Brooklyn, NY
Tuesday 27th October, 2026
Hey again, friend.
At 10:28 on Friday night I emailed Gene Weingarten a correction to a man’s hand. One tiny edit. (The other hand.) It ran Saturday morning, on top of Gene’s column about the dopes dumping Trump.
Then Gene asked about a grim reaper cartoon of mine. He assumed it had run in The New Yorker. (It hadn’t.) It had been sitting in the reject pile like every other cartoon that dies of natural causes. “I think I just gave it a home, no?” he wrote. (I’m sending him a signed print.)
On Monday, Andy Borowitz ran a desert island cartoon I drew in The Borowitz Report, under a headline calling me a New Yorker legend. (Heh. Steady on, mate.)
What I didn’t tell you is how it happened, and how it happened is the reason for this letter.
I sent Andy a batch, the way you’d send any editor a batch. He bought one. Then another one. By breakfast on Monday, Andy emailed to say it was a big hit. By lunch, a reader named Alan had written in with notes. His version had a bigger island, with a castaway for every candidate. (Not a bad gag. It’s in the pile.)
Sixty-odd years ago, all of this would have taken shoe leather.
In 1983, Mort Gerberg published our bible; Cartooning: The Art and the Business, which cartoonists still call the gag cartoonist’s Bible. Michael Maslin's Ink Spill (who knows more about New Yorker cartoonists than any one person should) pointed out that its very first chapter, all 23 pages of it, is Mort’s own account of making the rounds of New York magazines in the early 1960s.
The rounds went like this. Once a week, on look day, cartoonists carried (schlepped) their batches from magazine to magazine across Manhattan. You signed in, you waited your turn, and an editor flipped through a week of your life while you watched.
Look Day was a Wednesday. At The New Yorker it moved to Tuesday decades ago, which is the only change to the cartooning business anyone has ever described as an improvement.
When Mort started, around 1963, there were still plenty of doors to knock on: Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Playboy, and a stack of men’s magazines I’m not going to name in an email your grandchildren might read. The New Yorker took him years. He got in in the late 1960s.
I caught the tail end of it. Tuesdays at The New Yorker. The last time I saw Mort was the last day the magazine saw cartoonists in person before the pandemic shut New York down.
Most of the doors Mort knocked on are gone.
