Process Video: "Resting Knicks Face" - A Cartoon for New York's Newsletter

Drawn With a Pencil, Powered by a Hangover: The folks at The David Prize have published this cartoon in time for the big Knicks Parade in New York City.

I have never been a big basketball person.

Let me be clear about what that means. It means that on the night of Saturday the 13th of June, when the New York Knicks won their first championship in fifty-three years, I was catching up on the players’ names two minutes before the final buzzer. I’m the fairest of fairweather fans.

And yet. By the end of the night I was out in the streets of this preposterous city, hoarse, hugging people I will never see again, and weeping slightly at a fire hydrant for reasons I could not at the time and cannot now fully articulate. New York had not won a thing like this since 1973. Most of the people screaming in the West Village had not been alive for it. I had not been alive for it. I am not even from here. None of this stopped me. I was swept up like a leaf in a storm drain, and I went willingly.

(For the curious and the morbid, the full visual record of my descent that night lives here on my Instagram. I make no apologies and offer no commentary. The footage speaks, slurringly, for itself.)

So that was the state of me the following morning when I sat down to draw a cartoon for The David Prize’s newsletter, New York’s Newsletter. Scott and I had cooked up the idea as an absurd parody of a joke… then realised it might actually work. The best gags are usually a two-man job, like carrying a wardrobe up a narrow staircase -and there was a deadline, and there was me, a man whose skull felt like it was being gently reorganised from the inside by a small, irritable committee of bees.

This is the part where I’m meant to tell you about the tools…

Here is what I drew it with. Brace yourself, because it is genuinely the least romantic answer in the history of art.