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.

The “Rough”

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…

Take the word “celebrities.” I wrote it perhaps fourteen times. SEAT MAP, SEATING MAP, SEAT MEAP (a typo I briefly considered keeping, because it sounded like a noise of despair). M.S.G with the full stops, M.S.G without, MSG like a seasoning. You hand-letter a word enough times, and it stops being a word and becomes a small angry centipede.

Then the logo. The Knicks logo famously lives dead centre on the court, so I couldn’t fake it. I drew it by hand, in blue pencil first to rough the shape, then inked over the top, the orange triangle and the ball and that blocky New York lettering, the kind of thing that looks simple until you are three attempts deep and quietly furious. I redrew the court itself three or four times before it sat right. I wanted the MSG geometry exactly correct, because anyone who’s been knows the place has a distinct shape, and getting it wrong is the kind of thing that gets you destroyed in the comments by a man named GaryKNIX69.

I worked from a reference, a real seat map, the way you’d consult an atlas before pretending to know everything about a country. Then I drew my own, looser, on purpose, so nothing looked too rigid.

The copy edits came back from proofing. Add the full stops to M.S.G. Make “YOU” all caps. Mind the boss’s boss’s boss apostrophes, which multiply like the bosses themselves. Small things. The kind of polish you don’t notice unless it’s missing, which is precisely the point of it.

And then there was the “you.”

There’s a tiny “you” in the bottom left, the punchline arrow, the you-are-here of the entire gag. And I had to move it up. Not for art. For Instagram. Because Instagram, in its infinite wisdom, parks a little circular bubble icon over the bottom-left corner of any image the moment someone reshares it, and that bubble will cheerfully cover a caption, a punchline, or in my case the single word the whole joke depends on.

No design school on earth prepares you for composing around a social-media app’s UI gremlin. You just learn it the hard way, swearing, at 2am.

A couple of sleepless nights later, I turned it in. It’s on newyorker.com today.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.