect human, or a murderous, jiggly hippo.

Live in New York This Week
If you want to come see me live this week, I’ll be performing at New York Comedy Club on the Upper West Side on Wednesday at 9pm on a show featuring Anthony Moore, Alex Gardes, Molly Densmore, & Yvette Segan: the line-up is great, and tix are only 10 bucks with the code HTA0311!

I’ll also be performing on one of the best shows in Brooklyn later this month -YIKES! Comedy at Flophouse Comedy Club: get your tickets early!

Photo by Man Above town

The Sludge, the KGB Bar, and the Rebirth of Print
I woke up this week with the blurry-eyed weariness of a man who foolishly decided to put on hard pants and go out on a Tuesday night. I trudged through the toxic street-sludge of the East Village to the KGB Bar to celebrate the launch of The Metropolitan Review. In a world pivoting to AI-generated garbage, holding a physical, printed literary quarterly in a packed, sweaty room of actual human writers felt like a profound act of defiance. Also, I’m their new Cartoon Editor. (If you’re a working gag cartoonist, expect an email.)

The Supreme Court Just Made AI Art Legally Worthless
While I was trying to draw a guy falling butt-first into a toilet with a messy dip pen, the Supreme Court basically cemented the rule that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted. Zero. Zilch. It immediately enters the public domain. The tech bros have spent a year arguing that typing a prompt is like clicking a camera shutter. Still, the law has decided that without the struggle -without the deeply flawed, neurotic human being holding the pen- a perfectly rendered image has no intrinsic legal value. The friction is the whole point.

The Graphite Anchor in a Digital Storm
My $1200 iPad Pro decided its $130 plastic pen was dead to it right in the middle of a job. As my brain began to aggressively shut down, I reached past the crumpled receipts and dog treats in my bag for a blunt Blackwing 602 pencil. It didn’t need a firmware update or a Bluetooth handshake. In a world that demands we be constantly connected to a spinning wheel of death, there is something profoundly defiant about the scratchy, physical reality of graphite meeting pulp. It’s a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century nervous breakdown.

Scroll down to see more about my special guest for this week’s DMA. And, as always…

…be sure to leave a comment below!

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The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a selection of the sketches I did of peoples’ dogs as gifts this past week. If you have a friend with a dog, send me a photo and I’ll draw them into the book for you.

This morning I avoided my drawing table and started reading about Dutch theology… I only have one person to blame. Tomorrow on Draw Me Anything, I’m sitting down with Margreet De Heer, a comic artist who has lived about four different, fascinating lives.

Margreet originally flunked out of film school at the tender age of 17. So, naturally, she pivoted to studying theology at the University of Amsterdam. Why? Because religion is ultimately about the great stories of mankind, and her family is full of theologians. Along the way, she realised that making comics is exactly like making a film- except you don’t have to deal with the soul-crushing hassle of working with other people or begging for expensive equipment. She is my kind of antisocial genius.

She cut her teeth working at Lambiek, the legendary Amsterdam comic store, getting a masterclass in the medium from Kees Kousemaker. When the 2009 financial crisis wiped out two-thirds of her paid gigs, she married a fellow comic artist, moved into his reasonably priced apartment, and started drawing full-length graphic novels about philosophy, religion, and world domination. Her philosophy primer sold out in its first week. Not a bad pivot.

She eventually became the Stripmaker des Vaderlands (Comic Artist Laureate of the Netherlands). To wrap up her three-year term, she ran a crowdfunding campaign on Voordekunst for a book compilation where she literally stripped to raise 15,000 euros. I respect the hustle. (If I tried stripping to fund a book, I’d be arrested and immediately lose my remaining subscribers). Last year, she won the prestigious Zilveren Griffel award for her children’s book Kip en Kat , and she’s currently building a fantastic Substack filled with highly personal, autobiographical comics. (You can subscribe here.)

We’re going to talk about the lonely, maddening process of making comics, how to survive as an artist when the economy tanks, and whatever else comes up while we scribble. A little digital monastery for cartoonists. Because if there’s one thing cartoonists need, it’s confinement.

If you want to join the stream, request a live drawing, jump on the stream FREE!

If you’re new here, or you haven’t had a moment to wander back through the archives of profound genius I’ve shared up to this point, take a peek at the following scribblings: