468. A Triple-DMA Week, Lectures on Tap in NYC, Emily Flake Is Officially Funny & Comedy in Michigan!
Plus! Mort has a birthday, MoCCaFest 2026, & Morris gets
Look, this is a fun one, but it’s also a LONG one (ooer), so do me a favour and click the title up top to view this in your browser so it doesn’t cut off in your mail app. (Why does it do that anyway?)
Hey again, friend.
Welcome to Issue #468 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, Morris is tugging at my sock and waggling his head to try to yank it from my foot. Such is my commitment to this newsletter that I’m refusing to get up from my chair until I’ve hit ‘send’. This could well spell death for my sock, but SOCK-DARNIT THAT’S THE SACRIFICE I’M WILLING TO MAKE!
I’m still nursing the hangover from the weekend’s Oscars party. Here was my contribution to the evening’s menu…
Sunlight is slowly returning to New York City and flooding into the studio to alleviate my Seasonal Affective Disorder and give me enough energy to churn out not one, not two, but THREE epic episodes of Draw Me Anything for you this week. I really had fun with these! I’ll be posting the recap of the third one for you tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who tuned into the free livestreams yesterday.
I talked a lot of shop with a lot of great people this week.
I had lunch with my friend (and longtime MAD Art Director & illustrator) Sam Viviano yesterday, along with the ridiculously talented Ray Alma. We paid way too much for diner food while talking comedy, cartooning and the fine(?) art of doing Trump impressions.
Then I went along to the Society of Illustrators to watch recent DMA Guest Liza Donnelly present a screening of her film “Women Laughing” about the women cartoonists of the New Yorker. It’s a great film - lots of laughs and really interesting insights. You can catch a replay of it next weekend at MoCCaFest. You can hear me talking with Liza about it here.
After the screening she was interviewed alongside two of the featured cartoonists, the legendary Roz Chast and Emily Flake. (See below for some exciting news about Emily).
On the topic of short films and documentaries, my good friend and documentary director Rachel Ross is making an excellent film that needs a bit of a nudge. if you want to support independent artists in New York, this is a great one to back. See the details on “Good Girl Greta” here.
On Tuesday, I had my second big chat with award-winning cartoonist Kevin KAL Kallaugher. You can catch the recap below. We discussed everything from curmudgeonly old nib-sellers, the deranging effects of the Trump regime administration, to a crosshatching masterclass! I think you’ll really like it:
I also had a great talk with Jeremy Caplan from the wildly popular Substack Wonder Tools! We discussed everything from AI ethics to process, time-boxing, and the impossible task of keeping up with all of the new software that blasts into our inboxes like a broken fire hydrant.
You can catch that recap/replay tomorrow if you’re a paid subscriber.
And lastly (but not least..ly) I had an incredible talk with Dave Kellett from Drive: The Sci-Fi Comic and Brad Guigar of The Webcomics Handbook (both co-hosts of the Comic Lab Podcast (over 400 episodes in!)
You can catch that recap on Sunday- again, recaps are for paid subscribers, the live streams will always be free to everyone.
Thank you to my brilliant readers who sent in photos of their little puppers with their new hand-drawn portraits in my new book. Sassy here gave it ten belly rubs out of ten…
Carex here hasn’t stopped talking about how good the drawing looks, and how funny the joke on page 38 is.
If you have a friend with a dog, send me a photo and I’ll draw them into the book for you.
Thanks to my friends who came out to the show at New York Comedy Club last week— I got to enjoy dinner with my old pal Mort Gerberg before the show to celebrate his birthday. If there’s ever a way to remind you how much work’s ahead of you as a joke-writer, try talking to a cartoonist in their mid-nineties…
If you haven’t heard of Mort Gerberg, by gum, you’re about to. Click below to read my “Someone You Might Like” entry about him.
Speaking of Telling Jokes…
I’m headed to Michigan next month for the Traverse City Comedy Festival! I’m excited to get to share stages with some of my favourite comics in the world including previous podcast guest Roy Wood Jr. and the incredible Gary Gulman!
On Wednesday, April 8, I’m putting on pants and leaving the house to do a Lectures on Tap event at a bar in the West Village. I’ll be desperately trying to explain how I went from drawing with rocks on remote Australian dirt roads to arguing with editors at the New Yorker over a sketch of an elephant buying peanuts. I’m going to dismantle the myth of the “lone genius,” mostly because the actual creative process is just sharing terrible shower notes and hoping someone else fixes them before the deadline.
We’re going to cover the whole messy journey, right down to the specific, horrifying afternoon that Rupert Murdoch unceremoniously killed an iconic 102-year-old comic strip. Come grab a $14 IPA and listen to me explain why aggressively annoying your heroes until they teach you is the only valid career strategy. Grab a ticket at the link, and they’ll email you the exact address so we can all sit in a dark room and collectively avoid eye contact.
On Saturday, March 28 I’ll be physically located inside the Metropolitan Pavilion at 125 West 18th Street for MoCCA Fest 2026. This is Manhattan’s largest indie comics and cartoon festival, and I’ll be sitting at a table, clutching a Blackwing pencil like a life raft, and trying to mask my overwhelming dread interacting with hordes of strangers.
A day pass is $25, and the whole weekend is $36, which is about the price of a coffee in NoLiTa. Please come find me. If you don’t show up, I’m going to have to sit alone with my own farts thoughts. If you have a French Bulldog, bring him so I can aggressively compare him to my dog. I will also draw them. Just come say hi.
Lastly, my dear friend and fellow New Yorker cartoonist/comedian Emily Flake was juuuuuust awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor! If you’ve never heard of Emily, by gum you’re about to— and not just from me! Take it from a previous DMA guest, Tom Toro, rightfully heaping effusive praise on Emily below:
More on Emily in my early “Someone You Might Like” post on her from 3 years ago:
Be sure to add Tuesday, 24th at 12 pm EDT to your calendar, when I’ll be talking to Emily LIVE on Draw Me Anything. (yes, that’s NEXT Tuesday.)
Be sure to leave a comment below
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