Somewhere over Pennsylvania. Seat 17F. Tray table down, knees up around my ears.

I’ve been nominated for a Reuben division award this year for Book Illustration, in Columbus, Ohio.

Twenty-four years in this job, and (with the exception of hosting the show or accepting an award on behalf of Nick Galifianakis) this is the closest I have ever come to the podium.

My entire trophy history consists of the People’s Choice prize at the Rotary Cartoon Awards in Australia, which is a nice thing to win and also, let’s be honest, a popularity contest I somehow snuck through on a quiet Tuesday. I have been entering the Stanleys, the Australian Cartoonists Association’s answer to the Reubens, since I was a teenager. I am now 42. I have a grand total of zero trophies on my shelf.

For most of those years I told people awards didn’t matter. I said it with tremendous conviction, the way you do when you haven’t got any. Then I noticed the people who had them were the ones getting the books, and getting publishers over the line, and I quietly revised my position with no shame whatsoever. Awards don’t make you better. They just make a stranger or an agent in an acquisitions meeting stop scrolling.

I’m up against Mike Deas and Chuck Dillon, both of whom are fastidious, talented illustrators of genuinely excellent books, and I mean that in the way people usually don’t mean it. I have looked at their work. I have zoomed in. I know how this ends.

All the same, I’m very proud of this book and everyone who made it a thing.

I’m writing this at thirty thousand feet, flying from New York to Columbus for the 80th anniversary of the National Cartoonists Society. I served as president of the NCS for four years and on the board a good while longer, which mostly involved agendas, glaring at red columns spreadsheets, and gently talking cartoonists out of ill advised ventures. Cartoonists are my favourite people on earth. Awkward, generous, competitive in the way siblings are competitive. This organisation is my second family, and I’d be flying to Ohio this week whether my name was on that list or not.

But the Reubens are voted on by the whole membership, which means somewhere out there a few hundred of them looked at my drawings on purpose. After 24 years, that’s the part that got me.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.