Hey, before we get going…

My dear friend is on a panel this Thursday at the Society of Illustrators, talking about satire and why it matters while American democracy is (how do I put this delicately?) ..uh, on fire?

She’s joined by and (My doppelganger, I’m told by the French.) Historian Nan Wolverton will cover satire’s long history in American politics, and Pedro X. Molina will explain how his native Nicaragua slid from democracy into autocracy. Ann has heard Pedro’s story before and warns you’ll be horrified by how familiar it sounds.

Moderating is Roslyn Mazer, who wrote the cartoonists’ amicus brief in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the Supreme Court case that protects satire in America. (She’s the reason I’m legally allowed to draw politicians the way I do. For now. Thank you, Roslyn.)

Thursday 8th October, 6 to 9 pm, Society of Illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street. It’s free, but you need to RSVP at societyillustrators.org/event/republic-of-satire

Can’t make it? Ann and I have had some wonderful chats on Draw Me Anything, and you can go back and watch them here:

Now, on with the show…

On September 4, published a post on his Substack called What’s In A Name Anyway? ChatGPT and Me.

It’s his story, and he tells it better than I can, but basically he was at a wedding when his brother texted him a cartoon. Dolly Parton and Tim Curry had just died (the wrong people keep dying). Someone on Facebook had asked ChatGPT for a New Yorker-style cartoon tribute, with Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter walking Dolly up to the pearly gates. (Real original shit.) It went viral. In the bottom corner, perfectly legible, was BLOPER, Brendan’s signature.

His brother knew Brendan hadn’t drawn it. The text still ended with the best line of the whole mess: “everyone makes a stinker now and then.” It was the second time it had happened. Earlier in the year, a random stranger had sent Brendan a ChatGPT therapy cartoon with his name on it. He wrote that it made him afraid to post new drawings online.

I shared his post that day. I’d already watched AI do shithouse impressions of Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein, and Will McPhail, but adding a real artist’s signature was a new low. I wrote that now when people google our names, viral slop now comes up, not the body of actual artwork we’ve painstakingly produced over decades. I was furious for Brendan. I also assumed it was mostly happening to Brendan. Then I checked in with some other New Yorker cartoonist friends… it was, in fact, not just Brendan.

Then, yesterday Nieman Lab showed it’s waaaay worse than we thought.

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Andrew Deck’s well-researched story documents more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures Open AI has put on cartoons they never drew. , , , , - even deceased legends like George Booth and Saul Steinberg. Warren Miller, who was publishing in the 1960s also showed up with a ghost signature on a blob of slop.

I’ve been writing recently about the already diabolical disappearance of professional cartoonist positions around the world, and how recently in Australia and the US, they’ve been replaced with AI slop cartoons.

Pat Byrnes has signed his work with a full stop after his name since he was a teenager. Deck found more than a dozen ChatGPT fakes with Pat’s name on them. (Every one of them has the fucking full stop.)

That’s the detail I can’t shake. The model learned how one human signs his name, right down to the punctuation, and it vomited it out like it wasn’t shitting all over his entire legacy.

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Quick one, friend.

There are only a few tickets left for my Lectures on Tap event in Brooklyn next Wednesday, and I’d rather they went to you than to some dumpy schlub who thinks it’s a craft beer tasting.

(It is partly a craft beer tasting.)

I’ll be telling the story of how a chubby kid drawing with rocks on a rural Australian dirt roads ended up arguing with New Yorker editors about an elephant buying peanuts with a credit card. There’s the afternoon a media mogul killed the 102-year-old comic strip I was drawing. There’s rejection, lots of it, and how to survive it. And there’s my only real career advice: find the people doing what you want to do, and annoy them until they teach you everything they know.

It’s one hour, there’s a bar, and the exact address arrives in your confirmation email, which makes it feel like either a speakeasy or a kidnapping.

Grab a ticket here before they’re gone

‘til next time!
Your pal,

This weekend I’m heading back to Kendal in the UK for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, my first time back in 7 years.
I’m very excited to be back.

The festival has asked me to captain Team Asterix in the opening night debate at Brewery Arts on Friday night. Fellow ex-NCS President Bill Morrison is captaining Team Tintin. He’s a lovely man, and he is wrong, and I intend to prove it with slides.
And props.

In October 2017, instead of recuperating from the four most sleep-deprived days of my life at New York Comic Con, I decided to immediately fly to the UK for four even more intense days at an international comic art festival.
Because of course I did.

I kept a sketchbook diary of the whole trip…

July 1st, 2017

I popped across the pond to help plan bits of the festival, a 24-hour Manchester trip during which I slept a grand total of 0 hours. That flight was with the infamous Thomas Cook Airlines, a company that provided only a seat and a fart-filled fuselage (and an airline that has since ceased to exist) I’d like to think I contributed. I sat next to a screaming baby the entire way.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Wednesday. I got a haircut, pulled on my crappy suit jacket, over-packed my bag, and boarded another Thomas Cook flight to the motherland, where I sat next to the smelliest human on earth, who decided my lap was a perfectly reasonable place to rest his foot, and directly in front of (you guessed it) another inconsolable baby. I swear it was the same one. This baby was following me around the world. The baby’s father slept like a log, as it wailed for five straight hours and I attempted to sleep… and failed at it professionally.

Friday, October 13, 2017.
(Yes, Friday the 13th.)

I landed with a thud in Manchester at 9:55am, was met by Karen, a lovely gardener from Kendal. I ingested a year’s worth of caffeine and was driven two hours directly from the plane to Kendal College to teach a full theatre of students how to make art on a Wacom tablet. I could barely assemble two consecutive sentences, but I managed to cover the most important advice.

Karen patiently drove me through the centuries-old town of Kendal, educating me on the local wool industry and the many lakes* of the Lake District.

*There is one lake.

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By now I’d been awake for 24 hours straight and was hoping to count imaginary sheep instead of real ones, so she dropped me at my lodgings for the weekend: Stonecross Manor Inn. Or, as the locals call it, “Fawlty Towers.” Or “Flowery Twats.” Or something.

The place was built in the Jurassic period. The walls burbled with boilers and snoring septuagenarians. The power sockets crackled ominously whenever anything was plugged in, and the wifi only worked if you sat at the bottom of the staircase holding your laptop at exactly waist height. Also, it was haunted. It used to be an orphanage.

Because of course it was.

We weren’t even meant to be there. The nice hotel in town was hosting a wedding that weekend, so the festival guests got relegated to the haunted boiler-factory on the edge of town. I checked the guestbook to see who’d stayed before us.

After a nap (interrupted by a screaming baby in the next room, yes, actually the same baby) and a full hour negotiating with a showerhead that required me to solve a riddle and answer three questions to a troll before dispensing a slow drizzle of lukewarm, off-brown water, I ambled downstairs to find my National Cartoonists Society compatriots: Steve, Luke, Joe and Deb McGarry, Tom and Anna Richmond, and the inimitable, legendary Sergio Aragones, all swapping horror stories about their own first encounters with the plumbing.

Then we were shuttled off to be received by the Mayor. A man of few words.

At the welcome dinner, I fanboyed out meeting Manchester’s own Stanley Chow, whose portraits you’ve seen at the top of every online New Yorker article next to the writer’s name. (If you've ever seen my avatar, you’ll know exactly how big a fan I am of his style.) He somehow defies every convention of asymmetry in caricature and distils a person’s entire aura into a few perfect shapes. He’s a wizard. With a Manc accent.

I found my table with Graham Dury from VIZ (the UK’s answer to MAD), Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and Sergio Aragones (Living God). After mains, there was a 26-question trivia quiz for each table, projected onto a giant screen directly behind my head. At one point there was a question about me.

Every other table got it wrong.

Because of course they did.

From there we spilled out into the night and down the streets of Kendal to terrorise Ruskins Bar, where we sang karaoke and drank locally brewed ales until the wee hours, because body clocks be damned. I sang Drops of Jupiter by Train.

I maintain they liked it.

Then back to the haunted lodgings in seemingly the only cab in town, for a nightcap and a few spooky hours of sporadic shut-eye.

The next morning, after a full English breakfast of baked beans on toast with sausages, we were whisked to the Mayor’s Parlour at the Town Hall to learn about Kendal’s history and its rare, priceless artifacts.

A tall gentleman named Simon hovered about in white cotton gloves, nervously cradling centuries-old relics, then offered us our own gloves so we could hold the various shiny things while he told us fun facts about them.

From there we walked through the rain to the local tap house for ales and ham sandwiches. They love their beer very much in this town. They’d brewed several specifically for the festival. For dessert, we had chocolate cake. Made from beer.

That night was the big live drawing event at the Festival Hub, the Brewery Arts Centre (I told you they liked their beer). Steve McGarry and I co-hosted, with two artists working on Cintiqs hooked up to giant screens while Sergio drew by hand under a live overhead camera. The theatre was completely full, and demand was so high they simulcast it to an adjoining venue.

Seeing Sergio draw live is like seeing all seven wonders of the world at once. He was 80 that year, which remains statistically impossible. That night we awarded the inaugural Sergio Aragones Award for Excellence in Comic Art to Dave McKean, and officially launched the UK chapter of the NCS, something that had been years in the making.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. I moderated a talk with the great Lynn Johnston about For Better or For Worse, demonstrated at the Wacom café, and taught a kids’ cartoon-a-room session immediately after Charlie Adlard, the artist of The Walking Dead. Lovely guy. Tough act to follow.

The highlight of the whole weekend was doing signings next to Sergio. I sold about five cartoons, mostly because I spent the entire time leaning over watching him draw and sign his way through towers of books and prints.

At one point he told me he liked my Wacom video, and I smiled like a goofball for the rest of the day. He is my favourite living cartoonist.

Saturday night was the Knockabout Cabaret, a variety show of music, comedy and humorous slides from all corners of the globe, at which I’d been booked to do a 15-minute stand-up set. I re-jigged my material for a UK audience. It was futile. They liked the bit about my dad’s friend lopping off his hand, but I lost them the moment I started ragging on the Queen. (She was alive at the time. I maintain the two events are unrelated.)

I was saved from being the night’s biggest bomb by the act that followed: an enormous gentleman in a skin-tight unitard, mask and goggles, who screamed mercilessly into the mic while strumming his Fender until the strings broke, then asked the audience to take a beer break while he re-tuned his fractured axe on stage.

It didn’t end well for him either.

The final night’s farewell at Ruskins gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, a Britney medley, and old English folk songs from actual old English folk, until we turned in around 3:30am. I got three 2 of sleep, discovered my airport ride had gone to the wrong hotel, crawled 2.5 hours to Manchester in peak-hour traffic, and spent one solid hour in security while a man insisted we put my laptop through the scanner another fifteen times.

By the time I reached the plane, I was a husk of a human. I collapsed into my seat and passed out before we left the tarmac. Not even the screams of the baby in the next row could keep me from my coma. (-and yes. I’m pretty sure it was the same baby.) I got home finally to sleep in my own bed and stared at the ceiling, jetlagged to buggery with my mind racing. That’s when I drew all of the cartoons you saw above.

So anyway, I’m coming back this year!

Seven years later, I’ll be on stage on opening night, Friday 2 October at Brewery Arts, defending the honour of a small, indomitable Gaul in front of a room full of people with strong opinions about ligne claire. I’m bringing the sketchbook. The full diary of the trip will land here first.

If you’re anywhere near Cumbria, come along and cheer for the correct side. If you’re not, subscribe, and I’ll bring the ghosts to you.

See you in the Lakes.

(There’s one lake.)

‘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.

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Hello again, friend!

I won’t keep you long. I know you’ve got other emails in your inbox waiting to bother you. I just want to extend an offer of sending you some original art, in return for one small…

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Bonjour!
This was originally published 3 years ago at Christmas in Paris.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

~ J

👆 Play this while reading. It was recorded on location.

December 23, 2023
Rue de Rivoli, Paris

Thawing out for the afternoon, I’ve decided to order the cheapest thing on the menu and take in the show of the lobby bar in Le Meurice, a hotel bordering the Tuileries.

If there’s a New York equivalent, it would be the Plaza Hotel, A hive of opulence. A place to be seen. The kind of iconic establishment the clenched class comes to grudgingly tolerate their relatives over expensive champagne and high tea. Rich fodder for eavesdrawing:

A daughter tries to explain to her mother —through a tower of finger sandwiches— why her new boyfriend won’t be coming from Normandy to join the family for Christmas lunch.

Mother is incensed.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support a human artist making things with their hands, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

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To my right, the concierge rolls his eyes and mutters about a wailing infant as a shrill teenage girl asks “what the point of high tea even is?” Her boyfriend apologizes to the frazzled waitress for toppling the scone tower.

Signing the bill, the aggrieved mother forgets her room number —daughter says “Just make one up.” with the confidence of someone who’s definitely done it before.

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May 7, 2024
Musée Picasso, Paris

A loud pop could be heard from the rooftops surrounding the balcony café.

My prefrontal cortex had given up and decided to explode. I stared into the middle distance as I chewed away on a lukewarm quiche Lorraine, pondering Picasso.

It was Tuesday. I’d eked out precisely half an afternoon —a halfternoon, if you don’t mind— to slink away from my book deadline and do something interesting. The sun was finally out, so I took a very sweaty jog along the Seine and back through the Tuileries, followed by a visit to the Musée Picasso; My first time. Don’t ask me why it took me so long.

“I'm not really that interested in the fidelity of appearances. I'd rather draw my idea of a bird than what a bird actually looks like.”

I know, right? The balls on this guy! This quote doesn’t belong to Picasso, though: it was the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, the indispensable Bill Watterson, in his exploration of process on his most recent book project.

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I bring it up because it echoed throughout my cavernous skull every time I ascended another staircase. A puzzle piece clicked into place in each room, and now I can’t see anything the same way again.

I have Christoph Niemann’s famous ‘Abstract-O-Meter’ pinned above my drawing board in my studio, but it never really clicked until now. If you’ll afford me one last exasperated analogy— it’s like someone just handed me glasses with a new prescription. (Ok that’s probably not the last one. Sorry.)
Needless to say, you’re going to see some weird shit from me in these coming months, dear reader.

Let’s take a beat.

Pablo Picasso. The man, the myth, the inventor of Cubism. A pioneer in Surrealism, and arguably the most renowned, the most viewed, the most studied, as well as the most controversial artist of the 20th century. He has several museums dedicated to his work. The one in Paris is excellent. It is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district.

My favourite thing about him was his constant ability to reinvent himself;

To experiment and explore new ways of representing reality throughout his art. As the museum puts it: Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and prints from all his various periods testify to the breadth of these explorations.

I spent three hours dragging my jaw along the tiles, each room presenting the next stage of the evolution of the artist. It’s all very carefully curated to unravel as you ascend the building to the attic.

Everything I’d come to understand about building a lens through which to interpret the things I see through words, lines, shapes, even sound— it all kind of started to take shape. This is something basic that I’ve known all along; it just all finally became something very clear as the hours passed. It took gazing into dozens of Picassos to get there, but I got there: It’s a nice feeling, but also overwhelming. (and I didn’t even drop acid!)

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It wasn’t just Picasso on display. There were works by Renoir and by Picabia, and other artists. There were paintings, sculptures, mixed media pieces, scribblings, sketches, poems— a smorgasbord of tangible, wildly inventive art across creative lifetimes.

One of my favourite rooms resembled a real-world post: a small, darkened room hidden to the side, with Picasso’s mad scrawlings, poetry, and notes on various surfaces. Some of the work looked like it was falling out of him. Other pages looked like they were being extracted with all the grace of a gallstone.

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December 27th, 2023
Montmartre, Paris

I first hit the summit of Caricaturist Everest 13 years ago. I had no idea what was waiting for me (or how naive I was about it)

At the time, I didn’t realise what a tourist trap it was, more akin to Times Square than some bastion of fine art held in high esteem. Still, Montmartre wasn’t a place I knew about beyond glimpsing it in Amélie, so I was very curious to see it for myself.

It was 2010, and I was on my way to the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival in the UK. I stopped in France for just two days. I’d never been to Europe, so everything I experienced was so mind-bendingly new to me. I read my naive diary entries from back then and laugh at how the smallest things sent me into raptures; cartoons on billboards, movie posters, bookstores full of comics (bandes desinée), and exhibitions dedicated to comic art.

I’d only just moved to Melbourne from Perth, my only exposure to other working artists being at the annual shindig of the Australian Cartoonists Association. My teeny 20-something brain exploded when I discovered there was a culture on the other side of the planet that revered cartoonists the way Aussies worship cricketers. Uttering the names Sempé, Uderzo, or Hergé in Belgium to the French elicit gasps of excitement usually reserved for Taylor Swift fans.

Cartoonists aren’t really a well-respected bunch in my homeland, sadly— we have to scrap and beg for every inch of space we occupy, and even then it’s not enough to make a living. In France and Belgium, however… cartoonists are celebrated as actual artists; it’s a real, legitimate job. It’s not easy, but it’s actually possible.

Speaking with a couple of artist friends here in Paris this week, I learned there are very distinct tiers of professional work available, and if you don’t know the right people/have the right agent/publisher/style/attitude, it can be made even more challenging. With that said, there are grants, exhibitions and residencies for cartoonists in France that I could never even have dreamt of in Australia, let alone the US.

I revisited Place du Tertre today with Sophie (video above) to try and find the caricaturist I’d met all those years ago.

Considering the words above, you can imagine my disappointment at discovering that the few remaining cartoonists had been relegated to a tiny corner of the square. The majority of the people set up to draw were doing realistic portraits and watercolours of Paris landmarks and people’s pets from smartphone photos. I guess whatever sells is what they’ll favour most; Nothing new about that, I guess. (Just take a look at what sells at Comic-Con and you’ll see the same trend-chasing tendencies.)

When I asked about the guys you’ll read about below, I was told that some were dead, and others only worked in the summer, if at all. The heavily unionised and regulated square of artists seems to be less of a tightly-knit group of colleagues and more of a smattering of disparate mercenaries.

After the story you’ll read below about 2010, it was disappointing to see the cartoonist contingent recede.

April 17th, 2010
Montmartre, Paris

This morning I set out North in search of the artists’ Mecca known as Place du Tertre. Okay, some say “Tourist Caricature Mecca” others say “God’s waiting room for old French cartoonists.”

I marched up the cobbled streets towards Montmartre, getting higher and higher as my kneecaps ground further and further into a fine powder. After thousands of steps, I finally made it to the top of the Sacre Coeur Basilica to find breakdancing soccer tricksters entertaining crowds of onlookers. Just like Jesus would have wanted.

The view from the top of Sacré-Cœur is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. On a clear day, you can see all of Paris from these steps.  The only place you’ll get a higher vantage point is the top of the Eiffel Tower.

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It only registered after I wandered out of the cathedral how cold it was. Despite the bright sunny skies, the air had a deep chill to it. I couldn’t feel my face. Literally: my hands were touching my cheeks, but I couldn’t feel either one. I was lucky to still be able to operate my camera.

I walked the cobbled streets, jaw agape at the amazing neighbourhood of the great artists and writers who once thrived here when rents were cheap. These are the streets Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso called home. The Moulin Rouge, the little restaurants and cafés amid tiny cottages on winding roads.

I eventually made my way to the place I’d been really hanging out to see since I arrived in Paris - Place du Tertre. I remember reading about Tom and Anna Richmond’s account of their experience there in 2006, and it helped me know what to expect when I arrived. I rounded the corner to find a scene even more overwhelming than I’d imagined.

Dozens of artists- caricaturists, portrait painters, landscape painters all with their easels propped next to one another, samples of their work (and in some cases, other people’s work) presented proudly at their stand, enticing passing tourists to trade a hefty wad of Euros for a one-off piece of art.

The main interest I had was the caricaturists. The people who do exactly what I do for a job (minus the tacky tourist part) and some of them are truly amazing. Others… eeehh notsomuch.

According to Tom’s friend Rick Tulka, this seemingly loose collection of artists is actually a very tightly controlled union ruled with an iron fist. Trying to just show up and start drawing is a good way to get your fingers broken. Doubtless, to have a spot in the Place de Tertre itself, you pay a lot of euros in rent and have to have seniority.

In any case, there were other artists wafting around the streets of Montmarte trying to get a look-in to be considered for the ‘all-prestigious’ Place du Tertre. I wandered slowly through the square, stopping to look at each artists’ work, interested to see what samples they had displayed.

The guy who’d been displaying Tom Richmond’s caricatures of Busta Rhymes, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts and Joe Bluhm’s caricature of a co-worker were still up there. Without someone telling him to take them down, I suspect they’d stay up there as long as the Mona Lisa will stay up in the Louvré.

I’ve always found it bizarre that that scammy caricaturists will put up samples of other artists’ work. Surely when the person has theirs drawn and finds it’s not of the same standard, they realize they’ve been had. (and have no real obligation to pay, since the ballsiest of false advertising was the reason they sat down in the first place?)

As I continued wandering through, I came to a bustling corner where four caricaturists of varying ages had their work set up.

It was like a hierarchy - with the old, bearded Gandalf-like caricaturist sitting, smoking an endless chain of cigarellos and watching over the younger caricaturists around him. He was watching on in approval as the skinny old guy in leather next to him (I call him Skeletor) was finishing off a portrait of a young girl in charcoal.

I moved in to take a picture of him working, when ‘Gandalf’ moved in and started speaking some beard-muffled French in a raised tone about not taking photos.

He pointed at the girl’s father, who was standing behind me with a disapproving look - like I was trying to take photos of his daughter like a creep. I apologised to the dad and explained I was just taking a photo of the portrait as the guy was working on it. The dad was American, so he understood me just fine - and said, “No, that’s fine. I was just under the impression these guys didn’t want you taking photos.”

I looked around at the other caricaturists, all of whom now weren’t working, and were squinting at me, curiously. Gandalf slowly sat back down and lit up another cigarello, laughing to himself as he took the first puff. I felt kind of guilty about the whole photo debacle, so I wanted to make amends. I walked over and said, “How about you draw me?”

He raised an eyebrow at me, as if I’d asked something silly of him- almost as if I’d asked Mozart to just ‘play me a tune.’ He said something in French as he pointed to the caricaturist off to his right who quickly picked up his drawing board and charcoals and nodded at me.

As he gestured for me to sit down, he said, “He doesn’t speak English. I, uh— un peu— speak a little.”

This guy was friendly, very polite, and could clearly draw. I later found out he’d studied as an art student and was drawing caricatures because they paid well. He was passionate about the craft and considered it an art form worthy of respect. A Daumier devotee.

I made a very conscious decision before I’d sat down, not to mention that I’m a cartoonist, if I get my caricature drawn.

Not only am I way below par to these guys, but it felt presumptuous to just stroll into these guys’ territory and say that I do what they do. These guys have been doing it way longer, and its pointless to bring it up. What are they going to do - give me a job? Get me to fill in on their break?

Above all else, I didn’t want to sit for a caricature and tell the other caricaturist, “Okay - I do this for a living. You’d better be good… Go!”

The moment I sat down I realised it was the first time I’d sat for a solo caricature. I mean other caricaturists have drawn me at gigs…

…and Tom Richmond used my dorky face as the example for his caricaturing workshop at the Stanleys Conference last year - but I’ve not sat for a solo caricature as a punter, one-on-one with a caricaturist I’ve not met.

The Questions

The funny thing about caricaturing someone live is that people tend to ask you the same old questions while they’re sitting there; no matter where in the world they’re from, no matter what age - it’s always the same:

“So, how long have you been doing this?”

“What’s your REAL job?”

“What, are you like an art student or something?”

“What do you look for when you draw someone?”

This seems to ease the subject’s nerves to try and distract them from the fact that you’re staring at all of their features - and it is unnerving when someone starts looking at every inch of your face before grinning or squinting as they look back down at the page and scribble away.

So you always have the standard answers to these questions ready to go so you can keep drawing while you talk and put them at ease. You don’t want to have a whole bunch of caricatures of people looking uncomfortable.

Then, of course, you have ‘The Heckler.’

The Heckler is the person (usually a guy) who walks behind the artist, looks at the drawing and then at you, then back at the drawing and say something like “His ears aren’t THAT big!” or “Her eyes aren’t THAT far apart!” -and laughing hysterically - quickly undoing all the work the caricaturist has done to put the subject at ease.

These are the people who would never in a million years sit for a caricature themselves, but are more than happy to sit back and make fun of the artist and the person being drawn. Threatening to draw them next is a pretty effective method of dispersing said douchebag.

That all said - we had all the regular players this day.

Three or four different American tourists came up and did the ‘look at caricature - look at me - look at caricature - “Oh, his nose isn’t THAT big!” followed by an incessant cackle. Another passed by, said roughly the same thing, laughed and moved on.

The third heckler walked past and said “God, he’s really missed the likeness there. He’s way off - looks nothing like you!”

Now, when someone says that, there are two things you can do as the caricaturist: You can pretend you didn’t hear it, ignore it, and keep on working.

Or, you can say something.

The caricaturist drawing me decided to take option 1, but I could see in his face when he looked up from then on, he was worried and it had clearly affected him. He gave an awkward and uncomfortable chuckle and drew a little bit slower - pulling the page back to look at it more carefully.

The heckler gave one more “Nope. That’s not him at all.”

I then decided to take option 2.

“Sorry, chief - I didn’t hear him ask you what you thought. And I certainly didn’t.”

His devious grin promptly disappeared. In my book, his final jab entitled me to a free “Respond to the douchebag” token.

“Well, it doesn’t look like you.”

“Right. But you could do a better job, yeah?”

“Well no, I..    But I’m not an Cari.. caricaca… carickick..”

“Caricaturist.  Exactly. Now, shut the fuck up.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but instead just grumpily moved on. The guy drawing me had to stop drawing from laughter.

I looked over at Gandalf and Skeletor who were both having a big laugh. Gandalf pointed back at the caricaturist drawing me, so I turned and he was ready to go -this time with a smile.

He hadn’t smiled til now, and in doing so, he revealed two, big, widely spaced front teeth.

My hand twitched.

As his face stretched out from the smile, it revealed a whole new dimension to his previously stony face. Cheek wrinkles started to present themselves, crows feet, his chin shape changed, his eyebrows went from straight across, to a new sort of perfectly flowing, almost aesthetically pleasing shape across his brow.

I gritted my teeth.

This guy was a caricature and I hadn’t even realised it. He would make a fantastic subject, (and I’m sure he was aware of it too.)

I found myself studying his face for more detail: for proportions, for relationships between the features (til now I’d consciously switched off the part of my brain that does this with people. It can get distracting,)

I tried to distract myself by talking to him. I told him I realised caricature isn’t meant to be kind, it’s meant to exaggerate and distort and parody the person being drawn - not airbrush out features they’re uncomfortable with.

But saying this was only making me focus more on how I’d draw this guy. My brain started sketching the shape of his face exaggerating his jaw-line, his teeth, his bulbous nose, and those freaking eyebrows.

A good 25 minutes had passed as he started drawing the obligatory Eiffel Tower in the background, and asked, “Where are you from? You English?”

“Non, je suis Australien” (I winced, as I worried he’d put something like a shrimp, or a kangaroo in the background.) “Aah Australien! You are on holiday oui? What do you do in Ozzie?”

I bit my lip. Smiled. Thought of anything else - “Taxidermist” “Hitman” “Accountant”…

“Uh. I’m ….I uh.”

Ah, fuck it.

“I’m a cartoonist”

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This week I’ll be writing to you from Paris (France. Not Texas.) Expect some terrible clichés and excessive use of French words. Like cliché.

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The invitation arrived on a Tuesday,

wedged firmly between an email from my accountant (subject line: “Call me.”) and a receipt for a sandwich I have no memory of eating. It was in French. It informed me that I’d been invited as a guest of the 45th Salon International de la Caricature, du Dessin de Presse et d’Humour, which my phone’s Siri dictation insists on rendering as “the Saint Julie Motel festival.” I’ve stopped correcting it. Saint Julie sounds like a lovely woman. I hope her motel has decent water pressure. (And those little soaps.)

For this I have to thank. Liza, New Yorker cartooning veteran and previous Draw Me Anything guest, put my name forward to the organisers. I owe her a drink. Possibly a cow. More on that in a moment.

The festival’s real name is Saint-Just-le-Martel: a village of about 2,700 people in the Limousin countryside, 10 minutes outside Limoges. For 50 weeks of the year it is, by every account I can find, a quiet little place. Then autumn arrives, and it becomes the largest gathering of cartoonists on this here planet.

This has been happening every year since 1982, when Gérard Vandenbroucke and a handful of villagers decided that what their idyllic corner of France really needed was satire. The early pilgrims included Cabu, Wolinski, Plantu, Loup and Wiaz: names that mean nothing to most New Yorkers and everything to anyone who has ever tried to draw a politician into submission. Word spread. In a good year the village hosts 15,000 visitors and a couple of hundred cartoonists, all drawing, arguing and laughing at each other in a dozen languages. (Ok, imagine Comic-Con, if Comic-Con were run by farmers and had opinions about press freedom.)

They give out 10 prizes. The grandest is the Grand Prix de l’Humour Vache, the grand prize for “cow humour,” which in French means *savage*, and the winner receives an actual Limousin cow, valued at about €1,000. Not a trophy shaped like a cow. Not a bronze cow. An entire fucking cow.

The Pulitzer committee gives you $15,000 and a certificate. Saint-Just gives you livestock. I’ll let you decide which is the more serious civilisation.

Still.. I don’t know if I’ll enter. I don’t want to end up like Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

This year is the 45th edition. It runs from 26 September to 4 October, open 9am to 7pm, every day, continuously, meaning it does not close for lunch, which in France is bordering on a federal crime. There are 32 exhibitions under one roof, close to 1,500 drawings, another 7 exhibitions scattered around Limoges, more than 150 cartoonists in attendance, live caricature, signings, round tables, an apéro-jazz, and a prize called the Crayon de Porcelaine, a porcelain pencil, Limoges being the porcelain capital of France. A pencil made of porcelain: the most breakable possible version of a cartoonist’s only weapon. I refuse to believe that isn’t deliberate.

Oh! Here’s the part I’m still metabolising along with my cheese pasta from Delta Economy Plus: some of my New Yorker cartoons will be hanging in the exhibition. Mine! Drawings that started life at my drawing board in New York, with a dip pen and horrendous posture, will spend a week on a wall in rural France, being squinted at by people who read Le Monde and know what a subjunctive is.

Better still, the village doesn’t put its guests in hotels. (There aren’t enough hotels.) The families of Saint-Just take the cartoonists in to their homes.

Now, I’ve been to France more times than my accountant would like (I really should calL him back). I love France. France and I have an arrangement: I keep coming back, and it keeps pretending my French is charming. But in all those visits I have never once lived with a French family, and for the week of the salon, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing: a 40-something Australian exchange student with grey in his beard, a suitcase full of pens, and restaurant French that peaked in Year 9. I can say “je voudrais un croissant” and “où est la bibliothèque,” which should cover breakfast and precisely one emergency.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was this excited to pack a suitcase.

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There’s a comedy show in Paris where you pay on the way out.

Not the way in -the way out. You watch the whole show, laugh your face off, and then, at the door, you decide what it was worth to you. It is the most honest business model in entertainment and the most terrifying one I’ve ever agreed to be part of.

On Thursday, I’m on it.

This will be my 5th time in Paris and my first time performing there. On the previous 4 visits, I was a civilian. I ate the cheese, I dawdled along the Seine, I mispronounced “croissant” in ways that made Parisian waiters cringe. I got to simply like Paris, with no strings attached. This time I need Paris to like me back, out loud, in a room, on a schedule.

Emily is on the bill too. (My girlfriend is also a comedian, which means that on Thursday night one of us will have a better set than the other, and then we’ll walk home through the streets of Paris hand in hand, both quietly doing the math on what worked and what didn’t …and why.) Comedy is not a competition. It is, however, rated and scored every 12 seconds.

Book tickets here

The show is Coucou Comedy at La Pomme d’Eve, 1 Rue Laplace, in the 5th. Doors at 8pm, show at 8:30pm, and there’s a 1-drink minimum: a rule I have never once in my life needed to be told. Entry is free -you reserve a ticket, watch the show, and pay what you think it was worth on the way out. Suggested €15, though I assume the scale runs from “generous” to “a single centime placed in my palm while maintaining eye contact.”

If you’re in Paris this week, or know someone who is, come along: reserve a free ticket here.

I’ll report back next week and let you know what I was worth…

‘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.

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On a yellow legal pad, in handwriting that could generously be described as medically concerning. (Genuinely looks like the handwriting of a doctor on a rollercoaster).

I own an iPad. I own software that could transcribe my thoughts, organise them, and probably file my taxes. But there is nothing (nothing) like a hand holding a pen on a piece of paper. Specifically: a black clear-barrel Bic on a yellow legal pad. The cheapest tools in the building doing the most important job in the building.

When I read Draft No. 4 by John McPhee I learned about essay structure and getting the first rough draft out before you start noodling around with specifics.

Everything starts here. The shape of the thing, the serial killer arrows, the one word circled so hard the pen nearly goes through to next week’s ideas. Then I sit down and decipher it like the Rosetta Stone, (except the Rosetta Stone had three languages and I can’t read any of mine. It doesn’t help that I write in Australian.)

Usually I’ll print out a copy of the next draft and read it out loud (learned that from Sedaris) then mark up the edits in pen/pencil to do the final rewrites.

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This morning over my birthday coffee, I read a note from the writer that ruined the coffee. (But not the birthday).

An author releases a book he wrote, and within a few weeks Amazon is selling dozens of AI rip-offs with almost the same title. Dozens. Per book.

My book with comes out on 13th October. I asked my publisher what we do about this. The official position (from the people with the lawyers) is that nothing can be done. Great meeting. See everyone at the launch.

So… somewhere, a server farm in Russia is already warming up to publish “You Aren’t a Genuine Parent Up Until...” by Jasen Chatfeild & Scort Delroy: 180 pages of bullet points about cherishing your little ones, cover art with 11 fingers.

Here’s our sophisticated legal countermeasure:

you.

Buy the real book directly from the actual humans who wrote it. Preorder You’re Not a Real Parent Until... from me, and Scott & I will sign it with our own hands. For a bit extra, I’ll draw your kids into it. Their actual names, their actual cowlicks. Let’s see a plagiarism bot manage that.

PRE-ORDER WITH A SIGNED SKETCH!

Every copy you buy from a real author is a small vote for a version of publishing where humans get paid for the books they write. That used to go without saying. (Now it’s a legit business strategy.)

‘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.

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First order of business: it’s Noth, rhymes with both. He’s been letting people say “Nawth” for decades out of Midwestern politeness. Gosh. Consider yourselves corrected on his behalf. If you missed it live, the replay is above. Here’s what happened, with every link we promised on air down the bottom…

You know Paul’s most famous cartoon even if you don’t know his name: the flock of sheep gazing up at a billboard of a wolf, captioned “He tells it like it is.” It’s among the most shared cartoons in the magazine’s history; it’s now the cover of his book, and Paul has mixed feelings about its immortality. “It should be a historical document by now,. he said, a little wearily.

Here’s the detail that should be laminated and handed to every rejected cartoonist on earth: The New Yorker rejected it the first time he submitted it. So did they reject his other most popular cartoons, first time ‘round. Paul resubmits. He always has, fortified by a story he’d heard about Saul Steinberg, who supposedly used to take his rejected cartoons, put them straight into a fresh envelope, and post them back to the magazine. (The balls on this guy! I love him.)

Paul sold to The New Yorker in 2004. The cartoon: a White House press secretary holding a torch under his chin like a kid telling a ghost story, while a reporter asks how he responds to critics who say he’s just trying to scare people. He’d worked on that batch for the best part of 2 months under the wing of Matt Diffee, whom he’d met at the Rejection Show and who walked the batch in to Bob Mankoff.

Noth Things

Killed Cartoons #2

Lately, New Yorker cartoonists have been sharing their “first five” cartoons published in the magazine. For me, this means taking a look back at my older drawing style…

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18 days ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Paul Noth

At Paul’s first look meeting, surrounded by his heroes (Gahan Wilson among them), Mankoff greeted the new arrival with two sentences that became his entire art education. The first: “Don’t get cocky.” The second: “I want to see 10 a week from you, even if they’re shit.”

Paul has done 10 a week ever since, through every all-nighter, every TV job, every book. “It was my art school in a lot of ways,” he said. Like me, he’d never been to one. He’d never had art in public before. He learned to draw in public, 10 at a time, and eventually stripped away his early etching-style hatch marks when he realised the truth every gag cartoonist arrives at eventually: “The best style for me was the best execution of the joke.” Or as Lee Lorenz put it in The Art of the New Yorker, which we both worship: a cartoon is beautiful the way a sailboat is beautiful. It has exactly what it needs to function, and nothing else.

Mankoff gave me my version of that lecture too, around 2014, back when I wore a suit jacket to the offices like I was auditioning for a bank. He looked at my batch of borrowed styles and asked what I think about when I do my hair in the morning. “Try and think about your drawings as your hairdo. It’s a style you’ve arrived at. You’re not trying to copy Johnny Depp.” This from a man with famously luxurious amounts of hair. It worked, though. It worked on both of us.

Read that story here

The Pale Force story is even better than I’d hoped. , it turns out, is Paul’s brother-in-law; he’d married Paul’s sister a year or two before. Paul, not yet a New Yorker cartoonist, pitched Jim an animated bit for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, modelled on Steve Martin turning up to Letterman with something weird in his back pocket. When the head writer asked whether he’d done animation before, Paul said yes. (He had made flip books, so… technically not a lie?)

The budget was roughly what a guest gets paid for sitting on the couch, which is not a number that produces animation, and his first delivery came back with the note that a 16-megabyte video file cannot be broadcast on network television. The night the first episode aired, running on no sleep, he watched it freeze for a single millisecond and briefly died. Then it killed, the series got Emmy-nominated, and Paul got a comedy education by osmosis: Robert Smigel, Brian Stack and Demetri Martin down the hall, Conan’s face providing the biggest laugh of every episode no matter what Paul animated. His conclusion, having vowed never to do low-budget animation again:

Worth it.

The Laureate Report…

I put the important questions to Wisconsin’s inaugural Cartoonist Laureate, and I can now report the following to the people. There is no salary. There is no diplomatic immunity. There is, crucially, no sash: “I have to make the sash myself, apparently. Like a Mayor McCheese-style sash.” His opening list of demands included full access to the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. His actual duties, in his own words: “to figure out what the hell the cartoonist laureate does.” So far that means cartoon classes for kids, library outreach, trying to attach a cash prize for whoever comes next (”that’s what cartoonists actually need let’s be real”), and a retrospective of 175 of his originals opening at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in January, sharing a title with the book. When the museum’s president first floated the laureateship, Paul assumed she meant Lynda Barry, P.S. Mueller or Craig Thompson. She meant him.

His process, for the process junkies: 10 ideas written first thing every morning, “usually bad”, purely to switch on the part of the brain that notices things. Voice memos through the day, transcribed the next morning. And this, which made my week: Paul had listened to Tuesday’s episode with Brian Biggs and co-signed the boredom sermon. “If I keep the stimulus away, I just keep things mentally kind of quiet; I will start entertaining myself after a while.” Three episodes ago this was my crank theory. It is now, I’m declaring, the official position of the show.

Somewhere in here Matt Diffee himself materialised in the chat, speak of the devil, and was informed we’d been blaming everything wrong in Paul’s life on him. For the record: Diffee ushered in a whole generation of cartoonists, Paul among them, and his Rejection Collection books are the sacred texts of everything above.

Paul’s dad was a lifelong newspaper man who brought home cartoon collections from the feature desk for his cartoon-obsessed kid, and who gave him one piece of career advice: don’t go into print media. He could see the writing on the wall. So Paul didn’t pursue it. He tried screenplays, plays, other lives. “I look back at an old notebook where I was trying to write a screenplay,” he said, “and the margins are just full of cartoons. In retrospect, it should have been obvious.”

At the end, Paul described what this show apparently is: “It’s basically like a digital cartoonist lunch.” The magazine’s cartoonists used to eat together every Tuesday. We don’t anymore. I suppose I’ve been rebuilding the table an hour at a time, and I couldn’t be happier about who keeps sitting down at it.

Now, the promised links…

Pre-order I Am Going to Eat You... and Other Awkward Truths

Out 13 October, 200+ of his most-loved cartoons plus 50 never published, and Paul says the unpublished ones “are usually the funniest ones, to be honest”.

Pre-orderers get a signed bookplate posted to them! Just shoot him an email at paul@paulnoth.com with your mailing address and your desired inscription. (A proof-of-purchase screenshot is also much appreciated.)

Pre-orders are everything in publishing now, so if you were going to buy it anyway, buying it today is the whole ballgame. And since our books share a birthday: pre-order You’re Not a Real Parent Until... (👉 Pre-order here )

Oh! —and I’ll draw your kids, or grandkids, into the book!

Order your sketch here!

‘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.

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I’ve been very doomer-y this week. Sorry. I thought I’d cap the week off with something positive…

October 27, 2024
Lincoln Centre
New York, NY

My ol’ pal Mo Willems1 is on stage, killing. (A troubling verb for a room full of children, but there is no other word for it.) Several hundred people under the age of eight, screaming for a man who draws a pigeon live at Lincoln Centre. I’m in the balcony, among the only adults who arrived without a child as cover, in awe.

He’s a great role model, and a prolific artist. The kids excitedly run up to him to show them their artwork (yes, drawn on screens, but let’s meet them halfway) as he sits at the edge of the stage, trying to cultivate a new generation of humans who don’t sit in front of a laptop all day and learn to ‘vibe code’.

Anyway. This week Austin Kleon posted something Mo says about ants.

The short version:

I have never felt so seen by an insect.

I’ve been stepped on a fair bit this year. But nobody finds new food by walking in a straight line …and that’s the job now.
That’s. The fucking. Job.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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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.

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1

I first met Mo at the NCS Reuben Awards, where we got to shoot some funny sketches together. We’re part of the very small ‘Reubens Hosts Club’, pictured below:

He’s a prolific author and an inspiring guy. You can watch his whole episode of The Idea Garden below.

2. You can watch my episodes with Austin Kleon here:

We’re back with another episode! This week:

• Vale, Airmail: Puck pulls the pin on cartoons

• Spirit Halloween takes over a rib cage

• Jetstar, Bali, and bottomless mid-flight brawls

• Rat mazes at the polling booth: the midterm cartoons begin

• Democracy sausage vs “I Voted” stickers

• Martini levels: from “happiest I’ve ever been” to “texting my ex”

• NYPDA

• The fortune teller who sees her own future

• Robot nesting dolls

• Scraping 101, and the return of the Home Contents Aggregator

• Condé Nast, OpenAI, and cartoonists finding their signatures on work they never drew

• Owls in glasses

• What’s the dress code at a penguin wedding?

• The boomerang store: strictly no returns

…and not much else!

▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or jasonchatfieldcomedy@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

Copyright Disclaimer: We’re inviting you into our living room, don’t walk out with our lamp. Please refrain from selling our jokes. All original content is © Copyright 2026 Jason Chatfield & Scott Dooley for “Is There Something In This?” All rights reserved. We welcome you to download and play the podcast and share it with others for personal use; please acknowledge the “Is There Something In This?” Podcast as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

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Wednesday, midday… is alone in his Philadelphia studio, an old garage he describes as a hermit cave, holding his phone in one hand and a pen in the other. I’m at my drawing board doing the same. For the next hour, 90 people watched 2 grown men show each other their doodles.

If you missed it live, the replay is above. What follows is what you missed, with links to everything we held up to the camera.

Brian has made more than 80 books. The Everything Goes series, Tinyville Town, the New York Times-bestselling Frank Einstein books with Jon Scieszka. So naturally, when he started his Substack, the imposter syndrome turned up anyway. “I had to give myself a break,” he said, “and get past my oh-no ego and just let it happen.”

“All I want to do, man, is just draw.
I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories… and I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.

The turn came on an exercise bike in his basement, listening to Giuseppe Castellano’s podcast episode with myself and Adam Ming, where said to stop treating Substack as the road to being published and start treating it as being published. “It just was one of those ding moments,” Brian said. He got off the bike and got to work.

The work is The Walk, and the story behind it is every author’s recurring nightmare. In 2019, Brian published a picture book with Penguin called The Space Walk: an astronaut, alone in space, who just wants to go outside. It came out, in his words, “to the great yawn of indifference of children’s publishing”, and was out of print within a couple of years.

But out of print means the rights come home. So Brian is now turning that orphaned story into a full graphic novel, and serialising every step of it on his Substack: thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles, all of it. “Every stupid thought I’m having about this is going onto my Substack,” he said. The story is already mutinying. “The story has decided it wants to be something bigger than I think I want it to be,” he told me, having informed his wife that morning it might be three 200-page volumes. “I’m 58 years old, man. Do I have a 600-page graphic novel in front of me?”

The logic, though, is sound: last time, the book arrived to silence. This time, “at least it’s going to be a thing that there’s an audience built in already following it. And they care about it.” Every page will be hand-lettered, incidentally, because Brian letters the way you’d read it aloud, and he’d rather do that than make a font. He’s seen his hand-lettering redrawn by translators into Hebrew and Chinese, stroke by stroke. “I would love to meet those people one day,” he said, “but I’m afraid they would punch me in the face.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this I made him explain the line in his bio about being calligrapher to a princess, and I’m pleased to report it’s all true.

Junior year at Parsons, 1988, studying in Paris, he answered a job-board ad to address envelopes for a man in a cravat who threw parties for people like the Rothschilds. Which is how a kid from Texas, whose calligraphy career began with a drugstore Speedball set and the Renaissance Fairs of early-80s Houston, ended up hand-lettering the guest book for Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, whose family had been friends with Marie Antoinette, and who hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan a few weeks later. Brian was escorted out as the Reagans arrived. He did the work at his apartment drawing table, Enya on the stereo (not sure which album…), his roommate’s Akira comics all over the futon.

A year or 2 later, he was waiting tables at a Bennigan’s, telling anyone who’d listen: “I was a calligrapher for a princess for a month.”

Shit Brushes and Other Filing Systems

Then I flipped the camera, and we got into the pens, as is my tradition. Highlights of the show-and-tell: his Kuretake brush pens, my Hunt 101, the ink bottle I suction-cup to train tables, and his filing system of labelled coffee cans reading “new brushes”, “good brushes” and (after asking the stream’s permission to swear) “shit brushes”. He keeps a box labelled “used but might be useful on a rainy day”. He made it in 1994. It’s bloody full.

Related Reading:

This is also the man whose YouTube channel features a cheap pencil challenge (three pencils found on the street, one illustration) and who once sawed a Blackwing in half to fit his pencil case (who among us?), to the horror of his commenters. His position: “Just make the damn illustration.” We’re both ambassadors. Neither of us wore the merch. We apologise to our sponsor-adjacent overlords.

Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies
Brian’s YouTube channel, home of the cheap pencil challenge

One sermon we both delivered, and mean: before you buy pens on Amazon, try JetPens or Goulet Pens. They stock what artists actually use, and they’re the closest thing to a local art store most of us have left.

Fine, It Was Doodling

Earlier in the week, I told you not to call it Doodling. Brian would like to complicate that. The hands essay started because he was, in his own cheerful admission, doodling: drawing hands like stone monuments in a field after rereading The Lord of the Rings. (”What if Frodo had come across a giant hand?”) Then he misdrew one. Five fingers and a thumb. He went for a walk in the park, came back, and realised the mistake was a plot device: it’s science fiction, after all, and now there are six-fingered gloves in the book, and a reason for them. “The doodling became a door opener,” he said. The ideas never arrive at the desk. They arrive on the bus, in the queue at the bagel shop, on a run in the woods.

Which led us both onto the soapbox: “I’m not your mom,” Brian said, “…but put your freaking phones down and turn off notifications!” Long-time readers know I’ve been yelling this at clouds for years…

And then, quietly, the bit I keep thinking about. In the summer of 2022, for the first time in his career, Brian had no contract in front of him. He went to Iceland, raced bicycles, caught COVID, came home and, in his words, “curled up in the fetal position for about a month.” (again- who among us?)

What came out of it wasn’t a new hustle. It was a recalibration.

“All I want to do, man, is just draw. I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories. And I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.”

That’s the whole show, really. That’s all of us.

Watch the full replay above, then go follow the book being built at Random Orbit. Brian says if you have questions about any of it, his messages are open. He has a deadline. Ask anyway.

‘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.

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• The Walk, serialised in progress

• It’s not “Doodling”, the essay

• The Space Walk, the original 2019 picture book; Brian has about 40 copies for sale

• The Illustration Department Podcast, episode 318, the one Brian heard on the exercise bike

• JetPens and Goulet Pens, buy your pens like a person

• My rant about letting your brain just “be” in the world:
  

I learned this week that the state of Wisconsin has a Cartoonist Laureate.

An actual one: 3-year term, a museum behind him, official recognition at the State Capitol. I’ve been president of two different cartoonists’ societies on two different continents, and neither job came with so much as a plaque. His name is , and this Thursday he’s my guest on Draw Me Anything!

Add it to your calendar now!

Add it to your calendar now!

You know Paul’s work even if you don’t know you do. He’s been in The New Yorker since 2004: more than 400 cartoons, several of them among the most widely shared the magazine has ever run. Last year he won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Cartoon Art, only the 2nd cartoonist ever to receive it. Before that, he made Pale Force, the Emmy-nominated animated series for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, in which he and Jim Gaffigan recast Conan as the snivelling sidekick of a superhero whose powers were paleness and nipple lasers. He’s developed shows for Adult Swim and Nickelodeon, written a kids’ trilogy that opens with a boy selling his family to aliens, and drawn comics for the Federal Reserve that teach children financial literacy. His, in other words, is the only CV on Earth listing both the Federal Reserve and nipple lasers.

PRE-ORDER IT NOW!

Next month he publishes his first-ever collection of cartoons, I Am Going to Eat You... and Other Awkward Truths: 200 of his most popular gags, more than 50 that have never been seen anywhere, and a foreword by his old Pale Force co-conspirator , who credits the whole thing to “the same twisted mind”. (It comes out on 13 October, the same day as You’re Not a Real Parent Until..., which I’ve decided to read as a good omen rather than a threat.)

Meanwhile, on his Substack, Noth Things, he runs Cartoon Combat: 2 unpublished cartoons face off each week, readers vote, and the winner advances to a monthly Tournament of Champions. Democracy, but for gag cartoons. It’s the only election I’ve enjoyed in years.

On Thursday he’ll draw live while I ask him about all of it: the 3.5 years he spent trying to get a single wordless cartoon into The New Yorker, what a Cartoonist Laureate actually does, and whether the Federal Reserve knows about the nipple lasers. Then it’s your turn: lob requests into the chat, and he’ll draw those too. That’s the whole point of the show.

Draw Me Anything with Paul Noth. Thursday, 17 September, 12pm ET, live on Substack at drawmeanything.com.

Set a reminder and bring a request.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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I am divorced.

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment, the way my literary agent did.

In my defence, every good research team needs a control group. The co-authors of the book are Brian Page, a Certified Financial Therapist and home-labour specialist who has been happily married since 2002, and JR Havlan, who won 8 Emmys writing for The Daily Show. One of us knows the research. One of us knows the jokes. One of us is the “before” picture.

Why does an unfair split of the housework curdle into resentment? Should two full-time salaries mean a 50/50 split of the laundry, or is “fair” something weirder than maths? Does the person who earns more get more say in how it’s spent?

And my favourite: what’s the one household job your partner has no idea takes up half your brain? For years, I thought “the mental load” was just my ADHD with better PR. It turns out it’s a real thing; other people carry it, and some of them are married to us.

This Wednesday at 8pm ET, the 3 of us are doing a Substack Live about the book and answering your questions about cohabitation, which is to say a Substack Live about the questions couples actually fight about:

Add it to your calendar now!

Come for the research. Stay to watch two experts workshop your relationship in real time.

‘til then
Your pal,

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Brooklyn, NY
14th September 2026

I was reading the latest edition of Inkspot this week: the club magazine of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, the oldest cartooning society in the world, and the one I grew up in. I edited Inkspot myself for a time in the early oughts, back when the scariest thing in its pages was the treasurer’s report. (It’s now done by the industrious Steve ‘Noz’ Panozzo- and has been for a LONG time.)

For an expat, it reads like a letter from home. You pour a scotch, you settle in at the drawing board, and you catch up on who drew what, who won what, and who said something unrepeatable at the annual dinner. That’s what I sat down expecting from the new Autumn/Winter number…

Instead, somewhere between page 6 and page 9, a pattern emerged, and by the back cover I was deeply unsettled, a thing the treasurer’s report never once achieved…

Pages 6 and 7: The Herald Sun in my old home of Melbourne has been running AI-generated cartoons.

Page 9: Cathy Wilcox is leaving the Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years. Near the back: a review of Dave Blumenstein’s book about AI and cartooning, rereleased in a new expanded edition, on account of everything in it coming true.

One issue. One quarter. One country. The little club magazine I used to edit now reads like a casualty list with production values.

Let’s start with Cathy, because Cathy is the reason I put the scotch down.

The news had already reached me in August, the way cartoonist news travels now: a screenshot in a group chat, followed by the word “mate”, which in Australia carries roughly the emotional payload of a 21-gun salute. But we’re print people, our lot. Nothing is properly true until it’s been typeset. And there it was on page 9. Typeset.

Cathy drew for the Herald for 37 years. She announced it on stage at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, at a sold-out forum about free speech, which is the most Cathy Wilcox way imaginable to resign: mid-sentence, in public, on topic. The paper, in her telling, had developed a case of “editorial timidity”, and she wasn’t about to make herself smaller to suit it. She spent 37 years drawing lines. The last one she drew was under the whole arrangement.

WHen the Herald Sun ran that AI slop above, Cathy drew this:

The List.

She isn’t the first. She’s just the latest, and I want to be clear that I’m not being poetic when I tell you I keep a list now. I do. It’s a real list, and it is not a fucking fun one.1

January last year: quit the Washington Post after 17 years, when the paper killed her cartoon of tech billionaires kneeling in front of Trump. One of the billionaires was Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. You couldn’t submit that as fiction; any decent editor would bounce it back for being too on the nose. 4 months later, Ann won the Pulitzer Prize, largely for the work she did on her way out the door…

Related Reading:

5 months after Ann, the Baltimore Sun let KAL go. Kevin Kallaugher. 31 years at that paper, a 2-time Pulitzer finalist, and he’d been drawing for The Economist since before I was born. The Sun’s managing editor explained that they had decided to “allocate our freelance budget to other areas”.

Remember that phrase. We’re coming back to it.

Around the big names, there are the quiet exits. Fiona Katauskas, named Australia’s political cartoonist of the year in 2023, now freelancing after The Guardian didn’t re-up her longtime gig as editorial cartoonist.

Fiona: So, I found out on Friday that my gig at the Guardian is coming to an end in late August. Needless to say I’m rather bummed by this development AND in need of a new job so if anyone’s looking for a cartoonist HMU…

Emma Cook, let go from Stuff in New Zealand after 8 years. Colin Wicking retired from the NT News in 2022 and was simply never replaced, which is the preferred method these days: you don’t fire the cartoonist; you just wait for them to leave and quietly brick up the doorway behind them. (That’s without mentioning the ouster of people like Rob Rogers and Michael DeAdder under the first Trump Admin.)

Related Reading:

Nobody calls it a purge, because it doesn’t need to be one.

The door only swings the one way. Nobody is being hired to fill these vacant desks. The desks are being wheeled out. This is not a run of bad luck. It’s not a blip, or a rough patch, or a “challenging media environment”. It is the end of an era: the era of the staff cartoonist, which ran roughly 150 years, from the invention of the halftone to the invention of the quarterly earnings call.

And no, this is not just ‘the death of print’ -News media has moved online along with everything from crosswords and puzzles, horoscopes, job listings, editorials, and everything in between. But somehow, cartoons are the thing being jettisoned at a rate unlike anything else. (Daily comic strips were the canary in the coal mine, because they always are.)

Now.. for the part that really stings. Back to pages 6 and 7.

In August, Melbourne’s Herald Sun ran that AI-generated illustration of the Victorian Premier you saw earlier, and took great pains to point out that it was clearly labelled as AI-generated.

Ah. Well then. It’s not a burglary, officer; it says “burglary” right there on the sash. The paper added, by way of reassurance, that it had been quietly doing this for 2 years.

And then, just weeks ago, the Baltimore Sun (yes, that Sun, the same one) published an editorial cartoon with a caption noting it had been produced by the editorial staff using artificial intelligence tools…

Other areas.

They found “other areas.”

They let go of a man who spent over 30 years learning to draw exactly what he thinks, and filled the space with a machine that has never thought anything. called the result slop, which I felt was generous. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists published an open letter in protest, which is our profession’s equivalent of a strongly worded fist.

said watching AI illustrations spread through the papers felt like “a punch in the gut”. She’s right, and I’d only add that this particular punch works for free and never asks about superannuation.

Oh, and that book from the back pages of Inkspot? David Blumenstein (longtime Deputy President of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association) has literally drawn the book on this racket: Octane Render: Cartoonists Talk About AI Art. He lays the business model out in 3 tidy panels: scrape everybody’s art off the internet without asking, use it to teach a machine to draw, then launch a for-profit company selling the output back to the people you scraped. He published it in 2023 as a warning. It has just been re-released in a revised and expanded edition, which tells you precisely how the warning went.. (Almost as well as mine that year.)

Cartoonists exaggerate for a living. It’s the whole kit. So let me be uncharacteristically precise: we are not imagining this:

It is actually happening, on three fucking continents, to the best people we have.

Read more

I’ve been introduced at parties, more than once, as a “bloke who doodles for a living”.

Nobody does this to other professions, really. Nobody claps a surgeon on the back and says, “So, you tinker?” No one tells a pilot she “fiddles about with lil’ planes”. But hand someone a drawing you’ve spent 30 years learning how to make, and out comes the d-word.

This week’s Draw Me Anything guest wrote a whole essay about that word (It’s not “doodling”), and I’ve been nodding at it ever since.

has been drawing professionally for more than 30 years: The New York Times, MoMA, Disney, hundreds of magazines-he’s made more than 80 children’s books, several of them New York Times bestsellers, which is roughly 80 more than me. He teaches illustration at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. He hosts a YouTube show in which grown adults discuss art supplies with the hushed reverence most people reserve for French wine. (Precisely my kind of lunatic, in other words.)

Right now he’s making a graphic novel called The Walk, about an astronaut alone in space who wants nothing more than to get outside, and he’s serialising the whole process (thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles) on his Substack, Random Orbit. If you’ve ever wanted to watch an amazing book get built in public, plank by plank, that’s the one. (I’ve been following along instead of finishing my own book…)

Add it to your calendar now!

So. On Wednesday we’ll draw live while I interrogate him about all of it: the process of making books, the astronauts, geek out about pens, and how a man can draw for 3 decades and still feel like he’s just getting started. Fling your requests into the chat, and we’ll draw those too. That’s the whole point of the show!

‘til then!

Your pal,

Hey again, friend!

Welcome to Issue #471 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, the air conditioners are coming out of the windows, the pumpkin nonsense is going into the coffee, and I’ve just looked up from the drafting table to find an entire summer has slipped past without a proper roundup.

By the way, I really love hearing from all of you - on Notes, in the comments, in email replies. I really do appreciate everyone who reads this newsletter.

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This is issue 471, which is a number I look at and my brain kind of melts… the lists started with two people I met on the street outside The Stand comedy club; it’s now 20,000+ strong. Crazy. Thank you to everyone who reaches out on Notes etc., like below…

Things are going well with the Substack. I keep getting notifications like this one:

Not really sure if they really mean much at all, but I’m grateful all the same!

If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, I’d love you to consider it. it’s only $1 a week, and it makes all the difference.

Subscribe now

What’s coming up?

Wellp! The passport is out of the drawer. On Thursday 24 September, Emily and I are performing in Paris at Coucou Comedy, the English-language stand-up night. If you know anyone in France (a cousin, an ex, a pen pal, an enemy you’re pretending to like), tell them to come: bookings are free, pay-what-you-can at the door.

Then it’s on to the Saint-Just-le-Martel international cartoon festival, where a small village in the Haute-Vienne turns itself over entirely to cartoonists, and after that, the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal: my first time back since 2017, where I’ll be captaining Team Asterix in an Asterix v Tintin debate I intend to treat with wildly disproportionate seriousness.

Full dispatches from all of it in the coming weeks.

But back to the Summer Recap…

So, here it is: everything from the summer in 1 big pile, like the mail that builds up behind the door while you’re away. It’s been a stupidly busy one (a book, a wedding, a muppet, several funerals for entire art forms), and I’d apologise for the length, except you’re the one who subscribed.

Pour something. Settle in…

Since Last We Spoke…

Here’s what went out while you were sensibly at the beach…

Ten Australians (and 1 Long-Lost Perth Boy)

The New York premiere of James Boland’s documentary Ten Australians, about Australian expat life in this city, dedicated to the 10 Australians murdered on September 11. I’m in it, somehow, wedged between genuinely interesting people. I wrote about the whole night (the red carpet, the 2 martinis, the names worth saying out loud) at the link.

The unadvertised miracle of the evening: my friend John Robertson turned up to the afterparty at Old Mates. I hadn’t seen him in 16 years. We started out in comedy together in Perth in 2007; he’s now killing it in London and happened to be touring through New York. 16 years, and we picked it up mid-sentence, the way you can only do with someone who knew you when you were bombing in baggy jeans.

Our Baby Is Here (It Has My Nose)

Scott Dooley and I spent 9 months making You’re Not a Real Parent Until... and this month you finally got to see its face! It’s out in October, pre-orders are open now, and every single one genuinely matters to 2 blokes trying to raise a book in this economy.

The Titanic Wedding (and the Tiny Hot Dogs)

In July I officiated a Titanic-themed wedding in Alphabet City as a doomed maritime captain, because of course I did. The full account is at the link and it remains among the most New York things I have ever been part of.

Epilogue: Billy and Deanna, the newlyweds in question, recently put on a tiny hot dog art show at dba in the East Village. A room full of small paintings of hot dogs. I attended, obviously, because when the people you married on the door of a doomed ocean liner invite you to look at miniature frankfurter art, you go. This city, honestly.

Plus there was a baby hotdog there to hold…

One Laugh, Two Anniversaries

In July I quietly marked 19 years of doing stand-up, over vegan quiche, which is the most middle-aged sentence this newsletter has ever produced. The essay’s at the link.

Pancakes and Pens with a Legend

I spent Labor Day weekend in Baltimore, where I had pancakes and coffee with Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher: The Economist’s cartoonist since 1978, and The Baltimore Sun’s for 31 years, until the Sun let him go last year and, in a plot twist nobody with a soul asked for, started running AI-generated cartoons instead. (If you read The Handwriting Was on the Wall, you already know this genre of story. It does not improve with repetition.)

gave me a tour of his studio that I’ll be digesting for months: decades of originals, the crosshatching up close, a whole wall of history you can smell the ink on. I gifted him a couple of Hunt 101 Imperial nibs, because he’s one of the last guys I know using dip pens and ink on a daily basis.

Then, because he is not merely one of the greatest living political cartoonists but apparently also a children’s entertainer trapped in a Harvard man’s body, he performed for me with his muppet, Bowzer McSchnouzer. I want to be clear: I did not request this. It was offered freely, and it was magnificent.

Most importantly, I met his dog, Django, who supervised the entire visit like a furry maître d’.

While I was down there, I also sat behind home plate at Camden Yards and watched the Orioles thrash the Guardians. I ate hot dogs at a pace that alarmed the vendor, drank ballpark beer at ballpark prices, and cheered Coby Mayo’s 2 home runs like a man whose citizenship depended on it.

Columbus, Twice

I went back to Columbus, Ohio (scene of this year’s Reubens) for the Columbus Comedy Festival. The announcement is here, and the Day 1 diary is here; its title, “You Always End Up Where You’re Meant To Be,” is doing a lot of load-bearing work.

Thank you to my readers in Ohio who came out to support! It was great to see you!

The Magician, the Bird, & Me

3 performers explain how they actually make a living in the arts. 1 of them has a puppet, which brings this issue’s official puppet count to 2.

Drawn to NYC Stories

My first time hosting and live-drawing the same show, which turns out to be the professional equivalent of patting your head while rubbing your stomach, in front of a paying audience.

Bumping Into Kevin Nealon at the Comedy Cellar

One night at the Cellar I bumped into Kevin Nealon, who is not only an SNL legend but also, inconveniently for me, a genuinely brilliant caricaturist: One of the very few people on Earth qualified to beat me at both of my jobs in the same evening. He was, of course, lovely about it. I’m told I said words, possibly even in order.

2 Friends, 2 Theatres, 0 Co-Stars

This month I also got to watch two friends carry entire shows on their own: my new friend Laura Ramoso at the Beacon last night (as I write this), and my old friend Chloe Radcliffe at Joe’s Pub earlier in the month. Both were amazing, in completely different ways, and both held a room solo for the better part of an hour, which I consider showing off. There is no better feeling than sitting in the dark watching your friends be exactly as good as you’ve been telling people they are.

Buried Alive by CNN

The New Yorker softball team’s evening against CNN, in which we were left (and I cannot stress this enough) literally in the dark. A dispatch from the dugout for those following the season.

The Craft Corner…

The Bloke with the Highlighter

The big free essay on how I learned to write gooder: the books, the highlighters, the copy of Strunk & White currently propping up the short leg of my drafting table. If you go back for one essay from this summer, make it this one.

Drawing Quiet: Susan Cain on Waking Up

Behind the scenes on drawing Susan Cain’s portrait for the Waking Up app, which felt less like a commission and more like writing a thank-you note with a dip pen.

Cigars and Coke with Frasier Crane

An afternoon in Queens in October 2023 that I finally got down on paper. It is exactly the kind of afternoon the title suggests, and also not remotely.

The Robot Files…

The Machines Are Eating My Sketchbook

The one about the black box, the poison pill, and the people trying to hand us a crowbar. Practical rather than despairing: there are things you can actually do, and I go through them.

Everyone’s Tired & Nobody Trusts the Robot

My read on Creative Boom’s flagship 2026 industry survey, in which an entire profession fills out a form to say it’s exhausted. The numbers are grim. The company is excellent…

The Handwriting Was on the Wall

Air Mail stopped buying cartoons. Another market gone, and this one didn’t even have the decency to die first. I wrote about what that does to the maths of this job.

Fool Me Twice

An update on the AI, the shitting horse (long-time readers know the shititng horse), and the tech CEOs grading their own homework. The horse remains undefeated.

And if you want to know where that road ends, scroll back up to Baltimore.

The Quieter Ones…

The Best Day, The Worst Day

The one I wrote for Morris. I won’t summarise it; it’s short, and it says what I could manage.

Sketchbook: Strangers Are Easy

Going back to work afterwards, whatever that means, 1 stranger at a time.

The Man on the Trunk of the Tree

Farewelling Pat Oliphant, 1935-2026: the Australian who crossed the Pacific and redrew American political cartooning. The debt is unpayable.

9/11 in New York

25 years on, the memory is woven into the city’s daily life: the firehouse plaques, the fading murals, the names etched in stone. It pairs, unavoidably, with Ten Australians above.

Is There Something In This?
The Summer Episodes

Scott Dooley and I kept the gag mines open all summer: 5 new episodes of 2 men holding ideas up to the light and asking the only question that matters….

• #62: Knicks in Five

• #63: Every Liquid Is Gross

• #64: The Champagne Opened Itself

• #65: “I’ll tell you someone who’s not discussing the ins-and-outs of pigeon divorce: a dentist in Westchester.”

• #66: IP Theft Is Huge in the Moth Community

The episode titles are, as ever, the best jokes we made all month.

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a selection of the sketches I did of people’s kids at a birthday party this past weekend.

Don’t forget to pre-order our new book about parenting here!

The live drawing show rolled on all summer, and the guest list still doesn’t feel real. Each episode is an hour of me drawing whatever you lot request while somebody brilliant talks about how they actually work. Catch up here:

• Mindy Tucker, the patron saint of NYC comedy photography, on 20 years and 1 million photos of this scene, and why she’s finally opening the archive.

• Rich Sparks, on why getting a dog right doesn’t mean getting a dog funny.

• Austin Kleon, returning with his new book Don’t Call It Art.

• Josh Gondelman, on how to be funny without being a monster about it.

• Avi Steinberg, cheerfully gatecrashed by .

• Carly Valancy, live from Spain, on why every good thing in your life started with somebody sending a scary email. (The preview post is here too.)

Some of you will remember Carly. She interviewed me on her Substack, A Good Omen, a while back. This week I got to return fire.

Four years ago, Carly reached out to the writer . When she interviewed him, she asked who she should talk to next. He said me. She sent me one email. I said yes. Then I sent her one email (”I know how busy you are, but...”), and she said yes. Somewhere since then, I also filled out the intake form for her next Reach Out Party cohort, which means I am now both her interviewer and her student, a conflict of interest I intend to exploit fully.

She told me my ask landed as a gift, not an imposition: “I ran outside and told my husband. You know what’s so cool? The chain of events that can happen from one email or DM.” That’s her entire body of work in a sentence. One email. Everything else is scaffolding.

Carly is a former actor. Broadway community, Hell’s Kitchen, 44th Street, the whole catastrophe. At about 25, stuck in a coffee shop job she hated and hunting for an agent, she did the thing that would become her life’s work without knowing it: she reached out to 1 stranger a day for 100 days.

It worked, in the boring, verifiable way these things sometimes do. She found an agent she’s still friends with. She booked a national tour. And around day 82, she finally mentioned the whole scheme to her acting coach, who was appalled. Not by the project. By the secrecy. “You have to tell people you’re doing this!” Then: “When you get to day 100, you should throw a party at the studio. I’ll host it. You can call it Carly Valancy’s Reach Out Party.”

She ran the 100 days again at 30, and the second lap taught her the lesson hiding inside the first:

Carly has a phrase I’ve been carrying around like a lucky coin: increasing your surface area for luck. More reach-outs, more rooms, more chances for the universe to trip over you. Lately she’s refined it into something even better: “placing yourself in the current of serendipity”…

I asked her to define a good omen, given she’s named an entire publication after one. She gave me a visual instead:

“I’m going to give you a lava lamp. It’s constantly moving, and there’s some kind of glow about it where you’re just like, what is that thing? It’s got texture, and it’s alive.”

Then she gave me a better one, borrowed from the theatre director Anne Bogart, whom she cold-emailed (of course she did) with the same question:

Read more

Double-post today!
This is a repost of last year’s essay on the attacks on New York and DC. This is obviously a topic I’m very close to, having lived in Manhattan for 12 years and seen how much it’s changed since 9/11. I first set foot in New York 20 years ago, and it never stopped feeling like the place I was meant to be in this life. I know there are a lot of posts about the 25th anniversary floating around today, so I don’t expect you to have to trudge through another one, but for what it’s worth, these are my thoughts.

To live in Manhattan is to live with the memory woven into daily life.

It’s in the firehouse plaques, the fading murals, the names etched in stone. It’s in the way strangers become neighbours, and how we pause when the lights switch on every September.

On the night of September 11, 2001, I was seventeen, sitting on the couch in Perth with my mum. We were watching Rove Live when the program cut away to breaking news. It was 9:30 at night, and Sandra Sully was doing her best to remain calm and stoic. The screen showed the towers burning, then falling, and it felt like the world cracked open.

I was on the other side of the planet, in my final year of high school, and yet the images reached across oceans. They didn’t feel real. Too big. Too foreign. Too American. But something in me understood: nothing would be the same after this.

I visited New York a few times while they were cleaning up and while they were rebuilding. It still felt so raw. 2006. 2009. 2010, 2011, 12, 13. Coming over from Australia, I watched New York slowly, gradually rebuild and recover before I moved here in 2014.

(“The Pit” 2006)

Two decades later, I’d been in living in Manhattan for 7 years. On the twentieth anniversary, I walked downtown. The air was still, the beams of light shot upward, stitched into the skyline. Thousands of people stood shoulder to shoulder, quiet. Even this city—loud, restless, addicted to noise—knew how to hold its breath.

I thought about the two versions of me: the teenager watching in disbelief from a living room in Perth, and the old bastard with worn-out knees standing in silence at the site itself.

New York doesn’t do reverence neatly. It doesn’t stop honking or jaywalking or arguing about bagels (it’s the water!). But that’s part of its theology. It remembers in motion, holding grief and survival in the same breath. A man bows his head in the plaza, then shouts at a Grubhub cyclist. Firefighters raise a pint at a bar, laughing as loudly as they mourn. New York’s version of prayer, maybe.

For me, remembering 9/11 is remembering both nights at once: the night I sat with my mum, stunned by what the TV showed us, and the morning I stood among strangers downtown, the air charged with silence.

It’s been 25 years today. Every year, when the sky turns that clear blue, Manhattan remembers. And I remember it, from both sides of the world.

Thank you to reader David Rickert for calling my attention to this guest essay in the Times on Thursday. It really gave me hope amid the doom of the past week of AI-fueled nightmares.

For anyone in class who hasn’t done the reading, it’ll be helpful to have seen this, heard about this, and quietly lost your shit over this.

Let’s begin.

10th September, 2026
New York, NY

I know, I know. In April, I spewed 2,000 words about AI regulation and promised we’d get straight back to sketchbooks and psychotic pigeons. I’m nothing if not a man of my word, in the sense that I have once again broken it.

But hear me out: published an essay in Thursday morning’s Times, and I read it the way I read most news of the coming apocalypse: hunched at the drafting board with my coffee going cold at the same rate as my optimism.

Oren. You know what? I’m calling him Cass from now on. Cass sounds more better-er. Anyway, Cass is the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank. I am a Liberal expat cartoonist who once lost an argument with a self-checkout machine. We are not natural allies. So, when the two of us find ourselves nodding along at the same paragraph, it’s fair to assume something, somewhere, has gone properly fucking awry.

His argument (as a bit of a TL;DR) is:
Silicon Valley spent 20 years treating the public like lab rats; the public has finally noticed, and now the AI industry has turned up asking for our trust with the confidence of a man who walked into the subway car and ripped a huge fart while wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

By the way, excuse any typos or glaring errors in the following tirade… I’m writing a bunch of this on my phone in the subway. (And the smell from Airpods guy is real bad.)

So, you might have read that Americans are revolting against data centres (the buildings that, as covered in April’s rant, guzzle the electricity of 4 million homes and send them the bill) so fiercely that support has collapsed roughly thrice as much as support for nuclear power did after Three Mile Island. Yep. We are now more spooked by the sheds where the internet does its homework than we were by an actual partial nuclear meltdown.

Fewer than 1 in 4 Americans expect AI to improve their kids’ education, their jobs, the economy, their relationships or their happiness. Those are approval numbers normally reserved for jury duty and mosquitoes. When I sounded this alarm in April, I only got about 30 likes. The apocalypse, undeterred, continued apace. So it’s nice to finally have company, (even if the company is a conservative dude at a think tank.)

The President’s contribution to the debate was to post that anyone opposing data centres wants America to end up backwards and poor; the sales technique of a man in a tweed suit pounding on your screen door at midnight, yelling “Only an idiot wouldn’t want these encyclopedias!”

Cass digs up Zuckerberg’s old motto about moving fast and breaking things, then lands the cleanest line in the essay: “WE were the things being broken.”

20 years of feeds engineered like slot machines, of executives shipping apps to our kids that they wouldn’t let near their own, and now the same postcode would like us to believe the next product, the one they cheerfully describe as the most powerful in human history, is being built with our best interests at heart.

Sure, Jan.

And this time the goose really is golden. (The goose can share a paddock with the horse. The horse, long-time readers will recall, remains out, and remains shitting.)

The Prophets Would Like More Profits Pls.

It’s worth remembering what the founders themselves say. Out loud. Into microphones. On purpose.

Anthropic’s chief executive has suggested half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish within 5 years. (Remember that interview?) Musk, the man who deleted my X account after I got blocked by the President, says “Eventually, no job will be needed at all!”, and vocal-fry Altman has said “Wages for many kinds of labour will head toward zero”, then, in the same breath, promises “a future where we’re all freed up to spend time with loved ones and appreciate art.”

Cool.

Appreciate whose art, exactly, Sam? You fed the artists into the machine in Chapter 1. That’s like torching the orchard and promising everyone more time with apples. Nothing you do matches what you croak. (And that’s the common thread with everything Altman has said/done since the beginning.)

The fallback plan is a universal basic income, which Cass correctly clocks as a bribe to shut up and go away: pocket money from the people who took your job, redeemable, presumably, at the company store. He has a much better idea, which I’ll get to below, because it concerns your actual retirement, and I am saving it for after the paywall like the shameless little goose I am.

Meanwhile, as the film I reviewed in April (above) pointed out, there remains more regulation on selling a sandwich than on building the machine that 5 labs cheerfully agree might end the fucking world and all human life as we know it. Since April, precisely nothing about that has changed (except the sandwich now costs $19).

“These are the brilliant researchers actively working on the technology who casually admit they do not expect their own children to make it to high school.”

Read more.

The people building these machines openly admit they don’t fully understand how they work. They tip massive amounts of data and ‘compute’ into a digital brain, and the machine starts teaching itself things it was never programmed to do. It learns to do arithmetic, it answers advanced physics questions, and it figures out research-grade chemistry all on its own… oh, then it solves Navier-Stokes before breakfast.

My stake in this is not particularly subtle. I make my living doing the two things this technology automated first and most enthusiastically: drawing pictures and writing. Last week, it was Air Mail quietly closing another cartoon market; increasingly, its clients who used to call an illustrator are now asking a robot for “something similar” at a fraction of the price.
(You think I’m catastrophising? Read KAL or Cathy’s latest)

And Cass makes the point I’ve been shouting into the bottom of my empty scotch glass for over 3 years: The labs built themselves an exquisite, endlessly refined tool for writing code, and then, he asks, where’s the plumber’s version? Something to sort the schedule, the parts list, the invoices, the bloke ringing about his boiler at 6am? Nothing.

Speaking on behalf of cartoonists, I can report that we did get purpose-built software. It just doesn’t do our invoices. (The QuickBooks plugin for Claude is rubbish.) It does our job. Badly, and for free, which in this economy is a devastating portfolio.

You’ve seen the results. They’re the Canal Street Gucci handbags of art: convincing from 10 feet, and then you lean in, and the shoddy stitching says GUCCHI, the man in the drawing has 7 fingers, and the caption reads like it’s been written in Finnish.

Alright. I need to take a breath. My station’s coming up, and everyone’s still looking at me.

Look, I take ages to write this stuff, and I hope it’s of some use to you. If it is, I’d love you to consider throwing me six bucks, or even just a dollar a week by taking out an annual subscription. I spend most of my time working on my Substack these days, so this is my main gig now. It’s not a side hustle or a hobby. Anyway. Thank you all the same for reading. I appreciate you!

I promise I’ll be done in a sec. Just one last gripe that seems too insane to ignore:

Cass observes that if the industry had a better story to tell the public, its adverts would be telling it. Instead, per his tour of the evidence, OpenAI ran a SuperBowl spot aimed at people who love chess, Linux and writing software, a demographic you could seat in 1 carriage of the G train. Google spent the NBA playoffs suggesting a teenager could use its chatbot to learn to sink a game-winning shot, a plan with roughly the success rate of learning to swim by texting a lifeguard. And Anthropic put out a summer ad that opens on a burning house, an open-pit mine, war graves and a street riot, while a gentle voice asks how we can make sure all this benefits most people.

Who makes this shit? What agency tested this and went “Yep— go with war graves one, it’s killing with the 18→34s!”

I’m not a Luddite, incidentally.

I letter my comics digitally, I let Google tell me where I am on a map, and I have, in weak moments, asked a chatbot whether a joke of mine was funny. It said yes. It always says yes. (It’s wrong.) It is the only relationship I have ever been in where I am definitely the problem and will never once hear about it.

The most quietly radical idea in the piece comes from science fiction: Cass borrows the commandment from Dune: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” No human personas. No professed feelings. No chatbot companions, and certainly no fucking creepy chatbot girlfriends.

The serious version of this point deserves to be said straight… He reminds us that Musk’s Grok happily promoted its ability to generate deepfakes of real people without their clothes, and reined it in only when the outrage involved minors. An industry that needs public fury about children in order to locate a line it won’t cross can spare me the mission statements.

I was sitting in a Tesla this summer when the owner showed me what taking the guard rails off looked like -the Grok-powered car assistant called him things I wouldn’t even roast a fellow comic with in a greenroom hang. I blushed. The shit this thing came out with was unhinged..

Now, the idea I’d actually stick on the fridge concerns a good number of you directly. Instead of UBI, Cass says: tax the machines, and pipe the money into Social Security, Medicare and a benefit for families raising kids. If a robot takes a job, the robot pays into the system like everyone else who ever held a job.

His think tank’s own polling, he says, found people prefer a world where work survives but gets better over the post-work daydream by about 4 to 1. Turns out nobody wants to be liberated from a purposeful life. They want the purpose, minus the paperwork. If poss. Pls.

Regular readers know where I land on all this: apocaloptimism. Accept that the worst is genuinely possible, stay optimistic enough to fight for the better outcome, and keep drawing in the meantime.

Who, exactly, is all this progress for? The labs need an answer, and fast.

While they draft one, I keep thinking about the wobble. Every line I draw has one: a small tremor where the hand carries the day’s caffeine and the year’s news. A machine can draw a straighter line than me. So can a ruler. Nobody’s ever framed one.

The wobble is the signature. It’s how you know a person was here, at a drawing board, at 1am, trying to make you laugh instead of going to bed.

That part doesn’t scale.

‘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.

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10 September 2026
TriBeCa, New York

Last night I put on a shirt I’d ironed 3 times, which is 3 more times than I’ve ironed anything since the divorce, and walked a red carpet in Lower Manhattan. Somehow, I’m in a film.

Not a big part, let’s be clear. But last night Ten Australians premiered in New York: a documentary by old mate James Boland, who runs the Australian Community here, and who I mostly see once a year at the Anzac Day dawn service, standing in the dark beside the New Zealanders and the Turkish officers who come to remember Gallipoli together. Still the most quietly awesome thing I’ve witnessed in this city.

The film is full of Australians who really bloody did something with their time in New York.

It’s full of high-achieving Aussies. (full bios here:1 ) Nick Stone, who decided New York needed a proper flat white and built Bluestone Lane out of the craving while he was still working at ANZ. Anne Geddes, who photographed every baby of the 90s asleep in a flowerpot (inspired by a cartoonist, btw!). Erin Quill, of the original Broadway cast of Avenue Q, and Simon Adams, who spent a decade advising the UN on how to stop crimes against humanity… Oh, and me: a grown man who draws funny pictures for The New Yorker and tells silly jokes on stage. I sat there in the dark, feeling like the free plastic toy in a cereal box of accomplished people, and started on martini number one.

But the title isn’t actually about the 10 of us on screen. It’s about 10 Australians who never got to be on screen at all: the 10 murdered on 9/11, among the nearly 3,000 killed in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. I bang on about them every September in Ginger Meggs (below), and James has dedicated his whole film to them.

James made this film with honesty, restraint and enormous delicacy. It does not flinch. There’s no music under the interviews, not much B-Roll to speak of, but it holds your attention the whole time. The 120-odd minutes feel like 30.

Friday marks 25 years since 9/11. I was 17, in the middle of my final exams, when the second plane hit the tower, and I heard my mum say ‘fuck’ for the first time in my life. I had no idea what the World Trade Centre was. I know now. I walk past where it stood most weeks.

Julie Stahl knew immediately. In the film, she remembers watching from her rooftop, which had a clear line to the towers, while the early reports called it a Cessna, and her friend from Sydney, who’d seen the plane, saying: “That was not a Cessna.” She remembers people waving tablecloths from the top floors. And she remembers what came next, which the anniversary coverage always skims: “Every New Yorker was there to help their fellow New Yorkers.” The volunteer line on the West Side Highway was so long that nobody had any hope of reaching the front of it. Sit with that image for a second. The worst morning in the city’s history, and the queue was to help.

That, for my money, is what makes New Yorkers New Yorkers, and it’s the thing I say in the film: “It was the worst thing that ever happened here. And yet, here we are, still standing, still moving forward.” 9/11 didn’t just wound New York; it calibrated it. Sandy? Bring it on. Blizzards, COVID, a rat dragging your dinner past you on the platform? Strap in. Resilience here is infectious. You catch it from strangers.

The other theme snuck up on me somewhere around martini number 2:

Distance.

Everyone in this film lives about as far from the people who love them most as geometry allows. I say in the film that if you drilled a hole through the earth from my apartment, you’d surface in the Indian Ocean, just west of where I grew up. Chris Marketo’s dad used to answer his calls home with, “I used to have a son called Chris, but he had an Australian accent.” Which is funny, until Chris tells you his mum cried on every one of those calls, right up until she was gone, and that he still does the terrible arithmetic of whether staying might have bought her more time.

Erin Quill rang a Cairns hospital 3 times to say goodbye to her grandmother. The third time, they told her: “She’s gone.” Erin calls all of this “a tax on your heart,”.
Other Aussie friends abroad and I call it The Expat Tax. It extracts a lot.

I talked about it in the film, and it was the hardest thing to do, but I’m glad I did. A lot of people came up to me afterwards to tell me I was speaking their exact thoughts aloud. It’s a difficult thing to explain to people who live where they were born and raised.

This is the film’s quiet trick, and the reason it belongs to this week: leaving and loss kind of rhyme…

New Yorkers learned everything about sudden distance 25 years ago. Expat Australians choose a smaller, slower version of it every time we say goodbye at an airport gate, not knowing which goodbye will be the last. James pointed out in the Q&A that we never even call ourselves immigrants; always expats (ie., there are Irish Americans, Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, etc., but no ‘Australian Americans’) because every one of us privately believes we’re going home eventually. We’re not. We’re just people who love 2 places at once, which guarantees we’re always missing one of them.

Afterwards, we all walked to Old Mates on John Street, where the beer was cold, and the accents sounded like home.

So here’s the one thing I’ll ask. James made this film in roughly 1,000 hours of his own life for under $10,000, which in documentary terms is a magic trick, and he’s now raising about $15,000 to $18,000 to carry it through festivals and beyond. Doc NYC decides on 15 September.

Please support this film. Watch the trailer below, and on Friday, when the bells toll downtown and the names are read aloud, remember that 10 of them are ours.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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Scott Dooley and I have some news, and we’d like to do this properly.

After roughly 9 months of labour, we are finally giving birth to a book. It’s a follow-up to our first, award-winning book, which you’ll recall is You’re Not A Real Dog-Owner Until… We’re excited to announce that the new book is called…

You’re Not a Real Parent Until...

It’s out on 13th October through Andrews McMeel, and I can confirm it was more fun to make than the way you make an actual baby. Almost. Depends who you ask.

Anyway. Today you get to see its face.

Ready?

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK. 25% OFF UNTIL FRIDAY

128 pages. Full colour. Safe to leave on any coffee table, including your mother’s.

Long-time readers with preternaturally good memories may recall that Scott and I made the first version of this book a few years ago. This is the new and improved edition: new cover, new cartoons, same 2 idiots.

A note on our, er, credentials…
Scott has a 2-year-old called Leo, which means he wrote this book the way a war correspondent writes from the trenches: in short bursts, under fire, with something sticky on his sleeve. I do not have children, which I maintain makes me the impartial one. I have spent years observing parents the way Attenborough observes penguins -with enormous affection, from a safe distance, occasionally whispering extraordinary as one of them fishes a Hot Wheels out of a toilet. Between us, we have exactly the right amount of experience: one of us knows what it’s actually like, and the other one is well rested enough to draw it.

The book is, in fact, dedicated to Leo. So that’s nice.
Here's a taste of what's inside.

Now, the part where I ask you for something….

Pre-orders decide a book’s fate. Not reviews, not talent, not prayer: pre-orders. Booksellers look at the pre-order numbers and decide, right then, how many copies to put in shops. Every single pre-order tells Barnes & Noble to order more. It’s the one moment in publishing where 1 reader genuinely moves the needle.

And as luck would have it, Barnes & Noble has just made helping us cheap. From today until Friday, they’re taking 25% off all pre-orders. The only catch: you need to be a B&N Rewards member, which is free and takes less than a minute at checkout. (Premium members get a further 10% off the hardcover, because there’s always a velvet rope.)

The hardcover is $19.99, so with the discount you’ll pay about $15. For a real book. With a spine and everything.

This is the link to us. This one, specifically:

Pre-Order Our Baby for $15

As of this morning, B&N’s website was shelving us next to David Sedaris and The Philosophy of Snoopy, which is the nicest thing an algorithm has done or will ever do for either of us. Pre-order a copy and help us stay there.

That’s it. That’s the whole ask. One link, 3 days, and my eternal gratitude -plus Scott’s… which is worth slightly less but comes with better hair.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Yes, the deal ends Friday. Yes, that’s soon. That’s rather the point.

PPS. Look, if you know someone who might like the book, please share this with them!

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Add it to your calendar NOW!

Last September, a woman I’d never met sat me down and extracted confessions I’d never said out loud.

That I once needed my mum’s boyfriend’s cousin’s wife to smuggle a note to a cartoonist I was too frightened to email directly. That I pitched The New Yorker every week for 6 years before they took a single cartoon. That the best career advice I ever got arrived as a 5-page email from a Pulitzer winner I’d written an email to from Perth, fully expecting silence…

Somewhere around the part where I described seeing my first cartoon in print, she typed “Why am I crying?”

That woman was . The interview ran on her Substack under the title “People get things because they ask,” which is the sort of sentence that seems obvious right up until you actually try it. This Thursday, the tables turn. She’s my guest on Draw Me Anything.

Who is Carly Valancy, you ask?

Carly is what happens when a Broadway performer takes a hard left into tech startups and comes out the other side with a philosophy. At 30, she reached out to 100 strangers in 100 days; it rearranged her life so thoroughly that CNBC wrote it up. Now she runs Reach Out Party, an 8-week mastermind where ambitious creatives finally send the emails they’ve been drafting in their heads for years. She hosts Anti-Networking events, co-runs a growth consultancy, and writes , a Substack read by 5,000+ people about how everything good -the job, the marriage, the big break- traces back to 1 person being brave enough to ping another.

Here’s the bit I love most: When Carly was 9, she wanted to be a cartoonist!
Her camp counsellor taught the cartooning class, and his dream was to be published in The New Yorker. She didn’t become a cartoonist. She became something arguably more useful: the person who gets everyone else to ask. But somewhere in there is still a 9-year-old who flips through the paper wondering who drew the cartoons. Which, I suspect, is how she found me.

I’m doing her Reach Out Party this year. Yes. A 40-something Australian who considers asking for a glass of tap water an imposition is now formally enrolled in an American asking academy. In Australia, requesting things sits somewhere between poor form and light treason; Carly has spent 7 years proving it’s the single highest-leverage thing you can do in a day. One of us is wrong, and I’m paying her to find out which.

On Thursday at 10, we’ll get into:

• What a professional asker can teach a man who apologises to furniture

• Why “networking” is a filthy word, and what she does instead

• The 100-strangers-in-100-days experiment: what worked, what was mortifying

• How to write a reach-out that doesn’t read like a LinkedIn ransom note

• What thousands of scary drafts have taught her about what people actually want

  

When: This Thursday @ 10am EDT (4pm in Spain, where Carly will be enjoying considerably better weather and food than the rest of us)
Where: Live, right here.

Add it to your calendar NOW!

Come with a question. If her whole thesis holds, you’ll get something just because you asked.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS: If you know someone who’s been drafting the same scary email since 2019, restack this and send it to them. Consider it your reach-out for the day.

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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.

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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:

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.

Kal Draws The Line

General Mayhem

I am very grateful for the backing of my subscribers. Thanks to you, I can endeavor to keep the flame of satire alight in these darkening times…

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a month ago · 99 likes · 15 comments · Kevin KAL Kallaugher

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

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This?

Outside, seaplanes kept coming down the East River like they’d been thrown, and every twenty minutes Scott and I stopped mid-sentence to watch one not crash. One aborted, came around, and hit the water hard enough that we both made the noise. Nobody plans these segments.

I’m back from Columbus, where actual listeners turned up and forced us to describe our audience out loud. Here’s what we landed on: you’re pretentious, but you’re dumb enough to know you shouldn’t be. You want Barry Blitt on trade deficits, but you also want to know if the mouse has a really big dick. You are, in other words, exactly like us. (btw here’s a thing: I’m now live-drawing the ideas as we go, so the video version on Substack and YouTube is where you can watch me ruin a perfectly good joke in real time.)

Then we did the jokes. A jester’s head in the guillotine bucket, and the salesman who pitched the guillotine to the king as a workflow disruption. A MoMA guard with a new sign about muttering AI slop near the Van Gogh. A snowman in couples counselling, his wife a bucket of water: “I just think this summer has changed her.” A moth has an idea, and every moth for miles descends on it…

Somewhere in there, we stopped writing jokes and got onto the Flock cameras, the licence-plate network that lets cops look up their exes without a subpoena.

Also: the balls on the Big Merino, a pigeon with a hustle, a Borg water tower in Greenpoint, and a Gallagher courtroom gag from which Scott has formally removed his name. Because why not?

Our new book, You’re Not a Real Parent Until..., is out on October 13th and available for pre-order now wherever you buy books. It has, I’m reliably informed, already reached one bookshelf in Moscow.

By the way, if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, you can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

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▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Buy our new book at: www.realdogowner.com

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

‘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.

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Columbus, Ohio
Saturday, 29 August 2026

I spent this morning hungover, on a panel with a magician and a man who professionally writes for a bird.

The bird is a puppet. The man is Josh Zagoran, the bird is Chad, and Chad has spent seventeen years delivering ten-minute news rants every Saturday at a Chicago bar called the Green Mill. The magician was Hanowell (One word. Like Reacher- just… Hanowell), who moved to Columbus to work for a magic company, got laid off, and now does it full-time: the origin story of every artist you’ve ever met, minus the top hat.

The topic was the hustle: the sideways ways people like us pay the rent. I was there as the cartoonist and the stand-up comic, which meant that in a line-up featuring a puppet and a deck of cards, I was the normal one.

Yeah, sit with that.

The moderator opened with a number I haven’t verified and don’t intend to: Roughly two-thirds of comedians make less than $100 a month. The room laughed… the way you laugh when someone reads your checking balance aloud.

Here is what I learned from the other two-thirds of the panel…

A magician can eat anywhere.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support a human artist making things with their hands, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

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Magic, Chris said, is fluid: a restaurant floor, a kid’s birthday, a coffee shop, a television set as a consultant. Ask a comic at a party for a joke, and we want to murder you. Ask a magician for a trick, and he’s already behind your ear with a coin.

“We’re just whoring ourselves,” he said, cheerfully. “All the time.”

He has one talent priced for six rooms. I have one act and a wobbly bronze nib.

Writing is not typing…

Josh writes Chad’s ten minutes on a Saturday morning, mostly away from the keyboard: in the garden, cleaning, doing anything that looks exactly like not writing. (Kind of like how I write mine in the bathtub.)

He structures every rant like a medieval town crier: ring the bell, hold the scroll, deliver the news, lock it in with a rhyme so the village remembers. Big opening, the goods, a callback. Which is a comedy set. And a cartoon. And this newsletter, if I’m being honest, which at a hundred dollars a month I’m not obliged to be.

“Quit your day job is something your stupid uncle says.”

That’s Josh, and I’ve stolen it. His years as a short-order cook were still the comedy career. Tom Hanks gets to just do his art. The rest of us do book illustrations, live caricatures, portrait commissions, comedy writing, New Yorker cartoons and comic strips… “Say yes to everything and figure it out later.”

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Columbus, Ohio. Thursday.

I got here on the second flight, because the first one was cancelled by a biblical flood in New York, the second weather event this week specifically engineered to sabotage my comedy ‘career’. I’m beginning to feel like a deleted scene from Geostorm.

So it’s a Hail Mary flight that hits the tarmac roughly as the shows are starting. Hotel, dump the bag, sprint to Seventh Son Brewery for the nine thirty. And the strangest thing happens when I walk in.

People know who I am…?

This never happens. Usually I’m the grey bloke in the middle of the line-up nobody can place. Is he South African? British? Why is he here? But I was in town three weeks ago for the Reuben Awards and headlined a show while I was at it, and now comics are saying oh, you’re the guy from the thing. It’s pleasant, and I don’t entirely trust it.

My girlfriend featured for me on that show. I stood at the back and watched her do fifteen minutes that felt like five, a full house that wouldn’t let her go, and then I had to follow it. I waited for the small mean voice every comic keeps in the back of the skull for exactly this situation when you have to follow a kill, and it never showed up. Just pride, in an amount that felt slightly insane. Then I went up and closed strong, which is easier to be gracious about.

She’s not here this time. I’m on my own in the same city, out front of the same brewery, and a truck is making wood-fired pizza. I order a margherita and a margarita, eat the entire pizza myself, and the truck drives off before I can tip them. The festival director, Walker Evans, introduces me to a photographer who has spent twenty years watching Austin curdle into ground zero for American bro comedy, and we have a serious conversation about the state of the art.

Three feet away stands a comedian named Eric Boso with two black eyes, a split forehead and a wad of tissue jammed up one nostril. He got hit by a car while riding his bike. He looks like hell. He’s still doing shows this weekend. A true comedy addict. He’s already posted the whole thing on Instagram with a link in his bio so you can help fund his facial reconstruction. Fun!

Walker takes me upstairs to the main room where I’m on tomorrow night and asks me to sign the wall behind the stage. I graffiti it and add stickers, because why not overdo it before I’ve set foot on the stage.

Then it’s a hop, skip and a schlep past a sea of Buckeyes flags to Hashtag Comedy Club, which contains more comedians than I have ever seen in one room. I’m fifth on the open mic list until the fourth guy doesn’t show, so suddenly I’m up with no notes, no recording running, and a stomach full of pizza and tequila. I did well, I think? Who knows. Sometimes the comedy gods are generous to out-of-towners.

Out the back everyone is smoking and working out how long until we migrate to Sweeney’s, an old house in a row of old houses that have been converted into coffee shops and wine bars and, in this case, the unofficial festival headquarters for after Seventh Son yells last call. I bump into my pal Johnny Mocny and some other comics I met in Traverse City in the spring. This is the thing about us. We’ve never really met; we’ve shared a green room and a line-up, and that’s enough. Turn up in any city on the planet and there’s an instant shorthand between comics, a race to say the most appalling thing the fastest, because the shortest distance between two people is a laugh. Or a cringe. Possibly a well-timed fart noise.

And behind all of it, spray-painted across the entire back wall, forty feet of Alfred E. Neuman with an eyepatch.

Mad Magazine. The place every one of my heroes worked. The thing I read under the covers in Perth with a torch, thirty-five years and ten thousand miles from this yard. I think maybe three people out there knew who he was. I stood with a beer going warm in my hand and felt the way you feel when a stranger on the subway is wearing your dead father’s coat.

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This? Dools and Chatto are back in the writers’ room, slinging zingers, avoiding Obvious Ocean Liners and vying for the Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-Week®!

Outside, a lightning storm walked down the East River, and every news helicopter in the tri-state hung in the rain like blowflies over a bin.

Scott and I hadn’t made a podcast in two weeks. I was away winning an award and then losing a dog, and you can’t record a comedy podcast in the fortnight between those two things without it sounding like a hostage video. The award: You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until... won the Reuben for Best Book Illustration. The book is dedicated to Morris, who died the same week.

Then we did the jokes. A production of Death of a Salesman cast entirely with horses. A dragon that’s been yassified rather than slain. A Scrabble box held aloft at a lake house, chalk poetry on Bedford Avenue, and whether even chalk is too permanent for it.

Somewhere in there, we stopped writing jokes and had a proper argument about opinions versus comedy. Scott wants to be a mirror, not a megaphone. I want a strong opinion, even a wrong one. Bob Mankoff and Dolly Parton were both invoked. We didn’t resolve it, which is why the podcast works.

Also: pigeon divorce, witch daycare, a man in a kiddie pool at the office, and the four rounds of notes I’ve had on a goblin-porn book cover. Because why not?

I’m at the Columbus Comedy Festival Friday through Sunday. Ohio, come. Book early.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

By the way, if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, you can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

Subscribe now

▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Buy our new book at: www.realdogowner.com

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

Copyright Disclaimers: We’re inviting you into our living room; don’t walk out with our lamp. Please refrain from selling our jokes. All original content is © Copyright 2024 Jason Chatfield & Scott Dooley for “Is There Something In This?” All rights reserved.

We welcome you to download and play the podcast and share it with others for personal use; please acknowledge “Is There Something in This?” Podcast as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

On the topic: This podcast may include images that are used under the Fair Use doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107). These images are utilised for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, education, and research. Fair Use allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holder, provided the use does not infringe upon the market value of the original work.

We do not claim ownership of any third-party images used in this podcast. All rights remain with their respective copyright holders. If you believe your copyrighted work has been used in a way that does not fall within Fair Use, please contact us, and we will address any concerns promptly.

I went to Columbus, Ohio, a few weeks ago for the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards, which are the closest thing my profession has to the Oscars, if the Oscars were held in a Renaissance b…

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August 26th, 2026
The PIT, Chelsea

I spent last night doing two jobs badly at once, which is at least one more than I usually manage.

Henry Cruz asked me to host his show at the People’s Improv Theatre.…

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I started writing this post a while back, and the original title was “How I Write My Substack Posts” because people kept asking. But since then, I’ve noticed on Instagram and other platforms an increasing volume of posts encouraging people to just feed their writing into some kind of AI generator to mimic or artificially reproduce their voice, resulting in multiple fist-shaped holes in my wall.

This is, once again, like someone feeding their art into an AI generator and just having it pump out slop, missing and losing the lesson, process, and growth that come from making mistakes and iterating..

Anyway, below is a confession of how I still feel like a dilettante as a writer, but how I worked my arse off to write without a prosthesis, without using AI (except, admittedly, to spell-check, proofread, and fact-check. Let’s be honest, I’m doing that for you, not me.)

Anyway,

On with the show.

I have a confession, and I’d like you to keep it between us and the nineteen thousand six hundred and fifty-two other people I’m about to tell.

.

I am not a writer.

.

I draw for a living. I stand in front of strangers in basements and say things until they laugh or the light goes red. Writing is the thing I do in between those two jobs, the way some men take up fishing: alone, early, with a thermos, and with no real expectation that anything will bite.

I’ve told anyone who will listen that I find writing much like passing a kidney stone; it really doesn’t come comfortably and is quite painful… and yet every week I send you a few thousand words, and every week a small number of you reply, and a smaller number of you pay for the privilege, which is either very kind of you or a cry for help. (Seriously, thank you.)

So this week I thought I’d tell you how the sausage gets made. Specifically: how a cartoonist with a drafting table and a highlighter tried to teach himself to write by reading every book about writing he could find, and how that went.

It started, as most of my bad decisions do, with Stephen King. My gateway drug.

I read On Writing on a plane, expecting a how-to. A list. Something I could highlight and add marginalia, and ignore. Instead I got a man telling me about the nail he hammered into his bedroom wall as a teenager to hold his rejection slips, and how the nail eventually couldn’t take the weight, so he replaced it with a spike.

I was three chapters in before I realised what he was doing. He wasn’t telling me how to write. He was writing, right there in front of me, and letting me watch. The memoir bits were the lesson; the toolbox at the back was just the receipt.

(Sidenote: I plastered my wall with these for years. Depraved, yes, but it spurred me on.)

That was the moment I went from “bloke who types” to “bloke who would like to type gooder.” A low bar, but I cleared it, and I’ve been clearing progressively higher bars since, like a show pony with a drinking problem..

No?

Well.

After King, I went looking for rules, because rules are comforting to a man who’s just been told there aren’t any. Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir came first. She teaches at Syracuse, and the book reads like her course, if her course were delivered by a recovering Texan who has seen things. I read it in the dead of winter after a blizzard upstate in Albany… it was the perfect place to do so.

Her big idea is what she calls carnality: get the body on the page first, the smell and the sweat and the specific brand of cigarette, and the meaning will follow. The other big idea is that the person who comes off worst in a memoir should be the one holding the pen. (I couldn’t agree more. All of my jokes have me as the butt. No exceptions. Mostly.)

Anyway, I took this to heart. Some of you have written in to suggest I’ve taken it too far. Noted.

Then the Strunk & White. The Elements of Style, fourth edition, the one with the Roger Angell foreword (RIP).

If you don’t know the lineage: Strunk taught White at Cornell, White revised his old professor’s pamphlet forty years later, and Angell, White’s stepson and a New Yorker editor, wrote the foreword. It’s three generations of the same family telling you to omit needless words, which is either charming or a cult.

I became insufferable about it. I was the man at the party correcting “less” to “fewer.” I’d like to say I’ve recovered. I’d be lying, which Strunk & White would also have notes on. (I’m kidding, I don’t get invited to parties.)

’s Bird by Bird is the one everyone tells you to read, and everyone is right, which is annoying.

The title comes from her brother, aged ten, paralysed by a school report on birds he’d had three months to write and hadn’t started. Their father sat down beside him and said: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

That sentence has got me through more Tuesdays than coffee and whiskey.

Her chapter on shitty first drafts is the most useful thing anyone has ever told me about writing, and I say that as a man who once paid actual money to learn it from David Sedaris (more on him shortly). The idea is simple:

Everybody’s first draft is rubbish. The professionals aren’t the ones who write good first drafts. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with writing bad ones.

(I used to have this above my desk, written less eloquently by Hemingway. Probably while drunk.)

But the thing Lamott really gave me was permission to look at the world the way a writer does, rather than the way a cartoonist does. A cartoonist sees a man in a puffer jacket on Ninth Avenue and thinks: that’s a shape. A writer sees the same man and thinks: why is he crying into a bodega sandwich at 7:15 am, and who do I have to become to find out?

(Lamott, for the record, is still at it. Her husband set her up a last autumn, and in March she and he published a new book together, Good Writing, which picks up roughly where Strunk & White leave off. I have not bought it yet. I have bought four new pens for the studio since then. Priorities.)

John McPhee is the opposite of Lamott, and I need them both.

Draft No. 4 is a collection of his essays about process, and the central one is called “Structure,” in which he explains that before he writes a word he draws the piece. Boxes, arrows, a shape on a page. He’s a man who builds the scaffolding before he pours the concrete, and the title refers to the fourth draft, the one where you stop moving furniture and go word by word, asking each one if it’s really the best word or just the one that showed up.

I read a lot of McPhee in the New Yorker before I ever read him on writing, and I realise now that’s how I learned structure: by accident, by osmosis, the way you learn a language by moving to the country and trying to order coffee. Which, coincidentally, is also how I learned “fewer.”

Somewhere in here I read everything has ever written.

Every book, every essay, the shopping lists. Then I took his MasterClass, which is the fourteenth book I have printed, annotated, and spilt on.

Three things from that class live in my head rent-free.

One: don’t build an essay around a laugh. (So tempting.)
Two: you can’t control the reader, so stop trying.
Three: he rewrites every piece twelve to eighteen times, then goes out and picks up litter by the side of the road until eight at night. I don’t pick up litter. I box. (As in boxing, not packing things.) The principle is the same: you need something to do with your hands that isn’t the thing.

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls is, for my money, his funniest, and the one I’ve learned most from. He opens on something trivial (a dentist, a taxidermy owl, a kookaburra) and the piece quietly turns into something much larger, with the turn arriving late and without announcement. That’s the trick. Don’t lead with the feeling. Earn it.

He signed my copy one of the times I met him at a reading in New York.

He drew a Kookaburra for me.

Then there’s the stuff for the day job. , who co-founded The Onion, wrote How to Write Funny, which argues that humour is a learnable craft and not a gift bestowed by a wicked fairy.

His big idea is that every joke starts with subtext (something to actually say) and gets run through what he calls eleven “funny filters.” Irony. Hyperbole. Misplaced focus. I won’t list all eleven; I’m not made of ink. Pair it with Gene Perret, Bob Hope’s head writer for twenty-eight years, whose Successful Stand-Up Comedy is less about the jokes and more about the act: how to build one, how to rehearse it, how to take charge of a room. Dikkers for the jokes, Perret for the set. I am still working on both.

Now for the oddballs…

Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers. Older than me, which is saying something now. , a very good New York comedian who writes very good newsletters about the craft, put me onto it and I gobbled it up in a day.

Elbow invented freewriting: ten minutes, pen doesn’t stop, no editing, no taste. I do it most mornings when I don’t know how to start. It produces mostly garbage. Occasionally the garbage has a joke in it, which is more than I can say for most of my mornings.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way. I read it. You read it. We all got to the morning pages and stopped. (Morning pages are just Elbow’s freewriting in a kaftan, by the way. Nobody tells you that.)

Robert Benchley, Benchley Lost and Found. My friend recommended this one, and I owe him a drink. Thirty-nine pieces from Liberty magazine in the early thirties, never collected before, illustrated by the great Peter Arno. Benchley was Algonquin Round Table royalty and the patron saint of the put-upon man: queues at the post office, porters, vitamins, sand at the beach. He once said it took him fifteen years to discover he had no talent for writing, but by then he was too famous to stop. I’m hoping to skip the famous bit and go straight to the quitting.

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing. He was an editor before he was a teacher, and it shows. The chapter is literally called “Liposuction.” You can guess..

Truman Capote, The Early Stories. Fourteen stories he wrote as a teenager, dug out of the New York Public Library. They’re not good, exactly. But you can see the eye already working, which is a very comforting thing to see when you’re a forty-something man whose own early work is a drawing of a cat with a machine gun.

And pinned above my drafting table, stained and curling, is a single paragraph by Gary Provost, the one that starts

“This sentence has five words.” He’s highlighted the short sentences in one colour and the long ones in another so it looks like a heat map of a heartbeat. It reminds me to change gear. To breathe. To not use a big word when a small one will do the job, a lesson I have clearly not finished learning, as evidenced by the word “osmosis” two sections ago.

Columbus.

Here’s the part I wasn’t going to tell you.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Columbus, Ohio, for the Reuben Awards. The National Cartoonists Society turned eighty this year, which means the average age in the ballroom was somewhere between “distinguished” and “fossil record,” and I was, for once, among the young attendees. (I kid. I have more septuogenarian friends than any my age. They’re the best people I know.)

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This? Dools and Chatto are back in the writer’s room, slinging zingers, avoiding Obvious Ocean Liners and vying for the Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-Week®!

There is a moment about six seconds into this episode where a cork exits a bottle of Moët with no human involvement whatsoever. Scott is still mid-intro, still saying the podcast's name, and an inanimate object has already reviewed the show.

We took it as a good omen, because there was something to celebrate: You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until... picked up a nomination for Best Book Illustration at the 80th Annual National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards. (Named after Rube Goldberg, founding president of the NCS, and not, as Scott generously suggested, the reason people call the Oscars “the Reubens of film.”) We recorded this one on the way to Columbus, Ohio, where the winners get announced, and where I have spent twenty-four years being extremely relaxed about never having won anything. Scott called the “it’s an honour just to be nominated” position what it is: loser talk.

If you have never listened before, here is the format. Scott Dooley and I are two Australian comedians in New York who draw cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, and every week we sit down with a drink and pitch each other half-finished ideas until one of us says “is there something in this?” Sometimes there is. Sometimes it dies on the table in front of you. Either way, you get to watch the sausage being made, which is either fascinating or deeply unpleasant depending on your relationship with sausage.

This week the drink situation got ahead of us. We went to the pub first. Scott arrived wearing a portion of his beer. By minute seven we had already estaablished that the great advantage of moderate success is that nobody can be bothered canceling you..

By the way, if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, you can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

Subscribe now

▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Buy our new book at: www.realdogowner.com

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

Copyright Disclaimers:We’re inviting you into our living room, don’t walk out with our lamp. Please refrain from selling our jokes. All original content is © Copyright 2024 Jason Chatfield & Scott Dooley for “Is There Something In This?” All rights reserved.

We welcome you to download and play the podcast and share it with others for personal use; please acknowledge “Is There Something in This?” Podcast as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

On the topic: This podcast may include images that are used under the Fair Use doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107). These images are utilized for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, education, and research. Fair Use allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holder, provided the use does not infringe upon the market value of the original work.

We do not claim ownership of any third-party images used in this podcast. All rights remain with their respective copyright holders. If you believe your copyrighted work has been used in a way that does not fall within Fair Use, please contact us, and we will address any concerns promptly.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit:

Is There Something In This?

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Black Cat
Lower East Side, New York
Monday 17th Aug, 2026

An open mic on a Monday is church for people who don’t believe in anything, least of all each other.

Tonight’s congregation: three women grimaci…

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Alphabet City
New York, NY

The only thing that was in my apartment when I moved in was a large old roll-top writing desk, which has become my home. 

I sit at this desk for weeks on end drawing and writing and vanishing into my own little world. It was left here by the deceased previous tenant who happened to be the poet laureate of the Lower East Side.

There’s something magical about the desk. I fixed it up with an inordinate number of screws and old nails that I’d found around the place just to hold the thing together long enough to survive the next deadline.

The floors in the apartment are warped and angle towards the middle of the room, which meant I had to tether the desk to the wall with a bolt and some twine that I found on Avenue B. If that twine snaps, the whole desk will tip over and crush me. A writer’s death.

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September 29, 2022
Gre…

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I’m sorry if this one’s a bit much. I’ve been writing it on and off for a few days, and I still don’t know if it makes any sense. I just need to hit publish and retreat to my drawing board.

Columbus, …

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The first time I got into the cold plunge at my gym, I lasted about eleven seconds and made a noise I have never made before or since. Somewhere between a kettle and stepping on a dog’s tail.

I’d been…

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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 h…

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Lower East Side, New York
Thursday, July 30th 2026

…

I queued on Delancey Street with an oversized paper bucket of popcorn I did not need and a pair of 3D glasses smudged by a stranger, and I thought: this is the least dignified I have been all week, and it’s only Thursday.

The pavement in Manhattan was still giving back the heat it had borrowed at noon. A small Puerto Rican man outside the cinema was selling knock-off Spider-Man masks from a folding table, and doing well. Somewhere behind me a child explained the entire plot of “No Way Home” to a grandmother with the patient condescension of a man explaining tax law. I have been in this city long enough to know that this is the good part. The film is the film. The queue is New York.

Then the lights went down, and I sat there for two and a half hours with a lump in my throat like a swallowed golf ball.

Greenwood, Western Australia
A long time ago…

…

I was a kid in a quiet suburb of Perth reading about a kid from Queens. That is the whole thing, really. That is the entire architecture of my life in one sentence.

Greenwood in the late nineties was flat, hot, and profoundly not New York. I’d been blowing my allowance on Spider-Man comics (and MAD) for so long I didn’t have any savings. But I did know how to draw a pretty great Manhattan skyline. The comics arrived at the newsagent months late and out of order, so my understanding of Peter Parker’s life was less a narrative than a series of weather reports from a country I would never visit. Issue #340 in June. Issue #336 in September. I read them in the wrong sequence, sometimes with gaps in between (I had to glean what happened), and loved them anyway, the way you love a song you only ever hear on a bad AM radio.

In my late teens and early twenties, the number plates on my Hyundai said “SPIDEY”. In Red. (I know, I can’t figure out why the ladies weren’t throwing themselves at me either.)

I remember staying up past midnight on June 5th, 2002 with my friend Brent. We drove in Spidey to the only cinema in Perth showing the very first screening of the new, highly-anticipated Spider-Man film by Sam Raimi, starring Tobey Maguire. Australia was a day ahead of the rest of the world, so we were some of the first people to see it. It sparked what would become a 20+ year Hollywood obsession with superhero movies, and by 2008, there was enough evidence that it could sustain a fully-fledged cinematic universe. (Sadly, that MCU would collapse under the weight of its own complexity, but up ‘til Endgame, it was pretty satisfying.)

Now I live in New York, and I can see, from my window, the skyline that boy would have swapped a kidney for. I have not once got over it. I don’t intend to.

Sidenote: The past week in NYC has been absolutely bonkers for Spider-Man. Look at the crap they did to promote this thing:

Lower East Side, New York
Thursday, July 30th 2026

…

What it actually gets right.

Destin Daniel Cretton has made something I genuinely did not think I would live to see: a Spider-Man film that understands that the appeal of Spider-Man is not the punching. It is the falling.

The point-of-view web-slinging sequences (in 3D) are the best argument for going to a cinema that I have encountered in years. Not because they’re loud, but because they are heavy. You feel the arc. You feel the moment at the top of the swing where the line goes slack, and there’s nothing under you but eight hundred feet of Manhattan and a terrible decision.

Brett Pawlak shot it, and Cretton apparently insisted on doing as much of it as possible practically, and it shows in a way that CGI has never once managed. There is weight. There is consequence. There is that specific New York vertigo where you look down a street canyon and briefly realise the city is a cliff face we’ve all agreed to live on.

And then, between the set pieces, it is a very sad film about a man who lives alone.

That is the part nobody warned me about. Four years on from No Way Home, Peter has erased himself from everyone he loves and is now simply a bloke in a flat, doing an enormous job that no one can thank him for, visiting a grave, keeping his head down. May is gone. Ben is long gone. His two best friends walk past him in the street. He has the responsibility and none of the power, which is not the aphorism as written but is, I would argue, the more honest version of it.

I watched a man in a mask do a job nobody knew he was doing and then go home to an empty apartment, and I thought, “Ah. There it is. That’s why I’m choking up at a superhero film alone on a Thursday afternoon.”

At almost two and a half hours, it is a behemoth, and yes, you feel the length. I was never bored. I was, at points, quite badly ambushed, and my bladder is still throbbling.

The love letter was posted from Glasgow.

Here is what I did not know while I was sitting in the dark having a small religious experience about my adopted city.

None of it was filmed here.

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That’s the whole profession, basically. You know the work, you know the signature, you’ve never seen the face. “It’s the perfect crime,” Avi Steinberg said this week, a decade after drawing him without his knowledge. “You can be famous on paper and still walk around without anyone bothering you.”

Avi kept the caricature. I look at it and see only the mistakes, but he tells me it’s a treasured possession. I’m deciding to believe him.

Ten years, Ten a week.

Avi started submitting to The New Yorker straight out of high school and sold nothing for roughly a decade. I asked whether he hit year seven and wondered if he should pack it in. “I don’t wait till year seven to feel like that…”

The turn came when he worked out what the cartoonists he admired were actually doing. “The greats, they drew a batch of ten cartoons every week. And when I really learned that, my heart sank.” So he gave himself a year of ten a week. No more emotional rollercoaster. At the end of it, he could either do this properly or quit.

He teaches kindergarten in New York City, which is where he gets his best material on artistic confidence. “My students are the best artists in the world. No one told them how not to draw something.”

I told him about being fifteen, getting detention for a savage caricature of my history teacher, then having that same teacher sidle up to my desk during detention and offer me twenty dollars to do a mean one of the retiring school gardener. Avi diagnosed the whole career in one line: being a cartoonist is the balance of being in detention and getting twenty dollars.

Paid to be in trouble. Still true at forty-two.

Then , our official ‘Ryan Seacrest of Comic-Con’ gossip elbowed his way in to the stream

Tom appeared halfway through, still wearing his San Diego Comic-Con lanyard, having got home at half one that morning. He would like to be appointed my official Comic-Con Correspondent. Granted, obviously.

His collection And To Think This Started As A Book Club was up for an Eisner. Then the winners leaked. Comic-Con briefly posted the results on their own website, somebody screenshotted it, and Reddit did the rest. “Not since the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock has there been such a scandal at an award show.”

Tom resisted. Tom failed. He looked the night before, reasoning he would enjoy the dinner more if he knew, and found he had lost to Tom Gauld, “who has the flawless first name of Tom.” He was there with his son and struck a deal: every second book sale converted directly into Pokémon cards. “I basically started asking for payment in Pokémon cards, because that’s what it would be anyway.”

Tom is also up for Gag Cartoonist of the Year at the Reubens, after a Thurber finalist nod and the Eisner. He is hoping to lose all three. “I think it’ll be funnier to go 0 for 3 than 1 for 3.”

Rule of threes. The man is committed to the bit.

Avi’s new book contains an alien character he invented at twelve, posted to the newspaper syndicates, and had rejected. He kept the file for thirty years. “Nothing is ever totally gone. It was very nice to see that the work I did as a twelve-year-old wasn’t a waste.”

He is also banking the small milestones as they arrive: the cover, the proofs, the first box of copies. “However the book sells, whatever the reception is, those things are yours.”

Tom’s verdict on his friend, delivered with real affection: “Avi is like the Aristotle of gag cartoons. Your stick figures coping with the horror of existence is one of my favourite things.” Avi: “My biography.”

Preorder Now!

Watch the replay, then buy the books.

The full episode is up now. There is live drawing in the back half, and Tom talked his way out of it by claiming he cannot sketch, which I am choosing not to believe.

Avi Steinberg, The Jumble is out 3 November and available to pre-order wherever you buy books. Pre-orders genuinely matter: they all tick over on release day and become the number the publisher looks at.

Tom Toro, And To Think This Started As A Book Club, his Eisner-nominated collection, is out now. His children’s book Between the Balloons lands at Thanksgiving and is also up for pre-order.

Buy them from bookshop.org, from your local, from all of it. As Avi put it: buy one from each place, just to spread it around.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. I am up for a Reuben this year in book illustration division for You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until, drawn with Scott Dooley, alongside two books I own and rate more highly than my own. Morris remains unimpressed, and has been on the drafting table chair since Tuesday.

PPS. 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.

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This? Dools and Chatto are back in the writer’s room, slinging zingers, avoiding Obvious Ocean Liners and vying for the Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-Week®!

This week, we’re trying something a bit new by recording our video of the show. Let us know in the comments if you like it, and we’ll keep doing it… probably.

By the way if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, You can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

Subscribe now

▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

▶ Buy our new book at: www.realdogowner.com

▶ Check out our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ITSITpodcast

Copyright Disclaimers: We’re inviting you into our living room; don’t walk out with our lamp. Please refrain from selling our jokes. All original content is © Copyright 2024 Jason Chatfield & Scott Dooley for “Is There Something In This?” All rights reserved.

We welcome you to download and play the podcast and share it with others for personal use; please acknowledge “Is There Something in This?” Podcast as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

On the topic: This podcast may include images that are used under the Fair Use doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107). These images are utilised for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, education, and research. Fair Use allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holder, provided the use does not infringe upon the market value of the original work.

We do not claim ownership of any third-party images used in this podcast. All rights remain with their respective copyright holders. If you believe your copyrighted work has been used in a way that does not fall within Fair Use, please contact us, and we will address any concerns promptly.

Send us your ideas!

Genuinely. If you’re watching on Substack, drop your seedlings in the comments. We had precisely zero listener suggestions this week, on account of the eight-year gap, which is nobody’s fault but ours.

We might scribble it up, mention you on the pod, and if it’s good enough, submit it with your name on it. We’re not paying you. Nobody’s paying anybody. This is the arts.

‘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.

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