Thank you Dana Jeri Maier, Bear Edwards, Jenifer Douglas, Janice Driver, Sudarshan Cadambi, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michael Gerber!
“You can’t write a line of code that replaces the invisible labour, the thousands of terrible rough sketches, and the deeply human derangement required to make a truly great cartoon.”
If you try to launch a print humour magazine in the 21st century, most financial advisors will tell you to just set your money on fire instead; it’s faster, it requires less paperwork, and it keeps you warmer in the winter.
We live in the era of the digital churn. We live in an ecosystem where corporate media conglomerates are continuously gutting their editorial staff, pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to AI slop, and generally treating the written word and the drawn cartoon as disposable ephemera. The conventional wisdom is that print is dead…
But!
…if you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you know I’m obsessed with the messy, unglamorous back-end of making a living as an artist. I love pulling back the curtain on the creatives who look at the “churn,” laugh, and figure out how to keep the lights on without selling their souls to the algorithm.
This week on Draw Me Anything, I brought in a guy who looked at a sinking ship and decided to build his own lifeboat.
I was thrilled to host the brilliant Michael Gerber. Michael is the publisher, editor, and mastermind behind The American Bystander, a publication that Newsweek literally called “the last great humour magazine.”
During the stream, we dug into exactly how you resurrect a print humour magazine in the 21st century without setting mountains of corporate cash on fire. It is a story of grit, absurd luck, and a publishing model that bypasses the corporate overlords entirely. But before we get to the Chinese oligarchs and the naked Kickstarter launch, we have to go back to a very small room in the One World Trade Centre…
Sam Gross, The Everest of Cartooning & the Mouse in the Car
My introduction to The American Bystander didn’t happen on a newsstand. It happened in the absolute epicentre of the New York cartooning world.
It was late 2014, maybe early 2015. I was a relatively new immigrant to America, still trying to figure out the brutal mechanics of the New York publishing scene. To my brain, the ultimate peak of the industry -the absolute Everest of cartooning- was getting into MAD Magazine and getting into The New Yorker. Those were the twin pillars of the comedy art world. Everything else was just scenery.
Related Reading:
I was sitting at The New Yorker in the Cartoon Lounge. (Let’s be honest; it wasn’t really a “lounge”. It was a small box off to the side from where cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s office was. But the physical space didn’t matter, because of who was in said box.
The legendary Sam Gross was sitting in the room. He was in a chair, positioned right below a giant framed picture of his classic cartoon, the one with the mouse driving the wind-up car. If you’re a cartoonist, sitting in a room with Sam Gross is like a guitarist sitting in a room with Keith Richards.
Related Reading:
Sam was holding a copy of a magazine I had never seen before. “Kid, have you heard of this magazine?” he asked me. I looked at the cover. The unmistakable, beautiful line work of Arnie Roth stared back at me. It was Issue Number Six. “I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t heard of it,” I admitted.
Sam started explaining what it was, and as he flipped through the pages to show me the cartoons, my jaw hit the floor. I was looking at a murderers’ row of comedy art. “This is everyone I love,” I remember thinking. “These are all my favourite cartoonists in here. What the hell? How long has this thing been around?”
Sam saw the absolute shock on my face. “Yeah, right?” he smirked. “You should submit to this.”
It takes a long time to put these interviews and recaps together. If you find my work valuable, I’d really love it if you’d consider upgrading to paid for just $1 a week. It makes all the difference.
Naturally, the moment he said that, the impostor syndrome kicked in with the weight of a freight train. I was so completely enamoured with this magazine, yet I had absolutely no idea it even existed. When I told this story to Michael on the stream, he just laughed. “Well, that’s kind of the story of the business right there,” he said…
“…Everybody loves it. Very few people know about it. We’re always trying to figure out how to get more people to know about it.”
Fast forward to today, and I am deeply proud to not only be a contributor to The Bystander but to have now hosted its “re-founder” to talk about exactly how this impossible publication came to exist.
The Trifecta and the Pitch
To understand The American Bystander, you have to understand the pedigree of the people who originally conceived it…
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to New York Cartoons to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
