A Daily Toon for the New Yorker: Real Knicks Fans Who Are Terrible with Money (a love letter to the Garden)
Drawing the New York pecking order, one flimsy nib stroke at a time
Scott and I sold a cartoon to the New Yorker last week. It ran today.
Let me take the swagger out of that sentence immediately, because it arrived nothing like you’d imagine. No wood-panelled office, no monocle, no butler applauding softly from the wings. I submitted a batch. A batch is the polite word for a scrappy pile of ideas hastily scrawled in pencil, most of which will be rejected, some of which deserve to be. Mine were about the Knicks, who are in the finals, which in this city is treated as roughly equivalent to the Second Coming, only louder, and with worse beer.
Most of the batch died on the table. They always do. You learn to grieve quickly.
But one survived. A map of Madison Square Garden seen from above, the seating sections labelled not by price but by status: Celebrities. Finance and tech bros. Your boss’s boss’s boss. Real fans who are terrible with money. And down in the corner, an X. That’s you.
It started, as these things do, in a Google Doc with my writing partner, Scott. Noodling. Noodling is the technical term for two grown men typing half-jokes at each other across NYC at hours when sensible adults are asleep.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about courtside at the Garden. It is not a money hierarchy. It is a status one. Half the celebrities don’t pay a cent; the tickets arrive gratis because their faces sell the broadcast. The hedge-fund guy three seats back paid more than your apartment is worth and is, socially speaking, furniture. To confirm I had the pecking order right, I texted my mate Ronny, who is frequently in the front row, close enough to know precisely who sits where and which of them got in for free. He confirmed the hierarchy. He fact-checks the rich for me, no charge.
Now. I work by hand. All of it.
I know this makes me sound like a man who churns his own butter, but I use a Hunt 101 nib in a dip pen, with Higgins Black India ink, on actual paper, and I will not be taking questions. I draw it, then I scan it. That is the whole religion.
What you don’t see in the finished cartoon is how much of it is just the same thing, drawn again and again until my hand stops getting it wrong…
