Draw Me Anything with Michael Maslin. Friday, 9 October, 12pm ET, live on Substack!

In August 1977, The New Yorker bought an idea from a kid fresh out of college...

In August 1977, The New Yorker bought an idea from a kid fresh out of college…

They didn’t let him draw it, mind you. They gave it to the veteran Whitney Darrow Jr., and it ran that December:

(His first drawing under his own name ran on 17 April 1978. Before that, his career high was a high school strip called Our Table, read exclusively by the kids at his lunch table. I’ve done comedy shows like that.)

Forty-nine years later, Michael is still in the magazine. Worst prediction The New Yorker ever printed.

In August 2007, he did something nobody asked him to do and everybody now relies on. He started Michael Maslin's Ink Spill, a blog about New Yorker cartoonists past and present. Nearly 20 years on, it’s the closest thing my profession has to a journal of record: who sold what, who has a book out, who we’ve lost, written up with more care than most obituary desks manage. His New Yorker Cartoonists A-Z holds a bare-bones bio of every cartoonist who has ever contributed to the magazine. Every single one. (I check it more often than my bank balance. It’s less upsetting.)

He also spent 15 years researching and writing Peter Arno: The Mad Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist, the first full biography of the man who more or less invented the New Yorker cartoon (he sent me a copy… I learned more about New York from that book than anything I’ve ever read!) -Oh, and Ink Spill now lands on Substack, with the Monday Tilley Watch, Thurber Thursdays, and a lot of beautiful old junk from the attic.

He also happens to be married to Liza Donnelly, who’s been on the show twice, (and the cartoonist with whom I spent a weekend in France at the St Just-le-martel cartoon festival last week.) Together they wrote Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple. So on Friday I finally get the other side of the story.

Full disclosure: Michael does not own a smartphone. He owns a flip phone. So instead of our usual set-up, he’ll draw on actual paper and hold it up to the laptop camera, like a hostage proving he’s still alive. Then it’s your turn: lob requests into the chat, and he’ll draw those too!

Draw Me Anything with Michael Maslin. Friday, 9 October, 12pm ET (5pm London, 6pm Paris, which is what my body clock still insists it is), live on Substack at drawmeanything.com

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.