8th September, 2026
New York, NY
The email arrived this morning while the coffee was still doing its job busting me out of hangover prison…
You can tell bad news before you open it. Good news comes with an exclamation mark in the subject line. Bad news opens with “I’m very sorry to pass along…”
Air Mail has stopped buying cartoons.
Not paused. Not “restructuring the humour vertical.” Stopped. No warning, either: cartoonists were asked for their last batches and drew them in good faith, right up until the moment the shutters came down. The only omen, in hindsight, was that no cartoons had appeared in the last 2 issues. “The handwriting was on the wall,” Mankoff said. We just assumed someone was going to letter it properly and add a caption.
If you don’t know Air Mail: it’s Graydon Carter’s weekly, launched in 2019 by the man who ran Vanity Fair for 25 years and co-founded Spy, which means he’s spent an entire career knowing precisely what funny costs and paying it anyway. It was one of a very short list of publications that still ran gag cartoons the way they deserve to run: handsomely presented, promptly paid, and set among writing good enough that the cartoons had to earn their spot on the page.
Cartoonists noticed. We always notice. We’re like dogs; we can hear a tin of quality being opened from 3 boroughs away.
Over the past 7 years, I’m reliably informed that more than 1,700 cartoons ran there. That’s not nothing I guess. .it’s a body of work: a whole archive of drawings by working cartoonists who could, for a while, point at a classy publication and say “I’m in that” to their mothers, their landlords and, in at least 1 documented case, their divorce lawyers. (aherrrm.)
Here’s the part that actually stings. Air Mail didn’t fold. There was no tearful farewell issue, no liquidator carrying out the Eames chairs and foozball table. (Is that how you spell Foozball?) The online magazine sails on, weekly, full of Rolex watches and villas and profiles of people with good bone structure. It’s still there. Only the cartoons went overboard..
Which means this wasn’t a death. It was a decision.
I haven’t seen their books, and I won’t pretend to know their margins. But I know what cartoons cost a publication, because I know what publications pay me, and I can tell you that a gag cartoon is reliably the cheapest thing on any page it appears on.. A single panel costs less than the flowers at the launch party. Considerably less. The flowers don’t even have a punchline. (Unless they’re those really smelly ones that only open once every fifty years or something.)
So somewhere, in a nice room, someone looked at the budget, ran a finger down the column until it reached the funniest 4 square inches in the publication - the thing readers actually screenshot, forward and stick to the fridge - and decided that was the fat to trim.
The fat. We’re the fat. (As if I don’t already have image issues about my dad bod.)
If you’d like to keep 1 working cartoonist at his drafting table while the markets do whatever the hell this is, a paid subscription to New York Cartoons (that’s me, by the way) does exactly that. That’s the whole ask.
Anyway. Before the drawer claims everything, here are a few of mine (some that were collabs with my friends Joe Dator and Scott Dooley) that got to land in Air Mail while landing was still permitted:
and, of course…
It lands, as everything lands now, on top of ‘the AI of it all’ - you know? Software trained on decades of our drawings published online, wringing out an endless grey slurry of almost-cartoons, while the shrinking handful of places that pay for the real thing quietly close the window. It’s a pernicious little pincer movement. The machines take the style; the markets take the space; and the cartoonist is left standing on 9th Avenue holding a dip pen like a man who’s arrived at a gunfight with a fucking quill.
I’m not imagining any of this. Look at what happened with Cathy Wilcox and Kev KAL Kallaugher this past month.. both replaced with AI slop. Here’s KAL’s report on that today… Absolutely galling shit.
This is not a new feeling, of course. I’ve been kvetching about this for a while now.
Ask any gag cartoonist over 40 to name the markets they’ve outlived and watch their eyes go somewhere far away into the middle distance, like a grizzled war correspondent. The trade has been shrinking my entire working life. But every closure used to come with a story attached: the magazine died, the money ran out, print collapsed. Sad, but sad the way weather is sad. This one is different. This one had a budget. It just found something else to spend it on
