Michael Maslin has been in The New Yorker for 49 years…
He has catalogued every cartoonist who ever drew for the magazine, and wanted me to know that, off camera, he is surrounded by “a lot more books.” (Not his books. Just books. A man after my own heart.)
Thank you to everyone who tuned in and left comments during our live stream— a reminder: the live streams are, and will always be, free. If you missed it live, the replay is above. And the recap is written out below.
Here’s what happened, (with the links down the bottom…)
(This takes me a long while... so I paywall this part. I hope you understand.)
First, a correction to my own promo post (oops). I told you the magazine didn’t let him draw his first sale. Wrong. He did draw it. It went in with a regular batch, Lee Lorenz saw the drawing, and then came the note: “We’re just taking the idea.” Whitney Darrow Jr. would draw it instead…
“You want your foot in the door, but this wasn’t the foot in the door. This is a toe.”
He didn’t even tell his friends. Too confusing to explain. These days, people get a credit line beside the artist; back then it was “kind of hush-hush.”
The cartoon, you’ll remember, was a fortune teller telling a man, “Nothing will ever happen to you.” Decades later, Bob Mankoff asked if Michael still had his own drawing of it, and ran it online. “So it got its day in the sun.”
His first cartoon under his own name, in April 1978, was a man at a deli counter: “I’ll have a quarter pound of your most reliable cheese.” It would not have been his pick. (Same, Michael. They never take the one you’d pick. Mine was “Vlad The Employer ffs) But he said, “I was extremely glad, of course… that my life changed.”
Michael told me he submitted for something like six or seven years before anything sold. His very first batch was drawings with no captions at all, nothing to do with cartoons, sent in because a friend told him to. It came back with the standard rejection slip, and someone at the magazine had pencilled a note along the bottom: next time, send an SASE.
He didn’t know what an SASE was. He was a kid. “But the next time you send in is what I focused on.”
They haven’t stopped hearing from him since. They created a monster.
He moved to New York for one reason: to get into The New Yorker. He was sending 50 or 60 ideas a week on index cards. (He still has the index cards. Of course he does. He’s Michael friggin’ Maslin.) After many, many… many months of nothing, he got a phone appointment with Lee Lorenz and asked what he was doing wrong.
“You’re just not right for the magazine.”
End of discussion. He thanked Lee for his time and hung up.
