Fuzzy Men, Dorian Gray, & Knitting Dinosaurs!
#439: Plus! The Umbilical Brothers, A Jazz Album, & Morris is obstinate for a change.
Welcome to Issue #439 of New York Cartoons!
What a bonkers, whirlwind week it’s been! The Yankees beat the Angels, the Knicks are in with a hailmary chance to win the NBA Finals, and Fleet Week turned Manhattan into a deleted scene from On The Town. I hope you had an enjoyable Memorial Day long weekend.
I had the wildest comedy show on Saturday night— I’ll share more with paid subscribers later this week. I was just relieved that the new material worked, and the audience didn’t chase me out of the venue. Not like last time.
I’m excited to share that I have some huge guests lined up for future episodes of Draw Me Anything, including 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes and New York Times Best-Selling author Austin Kleon! Stay tuned for those, and this week…
A request of you!
I’ll be chatting Thursday at 3pm with the very clever Nishant Jain of The SneakyArt Post for this week’s edition of Draw Me Anything. He’s going to show me how he does his famous little “Tiny People,” and we need a subject or two for him to instruct me! If you want to send a full-length photo of you, or anyone you want sketched, send it here. Details on the live stream below!
The two Fuzziest Guys on Substack
Newsletters, Comedy, and the Future of Art:
Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with fellow bearded, bespectacled writer/comedian Alex Dobrenko` for his publication Both Are True to compare creative insecurities and Substack blunders (as one does when you're both just internet-famous enough to be recognized at your local coffee shop but not famous enough for anyone to care.)
We kicked things off by me admitting I made pretty much every mistake with my Substack journey. Like a true professional, I launched three separate newsletters before Sophia at Substack essentially told me, "Stop being an idiot and combine these." I listened, and shockingly, it worked. He, too, had created multiple joke Substacks. We're basically twins. Watch/read more below.
Protecting Your Time for Art!
I also had the pleasure of talking with Adam Ming, the talented illustrator and prolific mind behind one of the best creative daily newsletters on Substack: Ten Minute Artist - Daily Creative Joy.
We covered everything from his circuitous journey as an artist, his cartooning influences growing up in Malaysia, to the practical realities of building a creative career, all while attempting to draw a dinosaur knitting a scarf (his came out way better than mine, naturally).
This week’s Sketchbook is from my chat with Adam Ming. The request that came through in the live chat was “A Dinosaur Knitting”. Naturally, Adam’s turned out better than mine, but here’s my effort:
Here is a sketch I did of my pal Alex Dobrenko`from our chat last week. He has the great combination of the world’s coolest glasses and the best hair of any human man I’ve done a live stream with.
If you’d like a copy of the new book with a sketch of your dog in it, you can order a limited edition hand-signed edition below!
Portrait of the Critic as a Mucus Factory: A Feverish Night with Dorian Gray
…For the ensuing two hours, Sarah Snook transformed herself into twenty-six different characters before my watery eyes. The same Sarah who, late one night in 2016, sat across from me in a dimly lit booth at Old Town Bar on East 19th & Broadway, clinking whiskey glasses and sharing horror stories from the acting trenches along with fellow Australians Jai Courtney (in town promoting "Suicide Squad") and James Mackay (filming a "Dynasty" reboot for CW). I myself am not an actor (but I played one on TV.)
That night, we’d been blearily discussing a pilot she was there to shoot—some new thing produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell that loosely parodied the Murdoch family. That little project would, of course, become HBO’s "Succession," the series that went on to resuscitate Appointment Television and dominate every award ceremony with the unstoppable precision of Simone Biles at the Olympics.
"I’m never really sure if it'll work, the satire is very different. It’s like The Big Short meets Billions," she'd said that night. “That sounds amazing!” I said, "Yeah. But there’s a chance people might not get it." She added, our Aussie accents becoming thicker after several rounds.
People got it.
And now here she was, nine years later, stepping onto the Broadway stage with such mesmerizing command that I forgot to blow my nose. I let it run for so long I started drowning from the inside. I scribbled in my soggy playbill: "The greatest vanity in theater is believing a solo performer lacks ego." Yet here was Snook, disappearing into a kaleidoscope of characters with the fervor of someone escaping herself. One moment she's a pinch-faced dowager, the next a rakish aristocrat with wandering hands, then a trembling ingénue—each transformation executed with surgical precision, and the abandon of me at karaoke after six bourbons.
Keep reading below:
The Umbilical Brothers Return to NYC!
It’s been a minute, but the Umbilical Brothers have returned to NYC to perform their new show, The Distraction! I went along on Sunday as Ronny Chieng’s date and had a tremendous time reacquainting myself with the two guys I first saw as a 9-year-old on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, back in Australia.
It was one of the most relentlessly inventive live performances I’ve experienced. From the second it started, it felt like they hijacked the tech booth of a Netflix special and started mashing every button—green screens, live sound effects, camera tricks, and physical comedy all colliding in real time. It wasn’t just slapstick or clowning (though there was plenty of that); it was this chaotic, tightly rehearsed meta-commentary on how we consume entertainment now. I found myself laughing out loud at things I didn’t even fully understand until a second later. It felt like watching a kids’ show directed by David Lynch. Totally bizarre, totally brilliant.
He is refusing to do the last two floors of our walk-up on principle. He just lives on the 3rd floor forever now.
He looks like he’s making a stand!
Very witty! Thank you!