I’m staring at my phone screen, watching Sofia Warren materialise in what she describes as “Zombie Chic” (the result of a steady diet of human flesh), and I’m reminded why she’s one of my favourite people to talk to about the insane realities of being a cartoonist in 2024.
Within minutes, we’re deep in the weeds of her current obsessions: tracking down middle school friends on LinkedIn (a sentence that, as I note on air, has never been uttered on the show before. It won’t be the last time.), hunting for a lost DVD of her 11-year-old masterpiece “Mary-Kate and Ashley and the Sorcerer’s Scone”. We also discussed the surprisingly pleasant experience of listening to T.S. Eliot in a car to Boston with her brother. Also a poet.
The film she’s hunting? A feature-length satire she made at age 11 that she describes as “absolutely unbearable to watch.” (Ebert was crueller.)
Six DVDs were made—like Horcruxes, she jokes—and she needs to find one for her publisher’s marketing materials. The irony isn’t lost on either of us: a successful New Yorker cartoonist reduced to stalking childhood acquaintances on professional networking sites .“Maybe I’ll go into investigation after this,” she says. Honestly, given the current state of cartooning work, Private Detective might be a viable pivot.
The live drawing gigs that used to sustain us are drying up, replaced by AI kiosks that churn out “cartoon” portraits in 15 seconds whilst cheerfully proclaiming, “I can tell this is going to be a good one!”
I witnessed this dystopian nightmare firsthand at a recent corporate gig. There I was, sketching away with my analogue tools like some sort of Victorian street artist, whilst a queue of people waited eagerly to be processed by a machine that had learned to draw by stealing our work…
Related Seething:
Live Drawing in New York: A Dying Art?
Picture this: me, a 40-something Australian with a pen, standing next to a robot that looks like a photocopier had sex with a vending machine. We're both drawing people. The robot finishes in 10 seconds. I take 5 minutes. Guess who had the queue wrapped around the block?
Sofia and I have become inadvertent advocates for discussing the AI elephant in the room—not from a position of doomerism, as some interpret it, but because ignoring it is professional suicide. We’re not Luddites; we’re realists trying to work through the wave rather than be swept away by it.
“The machine isn’t just independently good at stuff,” Sofia points out with characteristic precision. “If it’s good at anything, it’s because it’s ripping off our work.”
This hits particularly hard when you consider what Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said about scientific discovery versus artistic creation: if a scientist doesn’t make a discovery, someone else eventually will. But no one else will create exactly what you create. That’s why art matters. That’s why what we do is irreplaceable, even if Silicon Valley pretends otherwise.
The conversation takes a delightful turn when we switch to drawing mode. Sofia produces her professional arsenal of microns and brush pens whilst I brandish my humble pencil like some sort of medieval peasant. As Mort Gerberg would say—and we spend considerable time discussing the legend himself—“It’s not the pen, it’s the person pushing the pen.”
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