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.

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Last night was the second-to-last game of the season for the New Yorker softball team, played down on the Lower East Side against CNN, a team we’d never actually faced before.

We’ve had a genuinely decent season so far, which I mention now because it’s the last time in this post the word “decent” will apply to anything I personally did.

I rolled up just as the game was starting, fresh off a summer of travelling around the islands of Massachusetts. (I’m working on a piece about things I overheard on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which will either run in The New Yorker or, if they pass, right here, where the standards are more forgiving.)

Teresa, who designed our uniforms and does the impossible job of herding cartoonists, fact-checkers and writers into a functioning batting order, greeted me with “where the hell have you been?” Which, coincidentally, is also what the ball said every time I swung at it.

Then the Dans took over. (We have six, possibly seven Dans this season. Nobody knows the exact number.) The Dans sort out the field positions: who’s in right, who’s up the middle, who’s at short. I was placed somewhere I could do the least damage, which turned out to be right field. Rightfield Chatfield.

Because here’s my stat line: every single time I swung the bat, I got caught out. Not some of the time. Every time. I wasn’t so much a batter as a very reliable delivery service for the CNN outfield. At one point I hit what I sincerely believed was a home run and then watched an associate producer catch it without moving his toes t. An old Asian man in a green shirt quietly ate soup in the bleachers as I slunk back to the dugout..

The soup smelled fucking delicious..

Rachel Perlman, our assistant cartoon editor, was great- herding people (cats) into ‘In the Hole’ and “In the Hole Hole”.

I contributed vibes.

Mainly vibes.

Someone brought Modellos but I didn’t get any. By the time the lights went out at sunset, we called it at something like 19 to 7. CNN buried us alive. Which is remarkable, really. They tried CNN+, they tried blogging, they’ve even tried Substack, and it turns out the thing they’re still genuinely world-class at is softball.

Well. At least legacy media is still good for something. (Shots fired).

One game left in the season. (We’re playing Slate in Prospect park next Tuesday? I think? I’m writing this on my phone so I can’t fact check this..) I’ll be working on my swing all week, by which I mean lying down until the urge passes.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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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 grimacing amid two dozen white men in near-identical caps, each waiting his turn to tell the others about dating apps and between unhinged takes about various ethnicities (one in particular). Nobody watches the stage. They watch their Notes app the way you’d watch a departures board.

I sat at the back and drew them instead.

I’m trying to get back to work -that’s the project at the moment. Comedy shows every night. Boxing every morning. Drawing in whatever’s left over. If I keep the day full, the hours behave themselves.

Because here’s the possibly deranged thing about how I’m wired: comedy is how I metabolise the bad stuff. It always has been. You drag the grief up on stage, you make it do tricks, and every night it comes home a little smaller, a little more house-trained. That’s the deal. It worked for grief for a parent, grief for a marriage.

It isn’t working for Morris.

I keep writing the new stuff anyway. I try it on strangers in clubs and New York basements. Some of it lands, most of it dies quietly, and I go home and write more. Persisting isn’t a strategy so much as the only setting I have left on the dial.

Tonight I filled pages with men I’ll never see again. Strangers are easy. You get the nose, the cap, the slouch, and you’re done.

I still can’t bring myself to draw him.

‘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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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
Greenwich Village— New York, NY

The New Yorker has been sending its cartoonists out into New York.

They’ve been instructed to eavesdrop (or as I’ve been calling it, “Eavesdraw”) its inhabitants, and publish their findings in their collection “Overheard in New York”. 1

I chose the Olive Tree Café, which sits directly on top of the Comedy Cellar like a lid on a pot. It is my favourite place in all of New York, and I say that as a man who has been to the other places.

How to eavesdraw…

You sit. You order the hummus plate, and then more hummus on the side, because two months is a long time to squat at a table you are paying eleven dollars an hour to occupy. Then you open a sketchbook and look, unwaveringly, at absolutely nothing.

And you wait.

The hearing part isn’t the skill. In New York, hearing is not a skill; it’s a condition. Everybody’s conversation is everybody’s conversation. The skill is not reacting, I think. Somebody two feet away says something so perfect as they walk past, so architecturally complete, that a normal human being would laugh out loud, and you have to sit there with a face like a bus shelter and scribble it down before it evaporates.

I got very good at looking bereaved. Unphased.

I should be straight with you about what this actually is. It is theft - pickpocketing words. Every line in that collection belongs to a person who did not know I was there, who was kibbitzing with a friend on a Thursday, and who has now been redrawn with a much worse nose and my signature at the bottom of it. I took the funniest thing they said all year, and I gave them a hat.
(In my defense, they were shouting.)

I have performed at the Comedy Cellar exactly once. (I’m not passed there.)

In 2018, opening for Ronny Chieng. I drew him as Worf from Star Trek afterward to say thank you, which is what I do instead of having emotions. Ronny was kind about it. Ronny is kind about most things, which people find surprising, given that his entire act is a man being detained by his own blood pressure.

So: one set, four years ago, downstairs. And then two months of sitting upstairs at a table four feet from the stairwell, drawing other people’s non sequiturs while the good ones went past me carrying their coats.

Every night, a hundred people come into that place and say something better than they will ever know they said, and it goes nowhere. Somebody has to write it down. The stage takes those who can carry a room. I get the leftovers, which is to say, I get the good stuff, uncut, before anybody has punched it up.

Also, the pen has no two-drink minimum.

(Although I do.)

Anyway. Here is a selection —the rest are available over at The New Yorker…

Yes, that is Outside Steve. If you have ever queued on that footpath in February, you have met him. He is the reason the line moves. He is a friend. He is also, I suspect, load-bearing.

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‘til next time!
Your pal,

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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, Ohio
Friday, 7th August 20206

I was in a tuxedo at the door of the pre-dinner reception in the ballroom when I took a call. It was my ex-wife. Morris -my French Bulldog, my shadow, the dog at the bottom of every post I’ve ever written here- was in New York in an emergency room at the animal hospital, frightened. A seizure, then a series of them the vets couldn’t get ahead of. They’d sedated him. He’d be staying in overnight for observation. Stable, sort of. She’d been taking such good care of him. She did everything she possibly could for him.

I put the phone back in my pocket, took a deep breath, and walked into a room full of people congratulating me on my nomination. I was numb.

The Reuben Awards are the National Cartoonists Society’s annual honours, named for founding president Rube Goldberg and voted on by the entire membership. Not a small anonymous panel, but over 300 people who do this for a living, some of them for their whole lives. This would be the 80th year they held the awards.

I’ve been a cartoonist for 24 years. It’s the only job I’ve ever had. This year I was nominated for Best Book Illustration, for a book I dedicated to Morris. He’s in it, on several pages. I was up against two of the best book illustrators I know, and I’d made complete peace with living in the nomination phase. Which is, let’s be honest, the fun part anyway.

The universe doesn’t check your calendar.

Within the hour, five minutes before showtime and somewhere between the chicken and the fish, a message from her lit up my phone. I stepped out and called her back.

“He passed away,” she said.

My ears started ringing. My mind went blank. A brain tumour, it turned out. Inoperable. He had to be euthanised.

My lungs collapsed. A wave of disbelief, unimaginable grief. fury. misery. He was seven years old.

I was directing the awards show that night. So I went back in, and I ran it.

At the end of the evening, the category was called: Best Book Illustrator for 2025, presented by Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, a man who understands dogs better than almost anyone alive. He opened the envelope and read my name. Twenty-four years, and I’d never won one of these things from any organisation. The whole room stood up. I don’t remember walking to the podium.

I thanked my co-author, Scott Dooley. I thanked my publisher. And then I told the room the truth: that this book was a love letter to my boy, that two hours earlier I’d found out he was gone, forever. That the award was his. It will only ever be his.

He sat at my feet every single day for months as I inked every page of that book. Spurring me on. Farting loudly. Posing for drawings without knowing it.

Patrick hugged me when I came off stage. He knew; more than anyone on this earth, he knew. And I’m glad the news found me where it did, surrounded by the family I’ve found. It didn’t make it any less excruciating. But I wasn’t alone.

I never had kids. Morris was mine. I know it isn’t the same thing -please know, I really do- but when people say a child is your heart walking around outside your body, that is precisely how I felt about him. He wasn’t just

a dog. He was a person. He was my person.

I work from home, so he was never the dog I came home to. He was the dog who was always just there, at my feet. 24-hours of every day for 7 years. There through the pandemic, asleep next to me on the bed while I self-isolated with the Alpha strain of the coronavirus in 2020, the closest I’ve come to dying. There to nudge me with his wet nose the day my dad died. I looked him in his big yellow eyes in the face of all of that, and you know what he said?

“I need to pee.”

He was there when my marriage ended, and it became just the two of us alone, in a new apartment, in a new life, walking through Hell’s Kitchen every morning. Morris in Manhattan. A city dog. He never left my side. He was the best thing that ever happened to me.

The grumpiest face on the happiest dog you’ve ever met. He never barked, except sometimes at the door, and even then he’d lick whoever came through it half to death. He’d ignore other dogs on the street entirely and sidle up to their owners’ shins for a belly scratch. He flunked out of puppy school. They gave him a little hat anyway. I’ve never been prouder of anyone.

I keep trying to untether the two things -the honour and the grief. Maybe one day I will. Right now, I can’t.

To everyone who has ever commented to ask about Morris, who enjoyed the photos at the bottom of every post, and the stories, who flipped straight past my writing to find him at the bottom of the story (fair), the way you flip past a 9-page New Yorker article to get to the cartoons: I understand completely, and thank you.

He was the best part of every post because he was the best part of every day. I’d been thinking about retiring the tradition after this week. I’ve decided the opposite. He stays at the bottom of every post, for as long as I’m writing them. Forever the last word.

‘til then.

Your pal,

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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 listening to the podcasts. The Ice Man (Wim Hof), Huberman, Attia, the whole shivering fraternity, talking about circulation and metabolism and setting your nervous system up before the day gets its hands on you. It was 2022, I was 20lbs overweight, and I was determined to try something different, dagnabbit.

But the part that stuck wasn’t physiological. It was the idea that voluntarily doing something horrible teaches your brain it can do hard things.

Forty-something degrees. (Farenheit) Waist-deep for the first six months, because I am a coward with a routine. Every morning I added a few seconds. Just a few- I timed it on my watch because why not.

A year later: eleven minutes and forty seconds, up to my neck. Baller.

Which is, let’s be honest, far too long. The benefits fall off a cliff somewhere around eight minutes, so the last three and a half were purely ego. I’d climb out the colour of a boiled prawn and walk to my drafting table having already won something before 9am.

Here’s what actually changed though: I started pitching The New Yorker more often. Not because I’d got better (I certainly hadn’t). But because I stopped minding the ‘no’. When you’ve spent a year negotiating with a bathtub, a rejection email is a warm towel.

As humans, we’re built to route around friction. Every day offers you the chance not to.

Try something hard this week. Something small and stupid and genuinely unpleasant. See what it does to the rest of the day.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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

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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.

Not the streets. Not the bodega. Not the skyline you swing past. Time Out went and checked, and the answer is that this is the first time Spider-Man’s New York has been recreated entirely overseas. Principal photography ran from August to December 2025 in Britain. Glasgow city centre was dressed as Manhattan and Queens, with Bothwell Street and Wellington Street signed under the fictional names “Frost Street” and “Franklin Street.” Merchant City did a shift as lower Manhattan. Pinewood Studios built three entire city blocks. A business park in Basingstoke was dressed as 1970s Manhattan. Some of it was shot in Dorset, in Thomas Hardy country, which is roughly as far from Forest Hills as a place can get and still have paved roads.

The working title was ‘Blue Oasis’, which now reads less like a code name and more like a confession. So the most New York film of the decade was made by people standing in Scotland, in the rain, looking at reference photographs.

I sat with that for a day and waited to feel cheated.
I didn’t. I felt something closer to recognition, and it took me until about the third scotch to work out why.

Glasgow is now a palimpsest. Somebody wrote New York over the top of it, carefully, fastidiously, with fake street signs and imported taxis and NYPD cruisers shipped across an ocean, and the older writing is still faintly legible underneath if you know where to look. Which is exactly, precisely what happened to me.

I am a Perth kid with New York written over the top. The original text is still showing through: I still say “heaps,” I still flinch at tipping, I still don’t pronounce Houston Street with full confidence in my accent after all these years. But the overwriting took. It’s real now. It’s not less real for having been applied later by hand.

That’s the thing about this city that people who were born here sometimes miss; New York is not a birthright, it is a forgery that everyone agrees to accept. Half the people you love here arrived from somewhere flat and hot and beige and drew themselves in. The film understands New York because somebody paid extremely close attention to it from a great distance, which is the only method any of us outsiders have ever had.

Attention beats geography. It always did. Ask any cartoonist who has drawn a room he was never in.

And here’s my favourite detail: among the villains flashing past in the early montage is Boomerang, who in the comics is Frederick Myers, an Australian, introduced in 1966. So the one Antipodean in the whole affair is a man who throws boomerangs at people. Truly, we have come so far. I have lived in this country for years, published in the New Yorker, run two national cartooning societies, and my nation’s cinematic ambassador to the Marvel universe remains a bloke with a stick.

Ditko’s fingerprints, and his flat.

The comic references are not decoration; they’re argument. There are cover homages stacked at the end and the beginning, the first being Amazing Fantasy #15. Peter wears a Delmar’s Deli shirt, from the Queens deli that has been in all three previous films. The suit itself is what Tom Holland has called a “spider-child” of the Maguire and Garfield costumes: raised webbing, angular lenses, all of it pulling back toward what Ditko and Romita Sr. were drawing sixty years ago.

Which brings me to the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

Steve Ditko drew the definitive New York. The one I was copying out of the comics as a kid. He gave the character his shape, his red and blue, his web lines, his whole visual grammar of a boy falling through a city. He was famously private. He gave no interviews. He lived and worked in midtown, about a fifteen-minute walk from where I am typing this, and in June 2018, at ninety, he died alone in his apartment and was found some days later when someone came to check on him.

The man who taught the world what New York looks like from the air died in a room in it, on his own, and nobody noticed for a while. That is not a moral. (I don’t have one.) It just sat down next to me in the cinema during a scene where Peter Parker eats dinner by himself, and it has not got up since.

The numbers, for those who prefer numbers to pictures.

As of Thursday, Rotten Tomatoes has it at 91% with critics and 98% with audiences, the latter tying the highest audience score of any MCU film. IMDb has it at 8.2. It opened around 93%, wobbled to 90%, and settled. Critics’ consensus praises the set pieces, the emotional stakes, and Holland’s performance, and several have called it the best of the four.

Not everyone. Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian gave it a qualified pass and argued a more radical reboot is needed. David Ehrlich at IndieWire was among the top critics who marked it as rotten. I mention this because I would rather you knew I was in a room with dissenters than have you find out later and think me a shill.

They’re wrong, obviously. But they’re allowed.

The button on the summer.

This has been a genuinely historic New York summer. The 250th anniversary of American independence on the Fourth. Seventy-odd tall ships in the harbour. Knicks in Five. The fiftieth Macy’s fireworks, billed as the largest they have ever staged. The World Cup Final across the river at MetLife on the nineteenth. The city has spent three months under scrutiny from the entire planet.

And then, at the very end of it, a film that spends two and a half hours saying: yes, and it’s also just a place where a tired man in a mask does a job nobody thanks him for, and goes home, and does it again tomorrow.

Made in Glasgow. Loved here. Both things true at once.

Go and see it on the biggest screen you can find, and sit through the credits, and then walk home the long way.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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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.

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

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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,

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ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

The first time I met Avi Steinberg, he wasn’t there.

It was 11 years ago. His girlfriend at the time emailed me to commission a caricature of him for his birthday. I’d never shaken the man’s hand, but I knew his cartoons from The New Yorker, so I sat at the drafting table and studied a complete stranger’s face until I could draw it. She wrapped it, gifted it to him, and now, years later, he’s agreed to sit inside my laptop for an hour while I return the favour in real time.

This Monday at 12:30pm EDT, Avi joins me live on Draw Me Anything.

If you don’t know Avi’s work yet, you’re in for a treat. He’s a New Yorker cartoonist who spent a decade submitting before they finally bought his first gag (two fish, if you’re wondering). These days he sends the magazine ten cartoons a month while working full time as a kindergarten teacher in New York City, which might explain why his drawings carry the anxious sincerity of a man who spends his mornings negotiating with a classroom of five-year-olds and his evenings negotiating with a blank page.

Avi’s incredibly productive. He writes a Substack with thousands of loyal readers, created “A Story No One Has Ever Heard Before,” which isa picture book that guides kids in crafting a story from the ground up, and his upcoming book, “The Jumble,” is set to release this November. It tells the story of a shy boy and a dog who switch places for a day, which honestly sums up most of my life by most Wednesdays.

We’ll talk about process, teaching, the weekly terror of the batch (of cartoons), and I’ll finally find out whether that caricature survived the relationship…

Oh! -and stick around to the very end, because repeat offender, is dropping in with a full recap of San Diego Comic-Con, presumably still smelling faintly of lanyards and exhibition hall carpet.

Monday, 12:30pm Eastern. Bring a pencil.

‘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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Good morning, friend. I’ve written and rewritten this post so many times I don’t even know what my name is anymore. I’m just hitting publish.

Wednesday, July 8th, 2026
Kaufman Astoria Studios, Queens.

The first captain’s hat I picked up had a swastika on it.

I’d like to say I noticed immediately, with the fastidious eye of a professional. I did not. I noticed at checkout, the way you notice spinach in your teeth only after the meeting. I was standing in the costume bank where they keep the wardrobe for half the film, television and Broadway productions in New York, holding a Nazi naval officer’s hat at arm’s length like a dead rat, while the attendant watched me reassess every decision that had brought me to this moment.

I was there because I’d told a small lie. I’d claimed, via a director friend who vouched for me with a straight face, to be a Broadway costume designer, which is how you get access to a warehouse of screen-worn history when what you actually are is a cartoonist who needs to dress as Captain Edward Smith of the RMS Titanic by Saturday afternoon.

I swapped the hat for the correct(-ish) one. White Star Line, not Kriegsmarine. A small but, I’d argue, important distinction for a wedding.

But look, I should back up.

Deanna directs. Billy builds.

I couldn’t tell you where I first met Deanna. Somewhere in the Venn diagram between pop-up comedy shows on Brooklyn rooftops and filming Apple commercials with David Ma in Michelin-starred restaurants in Koreatown. New York does this: it keeps handing you the same people in different contexts until you inevitably become friends. Or neighbours. (Or, as it happens, both.)

Deanna and Billy are the rare New York couple whose whole thing is not just sitting around talking about ideas but actually being crazy enough to make them. Their handles say it plainly: Deanna directs, Billy builds. Between them they’ve constructed everything from a massive working Talkboy from Home Alone 2 to the backside of the animatronic rhinoceros from Ace Ventura 2, the one Jim Carrey is messily born out of. Most couples have a shared Netflix account. These two have a shared fabrication kitchen workshop.

It should be said that they are not merely nicknames. Deanna is a creative director whose surname is, and I want to be clear that I am not doing a bit here, Director. Billy is a crane engineer. He builds things that lift other, heavier things, for money, in a hard hat, in the actual world. When New York hands you people, it occasionally hands you people who are also their own job titles.

They got engaged on a ferry, mid-shoot for their Instagram. Billy staged a Titanic bit specifically because it required Deanna to turn around and look away from him, which meant she was performing in her own proposal without knowing it.

So when they asked me to officiate their wedding, something I can legally do because I am, and I need you to sit with this, an ordained non-denominational minister in the State of New York, I immediately said yes with an alacrity that should have worried me.

The original plan was a Jim Carrey-themed wedding, with me officiating as Ace Ventura. Then they pivoted. Deanna has a deep, abiding, lifelong obsession with Titanic, the James Cameron one, the three-hour epic where a thousand-odd souls perish in the North Atlantic so that two very attractive people can experience a car with fogged-up windows. The brief became: immerse every guest in every ounce of that film.

Which is a bold theme for a wedding, when you think about it. Most couples reach for imagery of endurance. These two chose the most famous sinking in human history and said: that one. That’s us.

Billy, being an engineer, does not accept the premise of the question. He’ll tell you the ship was a marvel, that it changed everything, that it changed how we think about safety. This is a man looking at the single most cited failure in maritime history and seeing, with total sincerity, the engineering. I find this reassuring in a husband.

Honestly? Correct. Love isn’t about promising calm seas. Nobody can promise that.

Saturday, July 11th, 2026- 2:00pm
Avenue C, Alphabet City.

The Lower Deck

A maritime-themed restaurant one block from the apartment where I lived for seven and a half years.

Deanna and Billy arrived in the Ectomobile from Ghostbusters, because of course they did; you don’t build a giant Talkboy and then show up to your own wedding in an Uber XL. Outside, a man spun an advertising sign announcing the wedding with the preternatural grace of someone who has found his one true calling on a footpath in the East Village.

Inside, the theming was total. The guestbook was Jack Dawson’s sketchbook, the one he draws Rose in (like one of his French girls). The place cards were tiny lifeboats. There was a full seating chart of the ship, an upper deck and a lower deck; even the ice water on the menu was listed as ICEBERG RIGHT AHEAD. A chaise longue posed beside a cardboard Jack for guests to be drawn on. A giant replica Heart of the Ocean. And the car. You know the car. It had the handprint on it.

Above all of it hung a Titanic they had built in their own kitchen, which is a sentence I’d like to lodge with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. A hundred and fifty guests had come dressed in 1912 period costume, a hundred and fifty creative souls who had all, without exception, understood the assignment.

Here’s the thing about this crowd. Actors, comedians, writers, directors, producers, people from TikTok and Instagram whose follower counts have commas in places mine does not. If New York ever prints a brochure, it should just say this: we have the densest concentration of talented, interesting, unhinged-in-the-good-way people on Earth, and occasionally they all put on Edwardian dress and gather in a fake ship on Avenue C. This wedding was the brochure.

Oh, this wedding also had a brochure. Did I mention that?

I moved through the narrow front bar in character as Captain Smith, greeting passengers in the received pronunciation of 1912, a doomed man radiating calm. This, it turns out, would be the theme of my evening: serene on the surface, paddling furiously below. A duck in a dead man’s coat.

Because downstairs, several problems were forming a queue.

Problem one: my ceremony script, printed on official White Star Line letterhead for authenticity, was loose-leaf, and the stage had the air circulation of an actual ocean. One gust and I’d be improvising a wedding ceremony. I dispatched the endlessly patient Emily across the street to a bodega with instructions to beg, plead or barter for paper clips. She returned victorious. Somewhere on Avenue C there is a bodega owner who believes a woman in 1912 evening wear urgently needed office supplies, and he is right.

Problem two: three sound checks, two microphones, and a wireless mic I was assured worked perfectly. Hold that thought.

Problem three was not a problem so much as a jump scare: I turned from rehearsing my lines to find, standing directly behind me, a drag queen in a magnificent gown. Saline Dijon. She was to perform “My Heart Will Go On” after the ceremony. I have rarely felt so underdressed while wearing a naval captain’s full ceremonial uniform.

The morning-of text.

Now. I’d written the ceremony weeks in advance. But the morning of the wedding, after a pregame rewatch, I texted the couple an idea, which is exactly what every bride wants six hours before walking down the aisle.

There’s a scene in the film where Billy Zane, having stitched up Jack for theft, watches him and Rose slip away after firing his gun at them, and starts laughing. His bodyguard asks what could possibly be funny. Billy Zane delivers, with the smugness of a man who owns several railroads: “I put the diamond in the coat. And I put the coat on her!”

My pitch: at the ring exchange, I pat my pockets. Nothing. I go red. I start laughing. Billy, our Billy, asks what could possibly be funny. And I say: I put the rings in the coat. And I put the coat on her, gesturing to my own ‘Rose’ in the front row, wearing my suit jacket, rings in the pocket.

They signed off mere hours before the aisle. Creative people. Rare instance of doing instead of saying.

The ceremony.

The cue to begin was the head of the choir raising a pair of binoculars towards the staircase and bellowing “ICEBERG, RIGHT AHEAD!”, which I believe is how all weddings I officiate should begin, and I will not be taking any further questions.

But first, Billy walked to the wall, gripped an ornamental door, and yanked it clean off its hinges. He laid it on the stage to rapturous applause. We would be conducting this ceremony standing on the door. The door. The floating debris upon which Rose survives and Jack, conspicuously, does not.

Read more

Here is the CV, and I have since checked it against his actual bio rather than my memory, which is a courtesy I extend to guests and to no one else. Five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, first as web producer and then as staff writer, where he collected four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and three WGA Awards. Head writer and executive producer on Desus & Mero at Showtime. A contributor to the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Two stand-up specials: People Pleaser (2022) and Positive Reinforcement (2025). A book of essays, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results. Co-creator of the parody Twitter account @SeinfeldToday. A regular panellist on NPR’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!

We first met about ten years ago at Union Hall, doing Picture This, the show where cartoonists draw live while comedians perform and everyone pretends this is a normal way to spend an evening. I have two deeply unemployable skills: cartoonist and comedian. My parents are thrilled. Picture This is the only place on earth where both of them are load-bearing at once.

Josh’s read on it was better than mine:

“You’re watching something that’s never happened before and will never happen again. Everybody is kind of on edge seeing how the artists will interpret the comedy and how the comedians will react to the art. It’s perfect.”

We also remembered a show where the comic on stage was working a long stretch about diarrhoea, and I, being a professional, had no choice but to render it. Gratuitously. Backstage was a convivial disgrace. We were crying.

That’s the whole show, really. Backstage is better than the stage. (Don’t tell the box office.)

The Overnight Success That Took 9 Years

I confessed that I had followed @SeinfeldToday for years without ever once registering that Josh was behind it. He co-created it with Jack Moore in late 2012: log lines for Seinfeld episodes, were they to exist in the present day, and present day was 2012 into 2013… which is now a period piece.

The numbers are fucking absurd:

“By, I would say, 48 hours later, it had like 100,000 followers... Never had anything like that happen to me before or since. It was like as close as I had to being Hawk Tuah.”

The Sunday night the account was formed, Josh had dinner with a friend who worked as a manager. She told him, gently, that she loved working with him and would keep helping him out, but that her boss was after clients with a slightly higher profile.

Two days later, the boss wanted a meeting. And to sign him!

“I’ve never seen something turn on a dime like that in my life before.”

He had samples. He’d been doing stand-up for years. But he didn’t have the bulletproof script sitting in a drawer waiting for the world to finally notice him. He had drafts that were “all kind of a little rough.” So the lightning struck, and he spent the next year converting it into late-night writing applications, one at a time, like a man turning a lottery win into a mortgage.

The heat arrives whether or not you’re ready. It doesn’t wait while you tidy up.

The Taste of a 57-Year-Old Father of Three

Nice Try is a collection of essays, and I have described it, to Josh’s face and now to you, as being like “A Kind David Sedaris.” He took the compliment the way he takes everything, which is to say he immediately turned it into an admission of ongoing inadequacy:

“We moved into a new apartment last week and I was just shelving my books and I saw my old copies of Naked... I haven’t looked at it in years, but it was like, I’m chasing that still as a prose writer.”

Same. The personal essay has a king, and we are both loitering outside the palace.

There’s a bit in the book about a childhood library trip and discovering R.L. Stine, and a line about having the taste of a 57-year-old father of three.

“Books were kind of the place where I could have more adult taste. My parents were a little more protective with movies and TV and even violent video games. But with books, it was kind of whatever I could get my hands on.”

Which is how a child ends up with real, considered positions on prime John Grisham. The Rainmaker. The Client. The Firm. He said “prime Grisham” the way other men say “prime Coltrane.” That truly is 57-year-old-father-of-three behaviour.

Writing in Someone Else’s Mouth

Here’s the thing about Josh’s writing that I’ve never been able to get past. Him on stage is him on the page. The voice is identical, and it’s completely unique, and yet he spent five years writing in an acerbic British one, and got four Emmys for it.

How?

Below: how you make an atrocity funny without becoming a ghoul, the word Gary Gulman put in my head that I can’t get out, the pumpkin quiche incident, and why the meanest guy in the room in 2007 was never the one to copy.

“In a good writer’s room, the best writer’s rooms, I think, have real diversity of perspective. And so even when the host is filtering it through how they think and talk and see things, you are bringing what your interests and ideas are when you can get it through the lens of what they do.”

Part of what the host wants, he said, is breadth. He pointed to a Last Week Tonight piece made after his time there, on Black hair care and health, led by Ali Barthwell:

“That’s really cool that John has the range to go, I’m going to figure out how to talk about this thing that is compelling to me even though it is not of my personal experience. And then I want someone like Ali who can go, I can speak to this from personal experience and I can make it sound right coming out of John.”

So it isn’t impressionism. It’s not doing the accent in your head. You learn the show’s keystone phrases and structures and referential touchstones, and then:

“How can I expand this palette in directions, like in vectors, that are fun and specific to me as well?”

Which means that all those weird esoteric tangents, the ones that feel like they’ve been beamed in from a stranger’s dream? Those are somebody’s fingerprints, and if you know the room, you can dust for them.

“Oh, this is about an angry penguin with a whimsical name. And you’re like, well, that’s a Jill Twiss specialty for sure.”

He also recalled an extremely elaborate bit, requiring numerous graphic mock-ups, concerning an ornate sex party at Wes Anderson’s house. Unmistakably Will Tracy, who went on to write The Menu and Bugonia and worked on Succession for its entire run.

Now that I think about it, I’d always been able to spot Asher Perlman on Colbert the same way. There’s a full stop that arrives, and you go: ah. There he is.

Getting Your Fingernails Underneath

I asked him the question I actually wanted answered. At Last Week Tonight, he had to take genuinely bleak news and other material and make it funny. Not funny instead of serious. Funny as the delivery mechanism for serious.

“I think that layer kind of lets you take a couple of harder swings.”

You don’t always mock the tragedy. You mock the discourse around the tragedy. But, he said, it doesn’t always have to be removed levels of commentary. Sometimes the material walks right up and hands you itself:

“Then you see the CEO of the company that did the polluting going, look, you gotta dump sludge somewhere. And you’re like, okay, that we can make fun of. We can make fun of this asshole.”

Then the second part, which is the best description of comedy writing I’ve heard in a long time:

“Look for the little things where you can get your fingernails underneath and go, oh, I can claw something up here that’s fun and funny, and not just a wry good point.”

Because a very good point that only elicits ‘clapter’ is, as he put it, its own thing. Fine. Applause is not laughter and laughter is not agreement.

“There’s an idea that you can really sink into someone’s subconscious, that they walk away and they’re actually thinking about it going, holy shit.”

…

“The efforts of these shows are not mostly to change the world. It’s to make things intelligible.”

Not to fix it. To give you the vocabulary and the narrative at your fingertips for a thing you’d half-heard and had a feeling about and couldn’t articulate. Give them the utility. Give them the words.

It’s the same job as a political cartoon, incidentally. You are not passing legislation. You are handing someone a shape for the thing they already felt.

Oliphant knew that. He never wrote for the awards. He wrote for himself, and the rest of us borrowed the shape.

It’s Pronounced ‘Quiche’

Which brings us to the vocabulary people.

Gary Gulman is, to my mind and Josh’s, a master linguist operating under cover of stand-up, and the thing Josh loves about him is the exact opposite of what you’d expect from a man with a large vocabulary:

“He didn’t invent a new word. He did not put words together in a way they’d never been put together before. But he just cut through. Just the emphasis and specificity and structure of, I’m going to use the same words twice in the opposite order. And it gets a huge laugh. To me, that’s like watching surgery.”

I told him I’d watched Grandiloquent thinking the same thing: this is neurosurgery. Fastidious to the point of being slightly frightening. It is not about being baroque or ornate with the construction. It’s the opposite. It’s distillation.

Gary taught me a word recently that I cannot shake. He and Myq Kaplan were doing their thing over lunch, the two of them together, and Gary described the practice of shepherding your sentences. He’d picked it up as a legal term. It means carefully guiding, organising, and directing the flow of your writing so it leads the reader exactly where you want them to go.

And here is where I should tell you that these are the same men who, at lunch on the Upper East Side, destroyed me. I ordered the pumpkin quiche at a vegan place. It arrived within about five minutes, which is barely enough time to make eye contact with a waiter, let alone a quiche.

“Whoa,” I said. “That was quick.”
Within half a split second, without looking up, Kaplan said: “It’s pronounced quiche.”

Gary said, " Wow! " in the tone of a man witnessing a hole-in-one, “Kaplan. That mind. He’s so…” and I said, “…Quiche?” Then it was just three idiots laughing at themselves over a vegan tart.

That’s it. That’s the whole reward. Decades of craft, a Peabody or four between us, an entire language at our disposal, and the peak human experience remains three men in their forties and fifties giggling at a homophone.

“The Born to Run of That Thing”

Josh’s stated ambition, which I’d like framed:

“I always joke that I want everything to be the Born to Run of that thing. Just give me all the horns and the bells. Give me all the shit.”

But then, the caveat that makes it actually true:

“That kind of maximalism of intention, if not of execution, I think is really beautiful. I just want to fill this vessel, whatever it is, whether it’s a book or a song or a painting, with meaning. Whether that means it’s one long brushstroke of varying pressure that communicates it really clearly, or whether it’s a novel that’s 120,000 words. As long as it is the fully realised version of the thing it is, and done with enthusiasm, I love it.”

One brushstroke of varying pressure. He said that to a man holding a pencil, live, on camera, and I don’t think he even knew he’d done it.

“The Attell of It All”

“I think maybe the most copied comedian of all time, or of the last 25 years, is Dave Attell.”

I agree, and I have receipts, because I spent years on the comics’ bench at the Cellar watching him close out the late show, trying to reverse-engineer it. How the fuck is he doing this?? It felt like a magic trick performed in a room full of magicians.

And the second you try to imitate it, you lose something in translation, because there’s a layer underneath that isn’t transferable. There’s no way to do it without simply being Dave Attell.

Josh:

“I’ve heard dozens, if not hundreds, of people where you can draw a straight line from Dave Attell to where they are. But no one that captures...”

The globe joke. I travel so much for stand-up. I used to be afraid to travel, because when I was a kid, my father beat me with a globe. One of my all-time favourites, and one of his.

“I’ve seen so many people change the setup and the punchline by one word. And it’s like, that’s not slick. We know the seed that that’s coming from is so clear.”

The inimitable thing about Attell isn’t the darkness. Josh nailed it:

“The more bleak the comedy gets, the more grimy, having that gentle touch goes so far. This is a person, there’s a sweetness in this person, and they are also willing to look at the grimy parts.”

Which is, incidentally, precisely what makes Aaron Chen work. His special Funny Garden is on Netflix, and it is one of the most singular things you’ll see. So innocent on the surface, and then he picks up a vase to drink from, and takes you somewhere genuinely deep, and you don’t notice you’ve gone.

Josh made a related point about voices being unforgeable. Maria Bamford. Daniel Simonsen, with a thick Norwegian accent that is not, on inspection, Norwegian, or anything else. No one talks like that. Whatever that is, is him.

The Kindest Cut

Here’s what I actually wanted to ask him, and I saved it for last because I wasn’t sure how it would land.

I started in Perth in 2007. Everyone in that scene was watching the same two people: Dane Cook and Louis C.K. Fellow suburban Bostonians, as it happens. And there was a meanness in the water. The comedy rewarded the fastest, meanest person in the room. That was the metric. That was the whole ladder.

Josh started in Boston in 2004, at the actual epicentre, and built an entire career being conspicuously the opposite. I asked whether it was a bit he couldn’t get out of, or genuinely his personality.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. It took me a little extra effort. I started in Boston in 2004, and there were maybe a dozen guys who were like, oh, Dane Cook is what comedy is. And we’re all doing iterations of that.”

A dozen. All of them. Vituperative by default, because that was what winning looked like.

What saved him wasn’t a principle; it was proximity. He got lucky enough to be around the emerging Boston lot: Gary Gulman coming back through on Last Comic Standing. Erin Judge. Lamont Price. Joe List. The Walsh brothers, Chris and Dave, running a weekly show of strange sketch and storytelling that had no business working.

“Seeing that was like, oh, you don’t just have to do the thing that you see most prevalently or most successfully.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I sat on that bench at the Cellar for years trying to work out how to become Dave Attell, and the answer, which took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at, was that there wasn’t one. Not because I lacked the technique. Because the vacancy was already filled. By Dave.

Josh worked that out in 2004, in a room full of a dozen men doing iterations of the same guy, and quietly went and did the other thing.

Four Emmys. Two Peabodys. Three WGAs.

Nice try.

Watch the replay, then go subscribe to Josh!

Josh writes That’s Marvelous!, a weekly newsletter of pep talks: for readers, for strangers, and for inanimate objects. He described it in the chat, and I’m describing it here because I’d like you to actually go.

thatsmarvelousnewsletter.com

Also: Positive Reinforcement, his new special. People Pleaser, his first. Nice Try, his essay collection. Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!, where he has also guest-hosted. All of it good. All of it kind. None of it soft.

I could have talked to him for hours and was only stopped by the tyranny of the clock and the fact that I was, by then, drawing him.

‘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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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.

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

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If you’re new here…

Hi. We have a podcast called Is There Something In This?, where we sit down with a beer and try to build a New Yorker cartoon out of nothing but two Australian accents and a shared refusal to be defeated by a joke idea.

We hadn’t recorded in a while. How long is hard to say precisely, but Scott put a pin in it for us: the last time we potted, the Knicks hadn’t won anything, there had never been hand-to-hand combat on the White House lawn, and Charlie Kirk was alive.

So. Bit of a gap.

What the show actually is

If you’ve never listened, the premise is embarrassingly simple: Every week we bring in half-formed ideas, and we hold them up to the light together until they either become a cartoon or die of shame. Some become dailies for the New Yorker’s site and socials. Some go into the magazine. Most of them go nowhere, and you get to watch that happen, which is the best part.

The whole exercise is right there in the name. Somebody says a thing. The other one says: Is there something in this? And then we find out, live, with no editing and no dignity.

We got about ninety seconds in before I derailed us with a story about the comedian Gary Gulman, backstage, being told the costumes were designed by a man named Beowulf Borrit. Scott’s contention is that with a name like Beowulf you have exactly two career options: Broadway costume designer, or vampire.

Which led us to the image of young Beowulf brushing his teeth in the mirror while someone gently breaks the news. Hey, buddy. You can see yourself.

It’s like a fighter pilot learning he’s colourblind.

The Knicks cartoon

The cartoon we got up was the Knicks seating plan, because the tickets were eye-wateringly expensive. World Cup fans looked at those prices and said no thank you. The sections were the usual suspects: celebrities, your boss’s boss’s boss, tech and finance bros, and then, in the cheap seats of the soul, real fans who are terrible with money.

A mate texted Scott the same night: Yo, I feel pretty called out, I’m going tonight. He spent a fortune and watched them lose because Trump was in attendance.

We also got fact-checked by Ronny Chieng, who suggested we add crypto. I said crypto lives inside tech and finance bros. It was two in the afternoon.

I officiated a Titanic-themed wedding

This is real. I am ordained in the state of New York, which means going downtown to City Hall to register with the county clerk, where they marry someone roughly every five seconds and you can always spot the second wedding by the white two-piece tracksuit.

The clerk handed me my paperwork and said, congratulations, sir.

I said, oh, I’m not getting married, I’m officiating.

She said, oh, I’m sorry.

I said, no, no, I’m divorced.

We’re now having an entire conversation. I explain that I’ve just filed my divorce papers and I’m about to officiate a wedding. She says: that’s bad luck.

I said: you think that’s bad luck? The theme is “Titanic!”

They are getting married on the door. They have recreated the door. I am dressed as the captain, which Scott correctly pointed out is a man famous for steering directly into a disaster, and if that’s the metaphor for the marriage, well.

Also worth noting, for anyone whose art is stuck: go and sit in City Hall and watch the weddings come in and out. The parents, the divorcees, all in the same building. It is the richest room in the city. I sketched the clerk at the desk and gave it to her, and she went from I hate my goddamn job to oh my God, holy shit! in about a second. Scott said he could never do that, because he can’t draw, so his version would be walking up and saying “Hey, look at these photos I took of you while you weren’t watching.”

Send us your rubbish 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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Tuesday, July 14th 2026
New York, NY

There’s a photograph on my hard drive of a group of cartoonists crowded into a hotel room 20 years ago, all of us grinning like we’d won something.

We had, in a way. The Australian Cartoonists’ Association had flown Pat Oliphant and his wife Susan out as guests of honour for the Stanley Awards, which is our version of the Reubens, and a handful of us had been quietly ushered up by the President to meet him.

I didn’t notice until later, looking at the photo, that at the exact moment I pressed the shutter, the most decorated political cartoonist in the history of the form had calmly flipped the bird.

No announcement. No wink. Just a 74-year-old master craftsman deploying a middle finger with the same precision he’d aimed at every American president since Lyndon Johnson. It was the most Pat Oliphant thing imaginable: sneaky, perfectly timed, and funnier than anything else in the room.

Pat died on Sunday, aged 90. And I want to make a claim I’ve been bloviating about at dinner parties for years, usually to people with no way of checking: Pat Oliphant is the most influential Australian ever to emigrate to the United States.

I know. Rupert Murdoch also exists. But influence has a sign in front of it, positive or negative, and I’d rather not get sued in two hemispheres, so let’s move on.

From Adelaide to everywhere

The facts of the career, courtesy of the ACA’s tribute this week, read like something a Hollywood executive would reject as too tidy. Born in Adelaide in 1935. A cadetship in the art department of The Advertiser. Then, in 1964, a vacancy at The Denver Post, which he grabbed at the urging of a fellow Australian cartoonist named Paul Rigby.

Within a year of landing in America, the Los Angeles Times was syndicating him nationally. Within three, he’d won the Pulitzer. By 1980 he’d joined Universal Press Syndicate and become the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in America, running in more than 500 newspapers -enough leverage that no editor could tell him what to think, which suited him, because no editor ever successfully had.

Here’s my favourite measure of his influence, better than the Pulitzer, better than the seven NCS Editorial Cartoon Awards, better than the two Reubens or the Thomas Nast Prize: at one point Pat started using DuoShade board, a chemically treated paper that produced textured grey backgrounds. Nearly every political cartoonist in America immediately did the same. When he dropped it in the early 80s, the company’s sales collapsed.

That is influence. Not applause. Not likes. An entire industry buying the paper you buy, then abandoning it the moment you do, like starlings.

Perth, a drawing desk, and a stack of photocopies

When I was 17, at my very first drawing desk in Perth, I sat with a pile of Oliphant cartoons and tried to reverse-engineer them the way other teenage mechanics apprentices took apart car engines. How did he compose a panel? Where did he put the solid blacks? Why did that one patch of untouched white paper feel louder than everything around it?

I never fully cracked it. Nobody has. But the exercise taught me more than any art school could have, because an Oliphant cartoon was an ecosystem: remove one element and the whole thing collapsed. He knew exactly what to draw, and more importantly, he knew exactly what not to. He never cross-hatched to fill space. Everything on the page was there on purpose.

He was, and I will not be taking questions, the finest draftsman who ever worked in this game. Alongside names like Thomas Nast, he sits in the very small club of cartoonists who changed what the job was. Fittingly, in 1992 they gave him the prize named after Nast. If you weren’t trying to copy what Pat was doing, you weren’t serious about your job. Most of us were trying. None of us were succeeding.

“Pat Oliphant lives on the trunk of the tree. Remove him, and you don’t get a different tree. You get a stump.”

~ Nick Galifianakis

And there was the Perth connection. Paul Rigby, the same West Australian who’d talked Pat into taking the Denver job in 1964, wrote to Pat on my behalf in 2006, when I was 21, asking him to look after me if I made it to Washington DC. The timing never worked out. So when I finally shook Pat’s hand in that Sydney hotel room three years later -the same trip on which he was inducted into the Australian Cartoonists’ Hall of Fame- it felt like a forty-year-old favour being quietly passed down a generation. They say ‘never meet your heroes’, but with cartoonists that always turns out to be absolute bullshit.

What the others have said (better than I ever could)

, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who resigned from the Washington Post rather than soften her pen, published a lovely tribute to Pat this week. She describes meeting him as a young cartoonist at a DC gallery signing in the early 90s, working up the courage to introduce herself, and having her fiancé mention that she was an editorial cartoonist too. Pat looked at her sternly and growled: “You do know it’s a dying art, don’t you?”

Open Windows- Ann Telnaes

Legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant

People will throw around the label of legend in the editorial cartooning profession but Pat Oliphant was truly one. Not only did his editorial cartoons and caricatures slice right through deserving politicians and public figures, his draftsmanship was on a level far above everyone else. No one came close to his drawing ability in editorial cartooning…

Read more

a month ago · 877 likes · 43 comments · Ann Telnaes

So much for encouraging the youth. (She also notes, correctly, that nobody in the profession came close to his drawing ability, and that Susan Conway -the Washington gallery owner who became his wife and made it her life’s work to see Pat properly credited- was the reason the world knew it. Susan died in December, just seven months before him. I hope wherever they are now has good paper.) Read Ann’s full piece above.

And in 2023, my friend Nick Galifianakis stood up at the Reuben Awards in front of the National Cartoonists Society and delivered the best summary of Pat’s importance I’ve ever heard. I had a small hand in helping Nick put the tribute together, which mostly involved staying out of his way. His argument went like this: he likes Taylor Swift, but if you removed her from the history of pop music, nothing downstream changes. Remove the Beatles, and everything after them changes. “Taylor Swift is a lovely limb on the musical tree of pop music. The Beatles are on the trunk of the tree.”

Pat Oliphant, Nick said, lives on the trunk of the tree. Remove him, and you don’t get a different tree. You get a stump.

He also said something that has rattled around my skull ever since: Pat “drew and wrote for an audience of exactly one person: himself.”

He wasn’t chasing likes. He wasn’t preaching to a choir. He hit everybody, all sides, all ideologies, and he hit hard, which is why the people who hated him read him even more religiously than the people who loved him. Watch Nick’s full speech above.

Pat formally retired in 2015, though the arrival of the Trump presidency briefly un-retired him and his little penguin in 2017; some subjects are simply too well-suited to the instrument. It was the shortest comeback tour in history and, pound for pound, one of the sharpest.

The blotting paper

The last time I was in a room built around Pat’s work was in 2023, at the Century Association in New York, where he and Susan had kindly invited me to a tribute exhibition of his sculptures, sketches and cartoons. Pat’s eyesight had failed, and he could no longer travel, so a gaggle of us -Jeff Danziger, Signe Wilkinson, the inimitable Edward Sorel, a table groaning with Pulitzers- recorded a video message to him instead, a room full of sharp-tongued professionals suddenly gone soft. We all scribbled a little note to be sent back to him. I sketched one of his busts along with his quippy penguin, and sheepishly slid it under my napkin before the giants could catch sight of it.

The gallery held bronzes that could have gone straight into a museum’s permanent collection, and caricatures so incisive they should have required a licence. But the piece that stopped me cold was none of those.

It was his blotting paper.

The big sheet on his drawing desk where he’d test a nib or drag a brush before committing a line to the actual cartoon. Decades of warm-up strokes, half-thoughts, tiny studies, noodlings. Nobody was ever meant to look at it, and it was one of the most extraordinary pieces of art in the building: the mind of a genius with the hand of a master, caught with its guard down. A da Vinci codex made entirely of throat-clearing.

I’ve thought about that sheet a lot since.

We spend our careers trying to make the finished thing look effortless, and here was proof that for Pat, even the effort was beautiful.

Nick closed his Reubens speech by telling the young cartoonists in the room to push their talent, be authentic, and make something beautiful, so as to honour “a time when giants roamed the earth.”

The last giant put his pen down on Sunday. He is survived by three children, two stepchildren, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and every working political cartoonist on earth, whether they know it or not.

The rest of us go back to our drawing desks, look at our own scratch paper, and try to earn our keep.

Vale, Pat. Thanks for the finger.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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I’ve booked a bunch of comedians on Draw Me Anything.

Most of them arrive with a chip on their shoulder, a grudge against an open mic host in 2011, or a haunted look that says I haven’t slept since bombing at my Cellar audition. arrives with the aura of a man who once returned a wallet he found on the subway and then felt guilty for expecting thanks.

Tomorrow week he’s my guest, and I could not be more pleased about it.

Here’s the CV, and it’s a silly one….

Josh spent five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he collected four Emmys, two Peabodys, and three WGA Awards, which is more hardware than most people accumulate in a lifetime of trying. He then became head writer and executive producer of Desus & Mero. He wrote for the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a thrill he has confirmed was shared by his parents. He has two standup specials, People Pleaser and the brand-new Positive Reinforcement, the titles of which tell you roughly everything about the man.

You’ve heard him on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. You’ve possibly read Nice Try, his essay collection. And if you were online during a certain golden-rot era of Twitter, you knew him as the co-creator of Modern Seinfeld, an account that imagined what Jerry and the gang would do about texting, which was funnier than it had any right to be.

He also runs a newsletter here on Substack (and elsewhere) called That’s Marvelous!, which sends out weekly pep talks for “readers, strangers, and inanimate objects.” I want you to sit with that last category for a moment. This is a man kind enough to encourage furniture.

I first met Josh doing the show I co-produce at Union Hall called Picture This! - I was drawing for him about 11 years ago when we were both shiny baby boys… I burst into tears laughing mid-set and couldn’t control my drawing hand. He’s pretty fantastic at that.

Which brings me to the reason I actually wanted him on the show.

Comedy, as an industry, mostly rewards the sharpened blade. The quickest, the cruellest, the one who gets there first. Josh has built an entire career on the radical proposition that you can be devastatingly funny and also, somehow, a genuinely decent human being. In a business full of people performing kindness, he appears to have simply gone ahead and been kind, which is far more subversive and much harder to fake.

So tomorrow, I’ll hand him the microphone and the metaphorical pen, and we’ll talk about writing jokes for other people’s mouths, surviving five years of turning the week’s horrors into television, and whether niceness is a strategy or just a personality defect he’s learned to monetise.

Bring your questions. Bring your drawings. Bring the wallet you’ve been meaning to return.

‘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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This afternoon I ate vegan quiche with Gary Gulman and Myq Kaplan while the three of us pulled jokes apart the way other men pull apart carburettors: reverently, greasy to the elbows, with no real intention of putting anything back the way we found it.

Why does this word land and that one doesn’t. Whether the laugh lives in the syllable or the silence after it. The sort of conversation that would bore a normal person into the grave and kept me pinned to my chair for two hours.

It was, I realised somewhere between the pumpkin quiche and the third tangent about rhythm, the perfect way to mark the date.

Because nineteen years ago today, I did stand-up comedy for the first time.

It was 2007, at the Hyde Park Hotel in Perth, in a room called Werzel’s Comedy Lounge. I was doing 5 minutes in front of a comedy duo called Luke & Wyatt (the latter would years later become my roommate).

I did jokes about muppets. I did a Ray Romano impression. In Perth. In 2007. To a room of people who had come out on a weeknight to drink beer and were now watching a nervous local pretend to be a sitcom dad from Queens.

I got one laugh.

One. A single, audible laugh, from somewhere in the dark, and I have spent the nineteen years since trying to find that person again. Everything else about the set was a catastrophe. I bombed the way only a first-timer can bomb: thoroughly, sincerely, in a blazer. Any sensible person would have taken the hint, hung up the blazer and gone back to a quiet life.

Instead, I got the bug. That one laugh went into my bloodstream like a splinter, and I have not stopped chasing it since. Nineteen years of open mics, bar shows, clubs, theatres, festivals, green rooms, late trains, and standing in the dark waiting for strangers to decide whether I get to feel good about myself tonight.

But that’s only half of what today is.

Three years ago, also on this very date, my dad died. I keep turning that over. Nineteen years since the thing that made me who I am started; three years since the man who made me, full stop, ended. Same square on the calendar. I don’t believe the universe schedules these things: the universe can barely coordinate the F train. But if it did have a booking system, this is exactly the kind of dark, economical joke it would write. Setup in 2007. Tag in 2023. Callback every July for the rest of my life.

I’ve noticed the two anniversaries have started keeping each other company. The sad one stops the proud one getting smug. The proud one stops the sad one swallowing the whole day. It turns out grief and comedy are perfectly happy sharing a table, which anyone who has ever been to a comedian’s funeral could have told me.

So I didn’t do a gig tonight. I had lunch with two friends who love the machinery of jokes as much as I do, and we sat there taking language apart, and somewhere in the middle of it I thought: this is the job. Not the spotlight. This. The shop talk. The vegan quiche. The nineteen-year attempt to earn a second laugh from a stranger in a pub in Perth.

I hope he’s still out there, whoever he was.

I hope he knows what he started.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS: If this one landed, restack it on Notes. Morris has been informed it is my comedy anniversary and has responded with the same level of enthusiasm he brings to all my achievements, which is to say he sneezed on my shoe and went back to sleep.

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July 6th, 2023
Jersey Shore, NJ

I’m currently bonking my tilted head with my palm, trying to get sand out of my ear.

In nine full years of living in New York, I’d never once been to the Jersey Shore— all I’d ever heard about it was there was something called a Snooki and that it had great scallops. And lots of house-sized flags. It was the perfect place to spend our first July 4th as a US citizen.

“Sketch On The Beach”

It was quite an experience, plonking ourselves down in the sand with our American pals and celebrating the holiday as traditionally as we could, with sun, sand, and drinking lots of booze out of red solo cups.

I spent a lot of time drawing in my sketchbook (I’m very social) and capturing what I could of the people around me. My pal Tristan really liked the drawing I did of him while our pasty white skin baked in the breeze and an endless squadron of single-engine planes towing banner ads chugged overhead.

Ice Cream Guy!

Every so often a man would appear from behind the dunes and ring a loud bell, sending every child within earshot into a frenzy. They all know what the bell means: It means Ice Cream. Lots of ice cream. (Cash only.)

One Country Under God.
One Trip From the House.

Tristan’s old pal Morgan drove in from Missouri to join the fun. We had a lot of fun chats about his small business which is fast becoming a not-so-small business. He had crazy life stories, ageless wisdom, and a guitar that looked like it had been used as a weapon. (It still played flawlessly). He and his young family showed me how it’s done when lugging all of your stuff from the house to the beach in a single trip, Hobbit style. It’s quite a skill.

Running (for) Water

Like an idiot who thinks he’s in shape, I tried to go for a run on the first morning in the stinking 300-degree humidity. After mile three, I changed states from solid to liquid. If it weren’t for the kind stranger who left a cooler full of tiny water bottles on their lawn, I would have made the full transition into a gas.

Chillin’ With the Wee Sand Chickens

Tristan’s kids were endlessly entertaining: Phoenix would lean into my ear and quietly tell me about his nightmares of a monster named Siren-Head, and Fox would burn me alive with devastating roasts about my shirt out of nowhere. He has a bright future as a judge on Roast Battle. All was well when their mama brought out the watermelon.

July Fwoooar!

Thanks to a visit to my brilliant editor, Justine and her family’s place for dinner, we were full of so much food and patriotic glee by the time we boarded the bus back to New York.

We ambled on over to our friend’s place in Long Island City to watch the Macy’s Fireworks Display from their apartment window— the view was bonkers.

The NYC crowds ended up being treated to a mesmerizing drone swarm before the big banging noises. The Ooohs and Aaahs swelled as the show culminated in a rotating, pulsing scale model of the entire Statue of freakin’ Liberty…

See more from my July 4th Fireworks Experience here.

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Creative Boom ran their flagship 2026 industry survey - 882 creative professionals, weighted UK and US, nearly half of them with more than a decade of scars to show for it. The findings landed on me the way most surveys do: with the stark, clinical thrill of being told by a stranger that your suspicions about yourself were correct all along.

The headline number is burnout. A massive 69% (heh) of respondents say they've experienced burnout in the past 12 months. And before you assume that's just the kids who can't handle a deadline: mid-career creatives report the highest burnout rate at 77%. That's my cohort. The people old enough to run the projects and young enough to still answer the emails at midnight..

The report’s theory is that it’s the mid-career people running projects, managing junior staff and fielding client demands without the authority to say no who are taking the worst of it. I felt that one in my teeth. There is an exhaustion that comes from being trusted with everything except the power to refuse any of it.

Then there’s the robot in the room…

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86% of respondents now use AI tools in their work. Eighty. Six.
…And yet only 10% of creatives think AI's overall effect on the industry is positive. Sit with that gap for a sec. Nearly everyone's using the thing. Almost nobody thinks the thing is good. We have, as a profession, collectively agreed to date someone we openly despise.

The report puts it better than I can. (Read it here) It describes a community adapting under duress, using AI not out of enthusiasm but because it feels compelled to, while bracing for it; hedging its bets while it waits to see how client expectations, pricing and competition shift awkwardly around it. (Spoiler alert: we don’t have time to wait for that )

And now we arrive at the part where I’d suggest you top up whatever you’re drinking…

Because the money is where the survey stops being darkly funny and just goes dark. Half of the respondents feel less financially secure than they did a year ago, compared with just 18% who feel more secure. And for the freelancers -my people, the dip-pen-and-mild-dread brigade- nearly 47% of self-employed creatives in the survey earn less than £30,000 a year ($39k in the US).

The report is careful to note that this is a workforce stocked to the brim with experienced professionals, 43% of whom have more than a decade behind them. Some of them, two decades+ (ahem.) So this isn't a room full of beginners finding their feet. It's a room full of people who are very good at what they do, earning well below the median salary, with none of the safety net a salary usually drags along behind it. As someone who left a salary and a country to chase this exact life, I read that figure and did the laugh you do when crying seems excessive for a Tuesday morning.

There was one finding that made me actually cackle... When asked which design trend they were most sick of, the creatives didn't say gradients. They didn't say minimalism. One answer dominated by a wide margin: AI (with more than 70 mentions). Remember when those kinds of stylistic niggles were the biggest bugbear for visual creatives? Happy days…

We used to argue about fucking drop shadows. Now we argue about the end of human authorship.

Growth. 🤌

The awards, predictably, are being quietly abandoned. A full 80% of respondents haven’t entered an award in the past year, and only 12% still believe awards meaningfully help careers. As a former president of two cartoonists’ societies, I should probably be wounded by this. I’m not. I’ve stood in enough awards-night ballrooms, clapping for a trophy I didn’t win, holding a beer the temperature of human breath, to understand exactly why a burnt-out freelancer earning forty grand might decide the entry fee could be better spent on, say, cup noodles.

But here’s the turn. Here’s the bit that I keep coming back to, sober.

When the survey asked what would actually help, the answer wasn’t software. It wasn’t a better AI plug-in or Agent; Networking and community came top, cited by 57.5%, with mentorship close behind at 53%. New tools and technology trailed well behind, at just 31%.

People. The thing creatives say they need most is other people.

The report’s instinct is right: the temptation in a bad year is to retreat. Get your head down, cut costs, skip the conference, let memberships lapse. Become a hermit with a Wacom tablet. I know that instinct intimately, because I am writing this from an apartment in which the most reliable colleague is a snoring dog.

But the survey’s closing line is the truest thing in it, and I’ll paraphrase rather than mangle it: the creatives struggling most don’t want another dashboard. They want a room full of people who understand what they’re going through, and someone a few years ahead willing to offer a hand.

I think that’s why I DO keep going to the National Cartoon Society Reuben Awards every year, and why I meet up with the local chapters whenever there is an event. The NCS has become my ‘found family’, but even more, a huge support network that I simply can’t live without. These are the people who do what I do, who are experiencing what I experience, and they have a lot of knowledge to share -and are more than willing to share it.

It’s also why I keep doing the live shows like Picture This, the lectures, the nights where I stand in front of strangers and make a fool of myself with a microphone. Not because they pay well (reader, they do not). But because for an hour I’m in a room full of people who get it. And on the current evidence, that room is the only thing in this entire industry that’s still appreciating in value.

The robot can have the gradients.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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July 5th, 2014
Honolulu, HI

I landed in America on the 4th of July.

I donated or sold just about everything I’d accumulated over 29 years living in Australia. The stuff I kept was crammed into a bloated suitcase before squeezing onto a plane to start a new life: No plan, no job waiting, and no idea what I was going to do when I landed.

The Americans seemed very happy to see me when I landed — they threw a big party with fireworks and everything. People even took Monday off work!

It was a sorely needed reprieve from the anxiety-riddled gauntlet of these previous two years, waiting desperately to hear from the United States Citizenship & Immigration Service (USCIS) on whether the latest stage of the green card application had been approved so I could move forward.

The hundred-odd nights leading up to the final ‘Permanent Resident’ status being approved were pure torture. I ground my teeth down to powdery nubs in my sleep, confabulating every conceivable nightmare scenario where something went wrong, and I had to go to the back of the line and start over.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who has ever tried to emigrate to the United States, and understand the deep, profound relief of getting your passport stamped and stepping past the Customs desk for the first time as a newly minted resident.

When you land in the US and pass customs, there’s a huge escalator that takes you down to baggage claim. Just overhead, as you descend, are an enormous American flag and a picture of the incumbent Commander in Chief off to the side.

It is 2014. Barack Obama is president, ‘Gas’ is $3.63 per gallon, and my arm is still swollen from the eight vaccinations I had to get before flying to the US. Is Polio still a thing? And what the hell is Pertussis?

July 29, 2014
New York, NY

After a month of crashing at a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment in Inwood, I finally found a place to live. The hunt for an apartment in New York is incredibly challenging when you, A.) Don’t have a credit rating, B.) Don’t have a rental history and C.) Don’t have an entire year’s worth of rent in the bank. Some places ask for twelve months’ rent upfront. It’s crazy. Who has that kind of money?

Finding it was a total fluke: a perfect New York moment:

My wife at the time had been invited by a friend to an event at the Australian Consulate-General in midtown. After a few free chardonnays, she got chatting with the hilarious bartender, who mentioned she knew someone who might have a place we could see, but she wasn’t sure if it was already rented out.

The place was in Alphabet City:

The lowest, Eastest part of the East Village. I took a green cab (Ooer) downtown the following afternoon. The whole neighbourhood is legendary for hosting, at one time or another, some of the greatest creative minds in music, painting, writing, and acting.

There’s an energy to the place that buzzes through your whole body. The sirens, the smells, the mess of it all. It’s some real old-school New York shit, and I really like it.

After passing about 20 bodegas and several prehistoric dives, I pulled up in front of an old building about a block south of the Nuyorican Poets Café, between Avenues C and D. It was affectionately called “Bullet Space”.*1

*Bullet Space was so named as, back in the 80s, it was the best spot to get high-quality cocaine in New York. Movie stars would send their nervous assistants downtown, sometimes with a gun to retrieve it. They didn’t always expect them to return. (Bullet refers to the snuff bullet one stores their cocaine in. I’m told.)

The pre-law tenement was built in 1867 and was originally constructed as part of a row of three. The other two buildings had since been demolished. The original owner, John G. Costar, became very wealthy when he sold his previous property to John Jacob Astor for the construction of the Astor House.

“Up To Code”

In 1983, an artist named Andrew Castrucci, along with his brother and a friend, moved into this building as squatters.  They put on art shows and plays in their space and called their gallery and community Bullet Space. In 1998, the New Museum of Contemporary Art held an exhibition that showcased Bullet Space’s art, poetry readings, and performances.

In 2002, after a deal negotiated by the City and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, the squatters, who were lighting fires inside to stay warm and lugging water from the sidewalk fire hydrant up the stairs in buckets, were allowed to purchase the building for $1 and become its legal occupants.

I buzzed 5B and didn’t get any response. I peeped in through the glass door to see that the lobby was an art gallery space. There was an exhibition of paper maché heads and other cool oddities.

I tried a few more times, then called the number I was given by the bartender, and the landlord picked up. “Sorry, I’m out the back!” she said. “Let me come get you.”

I waited by the door, next to an old chair with a crutch leaning against it (“John’s chair”, where he waits for his sandwich.) until a short, dark-haired woman came to the door, all smiles.

She was with a friend and invited me up to see the place on the 5th floor of the 147-year-old walk-up. I had to stop on the 4th floor to catch my breath and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I looked up and saw an entire American flag made out of Coke and Pepsi cans.

No air conditioning, no elevator, just some old steps and banisters made out of scraps found around the city over the years. It was perfect.
We finally got up to 5A (“Hey, same apartment number as Jerry!”) and pushed open the heavy steel door.

It was basically a kitchen with a bathroom attached to it. There was a bunk above the sink if anyone wanted to crash and didn’t mind the sound of the dripping tap. There was a small spider hanging from the bookshelf. We called him John Jacob Astor.

The bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet, with an old mattress on the ground and an old, non-functioning air conditioner hanging out of the window. The only light was from a bulb plugged into an old lamp base on the ‘bedside’ table. If I climbed onto the roof, I could see the top of the Empire State Building.

The landlord asked what I did, and mentioned that everyone in the building is an artist of one kind or another:

“There’s a drummer, a couple of painters, a junk artist, a photographer, a writer, oh —and the poet laureate of the Lower East Side.” They’ve all lived here for decades and are probably still paying rent in beaver pelts and rare trinkets.

After a few beers, we discussed the rent. It was high for what it was but low for immigrants with no rental history. We were told that to stay there, you had to make your living as an artist. I pulled out a pen, asked for a scrap of paper, and drew a 2-minute sketch of the landlord.
She took it, smiled, and said, “The place is yours if you want it!”

I moved in the next day.

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[ This is the building I would end up calling home for the next seven years. ]

IMAGES BELOW:

Photos from Bullet Space:

I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, waiting for the coffee to revive my aching corpse, and I caught myself reaching for my phone.

Nothing had happened. No buzz, no notification, no summons from the wider world. The coffee-maker simply had the audacity to take ninety seconds, and my hand went for the phone the way a smoker’s hand goes for the pack: not a decision, a reflex. A small, sad, fully automated reach toward a glowing rectangle, because the alternative, standing in my own kitchen with my own thoughts, had become genuinely unbearable.

I put the phone down. Then I picked it back up. Then I put it down again and watched the coffee maker, as if it owed me money.

This, I have come to understand, is what I do now. I do not have moments. I have content gaps.

For most of last year, I had earbuds in for roughly ninety per cent of my waking life. Walking back from the gym: podcast. On the subway: more podcasts, or a man called Tim explaining how to live. Or the NYT Crossword app. Colouring a cartoon at the drawing board? Netflix going in the background, doing nothing but flickering, a televised nightlight for a grown adult. The remaining ten per cent of the day, the bit where my brain might actually catch up on the firehose of input I’d been aiming at it, did not exist. I had outsourced all of that processing to sleep, which is presumably why I spent the year sleeping like a guilty man being interrogated by detectives.

I did not think of this as a problem. I thought of it as being efficient. Optimised. A productivity hack, which is a phrase I have used unironically and out loud, in front of other adults, and for which I can only apologise.

Then, in one of those productivity newsletters I was almost certainly listening to instead of experiencing my own life, I came across the computer scientist Cal Newport, who had a phrase that lodged itself in me like a splinter: embrace boredom.

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I have never been a big basketball person.

Let me be clear about what that means. It means that on the night of Saturday the 13th of June, when the New York Knicks won their first championship in fifty-three years, I was catching up on the players’ names two minutes before the final buzzer. I’m the fairest of fairweather fans.

And yet. By the end of the night I was out in the streets of this preposterous city, hoarse, hugging people I will never see again, and weeping slightly at a fire hydrant for reasons I could not at the time and cannot now fully articulate. New York had not won a thing like this since 1973. Most of the people screaming in the West Village had not been alive for it. I had not been alive for it. I am not even from here. None of this stopped me. I was swept up like a leaf in a storm drain, and I went willingly.

(For the curious and the morbid, the full visual record of my descent that night lives here on my Instagram. I make no apologies and offer no commentary. The footage speaks, slurringly, for itself.)

So that was the state of me the following morning when I sat down to draw a cartoon for The David Prize’s newsletter, New York’s Newsletter. Scott and I had cooked up the idea as an absurd parody of a joke… then realised it might actually work. The best gags are usually a two-man job, like carrying a wardrobe up a narrow staircase -and there was a deadline, and there was me, a man whose skull felt like it was being gently reorganised from the inside by a small, irritable committee of bees.

This is the part where I’m meant to tell you about the tools…

Here is what I drew it with. Brace yourself, because it is genuinely the least romantic answer in the history of art.

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I have never been to Rego Park on purpose. I’m not sure anyone has.

You don’t go to that part of Queens; you wash up there, the way a single thong washes up on a beach, and you stand around wondering what current brought you in. The current, on this particular night, was Kelsey Grammer.

Let me back up.

There is a kind of New York evening that arrives with no announcement, no posters, no press, that turns out to be one of the strangest nights of your life. This was that. The only two corners of the internet that knew it was happening were a brewery called Faith American and a cigar lounge called Havana Dreams, and neither of them, frankly, seemed entirely sure either. There had been zero publicity. None. For a reason I’d later understand and find oddly moving: the SAG strike was on. Grammer wasn’t allowed to promote the Frasier reboot, which was premiering that very night on Paramount+. So instead of a red carpet, he had a humidor in Queens. Instead of a press junket, he had me and my cartoonist friends.

I should explain why I was there at all, because on paper I am the least likely person in that room. I’m an Australian cartoonist who draws for a living and apologises for existing. I am not, by temperament, a man who fawns over celebrities. I once stood next to a Hemsworth at a barbecue and managed only to ask him whether he wanted onions on his hot dog.

But here is the part I don’t say out loud at parties.

Frasier saved my life.

Not in the way people mean when they say a TV show “saved their life,” which usually means it was on while they ate a sandwich. I mean during the pandemic, when -with the exception of 7pm- the city went quiet, and the walls of my tiny East Village walk-up began their slow, patient closing-in, the thing that got me to morning was Dr Frasier Crane. It was running on Netflix then, the whole run, and I would put away three, four, five episodes a day. Three before bed, minimum, the way other people take a tablet. There was something about that warm, jazzy, oblivious world, that very particular fictional Seattle, all sherry and apricot walls and brothers being insufferable at each other, a pre-everything calm I could climb inside and pull shut behind me.

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I got hooked on the nostalgia of it. The whole Frasurbane of the thing, before I knew that was a word other people had also coined in their own lonely apartments. A spin-off from Cheers, of all the unlikely lineages, this fussy radio psychiatrist peeled off from a Boston bar and given his own life two thousand miles away. When I finally got to Boston, I went to the actual Cheers bar like a pilgrim, and they had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Grammer from his Cheers years, younger, with the longer hair, the mullet, frankly. I stood in front of it for longer than a grown man should. It cheered me up.

I’m not too proud to tell you that a piece of laminated cardboard in a tourist trap did more for my mental health that year than several actual professionals.

So when my friend , who is a Frasier superfan of a devotion that makes mine look like a passing interest, mentioned there was a thing in Queens, I went. Ie got there before Hilary did, which means that according to the official record, the canonical comic Hilary later drew of the entire evening, the first two things she noticed upon entering were, in order: 1. Cigar smoke and 2. Me and 3. Kelsey Grammer “just hangin out like old pals.”

The lounge was full of what Hilary would immortalise as the “cigar men of Queens,” a category of human I’d never knowingly encountered: large, contented men sitting in deep leather chairs, side by side, not speaking. Not to each other, not to anyone. Just sitting, smoking, gazing into the middle distance like a Rothko exhibition that had given up. Grammer himself found this unnerving, and said so, that all these men could sit beside one another in total silence. I thought it was the most honest thing in the room.

Cartoons by Hilary

Me & Frasier

To read my post on everything that lead up to this and my love for Frasier, go here…

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3 years ago · 20 likes · 13 comments · Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

We ended up out the back. Several of us, sharing cigars, just hanging about and talking the way you do when the night has decided to be a long one. There’s a thing that happens out the back of a place like that, away from the television and the silent men, where time goes loose, and you forget the situation is absurd, and for a while you’re just a few people in a cloud of smoke in Queens, and one of them happens to be a sitcom legend. I was drinking a Coke, for some reason. He commented on it and suggested I buy one of his beers.

And then he started to weep.

Not at us. At the beer. He’d snuck to the front of the bar, and had been telling the story behind the Faith American can, his brewery, the one he’d named, he said, because he loved Faith, his daughter, and he loved America, in that order, and it would be churlish of me to point out that this is also a sentence a cartoon villain says before flooding a town. He read out the label.

There was a whole legend printed on it about the Anti-Rent War, about men on a full moon riding down on the sheriff’s men of Andes, New York, costumed and freedom-minded, the Calico Men, riding into “this singular, distant page of American History.” And as he read it, the great man’s eyes filled, and spilled, and there it was: Kelsey Grammer, crying, in a cigar lounge in Rego Park, about a nineteenth-century tax revolt printed on a beer can.

Hilary and James were a few feet away. Hilary, in her comic, draws her own thought bubble at this exact moment, and it reads: Kelsey Grammer is crying to me about something called the Anti-Rent War. I had the same bubble. We just rendered it differently. She let hers show on her face.

I was trying to stay cool.

You should know how excited I actually was. Underneath the flat Australian affect, the laminated-cutout-in-Boston of it all, I was a man watching the figure who had got him through the worst year of his life stand three feet away and openly feel things about a beer. I was, to use a word my people reserve for moments of genuine internal weather, chuffed. Deeply, helplessly chuffed.

I spent the entire encounter performing the opposite, nodding sagely at the can, holding my cigar, going “mm” and “right” and “that’s a lot of history for a lager,” while inside the apricot walls of my own ridiculous heart, eleven-thirty-pm-pandemic-me was screaming.

Hilary felt it all on the surface and let it pour out: the hugs, the kiss on the head he gave her, the “I love you, Hilary,” the drawing she made him on the back patio that took her three attempts because her hands were shaking. She got the religious experience. The full Lourdes.

She got him to sign the cartoon she drew of him in the New Yorker (A parody of Hellraiser) before he hugged her. She was in a surreal daze.

We left when he left, because there is no reason to stay at a party once the icon has gone home to bed. On the way out he was still in good cheer, still talking about his beer, telling us with great sincerity that sometimes you have to try someone else’s beer and it’s terrible and you have to lie, but that he was proud of his own. I believed him. I believe a man who weeps at his own label is not lying about anything.

Hilary was frantically scribbling down details of the encounter for her comic, not wanting to lose any of the granularity of the night.

The reboot, for the record, was not very good. Nobody really watched it. It came, and it went, the way these things do, the way Rego Park does, a current that brings something in and then takes it back out. But I wasn’t there for the reboot. I was there, it turns out, to stand in a cloud of smoke and quietly thank a man who’ll never know he sat up with me through 2020, one apricot-walled episode at a time.

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I asked him something about his beer.

‘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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Every guest who sits down for one of the app’s Conversations gets a hand-drawn portrait: real ink, real paper, real swearing when the nib catches. I wrote about the whole collaboration here, back when I called it the most fulfilling project of my career. I stand by that. It remains the only job I’ve ever had where the brief is essentially “please stare at interesting people’s faces for hours,” which is what I was doing on the subway for free anyway.

But this week’s portrait was different, because this week’s portrait was Susan Cain.

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Some books arrive at exactly the right moment in your life. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking arrived at mine as a court summons. Here I was, a stand-up comedian who spends his evenings shouting into microphones in basements, reading a book that gently explained I was, in fact, an introvert: a person who finds other people enjoyable in roughly the way one with Irish skin finds the sun delightful. Wonderful. Essential. Best enjoyed in limited doses before retreating somewhere dark to recover.

It rearranged the furniture in my head. I stopped apologising for leaving parties early. I stopped treating the need for silence as a personality flaw to be managed and started treating it as the place the work actually comes from. Every cartoon I’ve ever sold was drawn alone, in a quiet room, by a man avoiding a social engagement.

So drawing her face felt less like a commission and more like writing a thank-you note with a dip pen.

She’s a great writer. Precise, completely unsentimental about sentiment, which is the hardest trick in the book. And her conversation with Sam on the Waking Up app is well worth your ears. If you’ve ever suspected the world was designed by and for people who think out loud, she’ll confirm it, then explain what the rest of us are for.

She has a new #1 New York Times bestseller called “Bittersweet: How Sorrow And Longing Make Us Whole”, which is another brain-changer. You can find her talk in the Conversations section of the Waking Up app. Tell her portrait I said hello.

You can listen to the convo 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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Not the actual Lynda Barry; an original manuscript page from Cruddy, hanging on his studio wall next to an outtake from Making Comics. He calls them his Guardian Spirits, and the plan is to keep adding to them until he’s got a full pantheon of demigods looming over his desk.

I understand the impulse completely. I’ve got a drawing of Larry David in my studio that Luke Watson painted for me, and he glares at me every day with an expression that says, “Is that really the version you’re gonna go with? Aeeeeh, it’s prettaaay pretty good.”

This was Austin’s second time on Draw Me Anything, and I’d be lying if I said we covered the book in an orderly fashion. We started with 63 people in the chat and ended with 350, which means roughly 287 people wandered in midstream to find two middle-aged cartoonists arguing about whether Hook is secretly a midlife-crisis film.

It is. More on this later. It gets worse.
(Bangarang!)

Don’t Call It a Book Tour

The new book is called Don’t Call It Art, and Austin, a man committed to the bit, named the promotional run for it the Don’t Call It a Book Tour. Previous books got 25-city tours. This one got three cities: Austin, Nashville and Cleveland, which he described as “kind of like a straight shot to Cleveland type tour.”

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He slept in five beds in six days. “This is a young person’s game,” he said, and every comedian who’s ever done the road nodded so hard the vertebrae in their necks audibly clicked. The week after a launch, he told me, all the things that keep you alive as a creative person, the sleep, the walks, the daily ritual, go straight out the window. The man who wrote the book on sustainable creative practice blew himself out promoting a book about sustainable creative practice. “I wish the books worked on me better,” he said, which might be the most honest thing anyone has ever said on this series.

Nobody Knows Anything, Confidently

We got into the publishing industry, which Austin summarised via William Golding’s old line that nobody knows anything: true of Hollywood, true of books. Nobody in publishing knows what sells books, he said, “but they’ll say something confidently to you about it.” Everyone’s chasing BookTok, which is lightning in a bottle, on purpose, which is not how lightning or bottles work.

The only thing that actually sells a book, he said, quoting Ann Patchett, is one person holding it up and saying I love this. Word of mouth. That’s it. That’s the whole machine.

And then he reached for Charles Portis, because of course he did. There’s a line in Gringos about two men who “had known the despair of selling things that people didn’t want,” and Austin pointed out that this is the entire creative life. Nobody is asking for another book. Nobody asked for another cartoon. Nobody wanted a live-action Moana. You make the thing anyway, and then you present it, over and over, like Marshawn Lynch running through a man’s chest. Austin apparently plays the Beast Mode clip to himself on a loop when the self-promotion shame creeps in. If you run through somebody’s face, over and over and over and over and over …. eventually they can’t take it any more. This is also, coincidentally, my approach to open mics.

The shame is real, though. You think: my audience must be so sick of hearing about this thing. Meanwhile, an actual paid subscriber to Austin’s newsletter walked up to him in Nashville and said If I’d known you were in town, I’d have brought all my friends. The man works across the street from the hotel. He pays money to be told these things. He did not know.

So no. Nobody is sick of hearing about your thing.
They have not heard about your thing.

The Taco Bell Theory of Art

My favourite framework of the day came from, and I want to be clear that I am quoting a bestselling author here, Taco Bell. Austin loves their “distinctiveness rule”: you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but never both at once. That’s how he thinks about his readers. Keep the familiar square format, but fill this book with his kids’ drawings and new textures, so it reads like an Austin Kleon book that was somehow drawn by his children. (This “RED” rule stands for relevance, ease, and distinctiveness.)

He’s unapologetic about thinking of his audience while he works, which felt almost transgressive to hear out loud. “My readers have given me everything,” he said. “This idea that I wouldn’t think about them when I was writing is just weird to me.” His books, he insists, aren’t pure art anyway; they’re the byproducts of him trying to make stuff. The Montel Jordan principle: this is how we do it. Not how you have to do it. This is how we do it.

Neither of us went to art school, which is probably why we both find kids so instructive. They don’t know the correct way to do anything, so they just let it rip.

Why the Book Exists at All

The title comes from a John Baldessari quote: I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. Kids don’t call it art. They’re not making Art; they’re just doing stuff. There’s a Brian Eno line in the book to match: people do much better when they don’t think they’re being artists. If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.

Austin described the book as being for anyone who’s lost that lovin’ feeling: you’ve been doing the work a long time, maybe even successfully, and the joy has quietly left the building. Where Keep Going was about pushing through a world gone mad, this one is Keep Going 2.0: the call is coming from inside the house. The chaos isn’t out there. It’s in here, with the deadlines and the invoices and the creeping suspicion that your passion has become your landlord.

I know this feeling intimately. Twenty-one years as a full-time cartoonist, and people still say “you’re so lucky, you get to do what you love every day,” and I want to grab them by the lapels and explain that they have no idea how hard it is to stay in love with a thing that is actively driving you insane. It’s not drudgery exactly. It’s more like the fruit has started to turn, and instead of leaping out of bed to bite the apple you’re standing in the kitchen at 7am wondering if you can make some sort of bread out of it.

Charlie Bucket’s Midlife Crisis

Which brings me to my Willy Wonka theory. End of the film. Great Glass Elevator. Wonka looks down at Charlie and says, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted.” Charlie asks what. And Wonka says he lived happily ever after, but what he should say is:

He had to run a chocolate factory. Payroll for the Oompa Loompas. Health and safety inspections. Wait until they unionise next summer. I think about Charlie Bucket’s midlife crisis constantly. Charlie at 45, staring out over the Fizzy Lifting Drinks Room, thinking I thought I wanted this.

Austin, it turns out, came at the same territory through Jungian theory, because he’s classier than I am. He’d been reading James Hollis, and the Jungians treat midlife as a time of return: you’ve spent decades building the armour and the castle, becoming who you are in the world, and then the question arrives like a bailiff.

“Who were you before you built all this?”

His favourite version of the question, the one he asks everyone in his typewriter interviews: what did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? People deflect with jokes at first. But push past that, and it’s always there. Drawing. Reading. Music. The thing that originally activated you. It’s still in you. You just have to reconnect with it.

So Austin is picking up dropped threads. Music consumed him as a teenager, so now he’s in a dad band that practises every weekend and has performed exactly one show, with a second looming. And he rides his bike, which produced the single best line of the night, the one I’ll be chewing on for months:

He grew up on a country road outside Circleville, Ohio, in the middle of what he describes as half cornfield, half bean field, depending on the year. He had the bike. There was nowhere to ride it. Time, space and materials, the equation at the heart of the book: you need all three, and if your creative life is broken, one of them is missing. He had the materials. He didn’t have the space. Forty years later, he’s reclaiming the ride he never got.

That’s the real engine of the book, and it’s why it isn’t a parenting book or a kids’ book, despite everyone begging him to write one. The breakthrough came from a Fiona Apple interview. She mentioned she reads parenting books. The interviewer, baffled, asked if she has kids or wants them. No, she said, but if she’s struggling with something, parenting books are just solid advice for humans. The interviewer said, “So you’re the parent and the child.” And Fiona Apple replied:

“Don’t you always have to be?”

Austin said a big Charlie Brown thought-balloon shot up out of his head. That’s the book. When you get older, you have to show yourself the care of a loving parent, so the wild creative kid in you feels safe enough to come out and let it rip. Not all the time. Just every once in a while.

(We then spent several minutes agreeing that Fetch the Bolt Cutters is THE pandemic album, dogs barking and all, and Austin shared that when he told his son she recorded some of it in GarageBand, the kid replied, “No wonder her name’s Apple. On brand.” Children are a bottomless font of one-liners, and they don’t even invoice you.)

One for Them, One for Me

We talked craft, too. I told him about my caricature rule from live-drawing gigs: I do the kind version for the punter, then go home and draw the version I actually wanted to make. One for them, one for me. If the drawing you sold isn’t the drawing you needed, you owe yourself the second one.

Austin does the same with his kids’ artwork, photographing it at the exact moment before they add the evil villain who ruins everything. Every parent of a small artist knows that moment. The piece is finished. The child does not agree.

This led us to Ralph Steadman, via Hunter S. Thompson’s Kentucky Derby piece, which Austin had just re-read and which is secretly a story about Thompson begging Steadman to stop showing his grotesque drawings to the people he’d drawn, lest they both get punched in the teeth. The eternal question of that partnership: who was the real wild man? Steadman, we agreed, is an introverted wild man, the best kind, flicking ink at a blank page in his shed, ukulele within reach. Do you ever see someone and think, that’s what I want to be when I grow up? For both of us it’s Steadman. And Quentin Blake. And Hockney. And Barry Blitt, who, as Austin put it, is lit.

I also discussed this week’s published New Yorker cartoon (the Knicks one, this week) perched on top of roughly 4,000 pencil roughs nobody will ever see. Austin called it my personal rejection collection. Behind every yes is a thousand no’s, and nobody sees the no’s. There’s a whole chapter in his book called Make a Pile of Imperfect Things, which I intend to use as a legal defence for the state of my studio.

Pilgrimage Season

Final order of business: Columbus, Ohio. If you can get to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the Chris Ware exhibition is one of the best things Austin has ever seen, and he grew up 40 minutes from the place. One side of the floor teaches you how comics work; the other side is a man who devoured the entire history of the form and rebuilt it inside his beautiful neurodiverse noggin.

The Billy is Disneyland for cartoonists, genuinely my favourite place in America, and I’ll be there twice in August: once for the National Cartoonists Society’s 80th anniversary and the Reuben Awards, and again for the Columbus Comedy Festival. Austin asked how you get an invite to the NCS thing. You don’t. You just come. (He’s coming.)

He’s also going to email the Billy and see if they’ll do a Substack Live walking tour. Watch this space.

Look. That’s the broad strokes, but the full replay has so much more: Me scribbling live, the chat going feral, the Russell Brand digression I have wisely omitted from this recap, and the moment a man blanked on the name of an author whose book was directly behind his head (It was Paul Jarvis!). Upgrade to paid, and you can watch the whole hour, plus the full archive of every Draw Me Anything so far.

Buy Don’t Call It Art if you want it. If you don’t, don’t. Don’t call it art. But do subscribe to Austin’s newsletter, which is easily one of my favourite things on the internet, written by one of the most generous people in it.

‘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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He walked in with a blind doodle of my face he’d drawn while we waited to go live, and then proceeded to dismantle nearly everything I believed about being a tortured artist. His whole pitch was that the tragic-genius model (the special soul who suffers, succeeds, and then drinks himself into a wall) is a trap, and that the better frame is comedy: an ordinary person who bumbles, fumbles, improvises, and survives on their wits. As an ordinary person who bumbles and survives largely on wit and instant noodles, I took this personally. (In the good way.)

Tomorrow -Thursday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern- Austin Kleon returns to Draw Me Anything!

Add it to your calendar now!

The reason for the visit: his new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. It came out on the 2nd of June, the long-awaited follow-up to his Steal Like an Artist trilogy, and his first new book in seven years. I have read it. I am, to be transparent about my condition, obsessed with it.

Here’s the premise, and it’s a good one:

Kleon spent years being what he calls a “studio assistant” to his two young sons, and discovered that watching kids make things teaches you almost everything you’ve managed to forget. The title is lifted from the artist John Baldessari, who said he learned so much about art from watching a kid draw, because kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around and drawing; they’re just doing stuff. That’s the whole thing, really. Throw out the instructions. Give yourself permission to be bad. Stop calling it art and just do stuff. (You can buy it here)

I saw some quotes from the likes of John Cleese, Ray Bradbury, and Doris Lessing, who said artists who feel stuck will savour it. I’d go further. I think it’s the rare creativity book that doesn’t make you feel like you’re being scolded by a wellness app.

(I should flag, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’ve now spent two paragraphs explaining a book whose entire thesis is “stop overthinking and just make the thing.” Austin, if you’re reading this: I’m aware. I contain multitudes, most of them contradictory.)

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It comes for the recovering perfectionist, the burnt-out professional, the recent art-school graduate, and (a phrase I love) the retiree hunting for a creative third act. Given who reads this newsletter, that last one may be the most relevant of the lot, and I mean that as the warmest possible compliment.

So come along on Thursday. Bring questions. Bring a pen if you’ve got one. I’ll be drawing live, asking him to explain how to unlearn a lifetime of bad creative habits in under an hour, and trying very hard not to look at the paper.

It’s going to be great. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Add it to your calendar now!

‘til then!
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 have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life drawing things that nobody asked me to draw. Like this bird.

That is, more or less, the job. You sit in a studio in Hell’s Kitchen with a flex nib and a flatulent dog, and you make marks on paper, and occasionally somebody pays you for it. It is a precarious living at the best of times. The rent goes up. The fees go down. Morris requires an alarming volume of food for an animal who contributes nothing but methane and pure unadulterated joy to the world.

And now there is a new wrinkle, which is that somewhere out there, a machine may have already eaten everything I have ever made.

Not metaphorically. Actually eaten it. Scraped it off the internet, fed it into the great churning maw of a training dataset, and digested my decades of nib-scratching into a statistical smoothie that it can now regurgitate, on demand, for someone who types “cartoon in the style of” into a box and hits enter. No credit. No payment. No idea I ever existed.

The trouble is, you can’t see inside the machine. It’s a black box. You suspect your work is in there, the way you suspect there’s a mouse behind the fridge, but you can’t prove it, and you certainly can’t get it back.

This is the bit where I tell you I’m not a neutral observer.

A couple of months ago, I sat down with two of the people trying to do something about all this. Sally Herships, who is a properly award-winning audio journalist and runs the audio program at Columbia Journalism School, along with Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore, have built a thing called Croquis.

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My actual contribution, such as it was, involved sitting with the team and helping wrestle their messaging into something a cartoonist might actually read without their eyes sliding off the page. Because here is a thing the tech world doesn’t always grasp: creators are a fantastically hard bunch to reach. We are suspicious of jargon. We are allergic to being sold to. Our Bullshit-Detectors are off-the-charts. We have all, at some point, been burned by a platform that promised to be on our side and then quietly changed its terms of service at two in the morning.

So I sat in on the wordsmithing. The one-sheet they’ve put out - the thing that explains the whole project - has my fingerprints on it, in the sense that I kept saying “no cartoonist will read that sentence” until the sentences got better. It is, I think, the most useful thing I have done with a pen all year that did not involve drawing a dog. You can read it below.

Croquis

166KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Ok, what is this thing and what does it do?

Here is what Croquis actually does, in plain terms: It pries the black box open. It scans AI models to tell you whether your work has been scraped without your permission -either by searching the giant piles of training data for your name and your art, or by interrogating the models themselves to see what they’ve quietly memorised. A new tool designed by researchers to help artists figure out where their work has gone is, frankly, the first piece of leverage most of us have ever had. You can’t demand compensation for a theft you can’t prove. Croquis is the proof.

And it’s coming from the right place. Croquis was created by Mark Fiore and Sally Herships with help from an AI scholar at Stanford, funded by grants from the Herb Block Foundation and the Brown Institute, which is to say: not by anyone who stands to profit from selling your data back to you.

Now, the proving is one half of the fight. The other half is stopping the theft before it happens, and this is where the talk they’re giving comes in.

Watch the Walkthrough, Live

On 16 June at 7pm ET, Mark and Sally are running a free virtual webinar through the National Cartoonists Society called Protecting Your Art in the Age of AI. It’s the practical companion to all of this. They’ll walk through how to tell whether your work has been scraped, and then how to fight back using a couple of tools that sound made up but are gloriously real.

Register for it here

The first is Nightshade. Developed by a team at the University of Chicago, it messes up training data in ways that damage image-generating AI models - dogs become cats, cars become cows. It subtly alters an image at the pixel level so that AI programs see something totally different from what’s actually there. The lead researcher, Ben Zhao, compared it to putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the office fridge. Which is, I think, the single best description of a piece of security software ever committed to the record.

The second is C2PA, or Content Credentials, which works the opposite way round. It’s an open standard that attaches cryptographically signed, tamper-evident provenance to a piece of media - like a digital nutrition label, showing who made it, how, and what changed. It won’t poison anything. It won’t stop a determined thief. It demonstrates that a signer made certain claims, not that those claims are accurate, and most platforms strip the data out anyway. But it’s a start - a way of saying this is mine, and here is the receipt.

Nightshade is the hot sauce. C2PA is the label on the lunchbox. Neither one alone saves your sandwich, but together they’re a great deal better than the nothing most of us are currently working with.

The webinar agenda runs through the whole landscape: what AI theft is and why it matters, how to know if you’ve been scraped, how to prevent it, and what comes next. (Yes, they’ll also cover the new French Darcos AI Bill from earlier this month.) They’ll demo the new tools they’re building - the ones meant to hand creators a bit of agency back in a fight that has, so far, been spectacularly lopsided.

You might think AI is a mysterious black box beyond your control.
It’s not. That’s the whole point. And for once, the people telling you so aren’t trying to sell you anything.

Register for the webinar here: Protecting Your Art in the Age of AI

And if you want to find out whether the machines have been chewing on your sketchbook, you can join the Croquis waiting list - the one-sheet I helped (gently, insistently) wrestle into plain English lives at SFAI.agency.

‘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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Good morning from New York!

I’m groggily writing this with the windows open, listening to the scrape of cleanup crews dragging last night out of Bryant Park. Oh, did I write JOY in the headline? I meant Booooos.

The Knicks lost. They didn’t just lose; they were cursed into losing, undone by a sleeping giant in the stands. A man so still, so blissfully unbothered, that the Jumbotron found him and the entire arena turned on him with a fury usually reserved for referees and people who stop at the top of subway stairs. They showed his face. They booed. I won’t name him. (He knows. The city knows. Bryant Park knows, and Bryant Park will be finding evidence of it for days.)

Quite the night.

Thank you to everyone for the kind words about Scott and my toon in yesterday’s New Yorker for the daily - it went a little nuts, to be honest. Knicks fans are VERY vocal on social media about ticket pricing. It’s a huge part of the conversation.

I’ve been writing a lot lately.

I don’t blame you if you haven’t had time to read all of it. I’ll post some stuff below you might have missed in case you get time to file it away for a quiet summer day by the pool…

1. I wrote about my cartoonist lunch with the Hollywood director Gus Van Sant where I pitched a joke and got giant groans from the table…
   

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1. I wrote about the increasingly impossible notion that an artist could use their social media following to reach the people who opted in to see their work…

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2. I wrote about drawing New Yorkers’ dogs for a dog rescue/adoption charity in the West Village…

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3. I wrote about drawing Michael Pollan for the Waking Up App…
   

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4. I wrote about busting Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s balls backstage at the Comedy Cellar before a live podcast taping
   

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5. I wrote about the ailing print media industry after seeing the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada in NYC
   

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6. Last but definitely not LEAST, I celebrated my little fur goblin’s 7th birthday!
   

   

   
   

50 Eps at 30 Rock

My friend Nayeema celebrated her 50th episode of Dumb Girl, Smart Questions at Rockefeller Centre this month, with a big blowout party at the newly opened Pebble Bar. I’m writing up her latest live episode taping with iconic New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, which happened to feature Anna Delvey in the crowd. You can read up on a previous live episode of the show here…

Slingin’ Zingers in Queens

After the insanity of the finals subsides (possibly?), you can catch me this coming Friday at “End of the Line Comedy” at QED in Astoria. Getcher tickets here!

My right shoulder is throbbing, which can mean only one thing…

That’s right— It’s that time of year again!
Time for another annual edition of:

Each week in summer, the New Yorker softball team meets to play writers, fact-checkers, cartoonists and staff who work at other magazines based in New York City. I am probably the least valuable member of the team, with the pitching arm of an old chair and the knees of a septuagenarian. That said, I do bring the warm beer…

I’m happy to report an opening day victory for the team last Tuesday, with an 8-7 walk-off win over Defector/HellGate. Tonight at 7 pm, we will look to extend our winning streak, facing The Infatuation at our home field of Central Park North Meadow #2.

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a quick sketch I made on the High Line in Chelsea. I used to walk this every morning when I lived in Hudson Yards.

This week you can catch me talking with repeat guest about his epic new book DON’T CALL IT ART!

Add it to our calendar now

If you missed my previous 5 episodes since the last issue, you can catch up here:

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $1 per week).

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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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Scott and I sold a cartoon to the New Yorker last week. It ran today.

Let me take the swagger out of that sentence immediately, because it arrived nothing like you’d imagine. No wood-panelled office, no monocle, no butler applauding softly from the wings. I submitted a batch. A batch is the polite word for a scrappy pile of ideas hastily scrawled in pencil, most of which will be rejected, some of which deserve to be. Mine were about the Knicks, who are in the finals, which in this city is treated as roughly equivalent to the Second Coming, only louder, and with worse beer.

Most of the batch died on the table. They always do. You learn to grieve quickly.

But one survived. A map of Madison Square Garden seen from above, the seating sections labelled not by price but by status: Celebrities. Finance and tech bros. Your boss’s boss’s boss. Real fans who are terrible with money. And down in the corner, an X. That’s you.

It started, as these things do, in a Google Doc with my writing partner, Scott. Noodling. Noodling is the technical term for two grown men typing half-jokes at each other across NYC at hours when sensible adults are asleep.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about courtside at the Garden. It is not a money hierarchy. It is a status one. Half the celebrities don’t pay a cent; the tickets arrive gratis because their faces sell the broadcast. The hedge-fund guy three seats back paid more than your apartment is worth and is, socially speaking, furniture. To confirm I had the pecking order right, I texted my mate Ronny, who is frequently in the front row, close enough to know precisely who sits where and which of them got in for free. He confirmed the hierarchy. He fact-checks the rich for me, no charge.

Now. I work by hand. All of it.

I know this makes me sound like a man who churns his own butter, but I use a Hunt 101 nib in a dip pen, with Higgins Black India ink, on actual paper, and I will not be taking questions. I draw it, then I scan it. That is the whole religion.

What you don’t see in the finished cartoon is how much of it is just the same thing, drawn again and again until my hand stops getting it wrong…

Take the word “celebrities.” I wrote it perhaps fourteen times. SEAT MAP, SEATING MAP, SEAT MEAP (a typo I briefly considered keeping, because it sounded like a noise of despair). M.S.G with the full stops, M.S.G without, MSG like a seasoning. You hand-letter a word enough times, and it stops being a word and becomes a small angry centipede.

Then the logo. The Knicks logo famously lives dead centre on the court, so I couldn’t fake it. I drew it by hand, in blue pencil first to rough the shape, then inked over the top, the orange triangle and the ball and that blocky New York lettering, the kind of thing that looks simple until you are three attempts deep and quietly furious. I redrew the court itself three or four times before it sat right. I wanted the MSG geometry exactly correct, because anyone who’s been knows the place has a distinct shape, and getting it wrong is the kind of thing that gets you destroyed in the comments by a man named GaryKNIX69.

I worked from a reference, a real seat map, the way you’d consult an atlas before pretending to know everything about a country. Then I drew my own, looser, on purpose, so nothing looked too rigid.

The copy edits came back from proofing. Add the full stops to M.S.G. Make “YOU” all caps. Mind the boss’s boss’s boss apostrophes, which multiply like the bosses themselves. Small things. The kind of polish you don’t notice unless it’s missing, which is precisely the point of it.

And then there was the “you.”

There’s a tiny “you” in the bottom left, the punchline arrow, the you-are-here of the entire gag. And I had to move it up. Not for art. For Instagram. Because Instagram, in its infinite wisdom, parks a little circular bubble icon over the bottom-left corner of any image the moment someone reshares it, and that bubble will cheerfully cover a caption, a punchline, or in my case the single word the whole joke depends on.

No design school on earth prepares you for composing around a social-media app’s UI gremlin. You just learn it the hard way, swearing, at 2am.

A couple of sleepless nights later, I turned it in. It’s on newyorker.com today.

‘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.

June 26, 2018
Theatre District, NY

I once pitched a caption so bad that I made New Yorker history.

Not the good kind of history. There’s no plaque. But somewhere in the record of that week’s Talk of the Town, there’s a line about a table of cartoonists greeting a pitched gag with “groans”. I am, as far as I can tell, the only cartoonist ever immortalised in the magazine for bombing at lunch. It feels right, somehow. A man should be remembered for something.

Let me back up.

The reason there was a journalist at lunch in the first place was that we had a guest. Gus Van Sant. That Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting, Milk, and Drugstore Cowboy, and who had a film out that week about the cartoonist John Callahan, called Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. So this was not a normal Tuesday.

The lunch itself, though, was the usual ritual. After the Tuesday pitch meeting at the New Yorker, a batch of us would shuffle up to Pergola des Artistes in the Theatre District and talk shop over duck salad and cheap red wine. Eight of us that day. The duck salad arrived piled on the plate like it had fallen out of a ziplock bag. It always did. That was part of the charm, or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

In attendance, in no particular order, were Sid Harris, Sofia Warren, Felipe “Fego” Galindo, Farley Katz, Sam Gross, Jason Adam Katzenstein and Cartoon Editor, Emma Allen.

Sam Gross held court. Sam usually did. He pulled out a stack of cartoons and told stories about Callahan and about every other cartoonist he’d known across half a century of this strange trade. Gossip, scandal, kvetching: the whole nine. The rest of us pecked away at our duck and listened like apprentices, which is exactly what we were.

At some point, Sam slid the cartoons across and invited captions. And I, God help me, pitched one…

It was bad. I knew it was bad roughly half a second after it left my mouth, which is the worst possible moment to know a thing like that, because there’s no getting it back. The table groaned. Emma wrote it down. And that is how I became the only cartoonist on record as having pitched a gag to a room of professional humorists and received, for my trouble, a unanimous groan.

I received a phone call the following day from a fact-checker at the New Yorker asking if there was a ‘loud groan’. I said, “I’ll admit to groans. I don’t know about the volume.

Here’s the thing I didn’t fully understand at the time.

When I got my first invitation to that lunch, it felt like I’d finally landed in New York. Properly landed. The cartoonists I’d grown up admiring were passing me the salt. I was bombing captions in front of legends, which meant I was at the table, and the bombing was the price of the seat.

That lunch doesn’t happen anymore. Neither does the in-person Tuesday pitch meeting. The whole ritual, the armful of cartoons, the magazine-to-magazine trudge, the duck salad and the cheap red and the afternoon dissolving into evening, all of it is gone now, scattered like the cartoonists themselves back to their studios for good.

I’d give a lot for one more bad caption at that table.

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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“Youp.”

Where I’m from, that’s a diagnosis. My uncle Greg taught it to me as a child: “Mate, get a load of this bloke. He drinks his own fucken bath water.” (Australian for arrogant.) First cousin to tall poppy syndrome, that great national project of never letting anyone tout their own success.

I opened the book to that page first, and decided the next hour of my morning was spoken for. Which is roughly how the whole conversation went.

A book with no thread, which is the whole point…

The reason for the visit was Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings, Rich’s new collection, put out by our mutual pal Marty over at The Weekly Humorist. A book of single-panel cartoons is one of the hardest things in the world to assemble, and I say that as someone who has tried. There’s no narrative. No theme. No throughline to hide behind. It’s just a brain, decanted onto a few hundred pages, arranged so a stranger will smile no matter where they crack it open.

I got my copy in the mail the other day. I had mail to sort- urgent, adult, responsible-immigrant mail. Instead of opening my Jury Duty letter, I sat down with the book instead and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Morris watched me from the floor with the quiet judgment of a dog who knows the difference between work and joy and resents being excluded from the second.

Rich works out of Chicago, has been at it for decades, and turns up pretty much anywhere a cartoon can legally be printed- the New Yorker, Air Mail, the lot. The story goes that he got his start redrawing a Ring bell for service sign on the scale in the produce department of a grocery store, then quietly updating it every week until customers started coming by to see what it said. That’s the whole career in miniature, really. Couldn’t not do it.

“Getting a dog right
doesn’t mean getting a dog funny.”

This is the line I came away with, and I suspect it’ll rattle round my skull for months. (it’s around the 40:47 mark).

We got talking about reference, because Rich draws his animals from photos. I thought he knew what a dog looked like. Then I spent months -months!— trying to work out the shape a dog makes when it leaps to catch a ball, only to discover that the real anatomy of a jumping dog is so deranged it looks like a printing error.

He personally lands, as you do, somewhere between the truth and the lie.

I quoted the late James Stevenson, the New Yorker cartoonist, who said that “Until you draw a picture of something, you are apt to be dead wrong about what it looks like.” And that’s the trade, isn’t it? You think you know your own father’s face until you try to put it on paper and realise you’ve been carrying around a rough sketch your whole life.

But here’s the bathos (because there’s always bathos). Even after all that fastidious study of the real, Rich’s actual insight is that accuracy isn’t the job. You can chase the truth of a thing for weeks and still have to abandon it at the last second for the funnier pose. There’s a reality inside the panel, and it is not this one.

I think about that with caricature. The likeness lives in the asymmetry- the bit of a face that’s slightly wrong is the bit that’s most them. Same with bodies. Rich said he sees the human form in three dimensions, rotating, and that when genuine symmetry turns up it’s so rare it’s almost shocking to look at. The rest of us are gloriously, correctly lopsided. The algorithm would like to convince you otherwise. The algorithm can drink its own bath water.

Here’s the bit where I rattle the tin.

These recaps take a while. The interview’s the fun part- the writing-up is me, alone, in the studio, doing the cartoonist’s equivalent of drawing the dog’s back leg forty times until it’s both true and funny. It’s a solitary job, as Rich said.

If you’ve read this far, you’re my kind of reader, and I’d love you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s a dollar a week. That’s less than a single bad coffee in this city, and considerably less than a good one.

It keeps the lights on, the cheap whiskey in the glass, and the bath water in the bath, where it belongs.

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The men in the cartoons are all his father.

This was the moment the whole hour tilted.

I’d been banging on about the glasses -Rich draws this specific flat-topped frame, the kind where you can’t see the eyes, and I’d built an entire theory about Scott McCloud, and how a reader projects themselves onto a face they can’t quite read.

Then he said the men in the drawings are his dad. Or versions of his dad. The glasses, the little moustache, the high-waisted trousers, the bit more hair than a man that age has any right to keep. He’s been drawing his father, over and over, for a career.

We didn’t dwell. Cartoonists never do. We pivoted immediately to the fact that he draws nearly everything with a Uniball Vision. Because the ink isn’t waterproof, I sometimes cheat a little wash out of it with a water brush- making it look like I hauled a full watercolour kit to the desk when really I just smudged a pen.

The deep cuts, the dick jokes, and Vlad the Employer

The book is stuffed with what I can only call cartooning deep cuts. There’s a Leonardo da Muncie, a Charlie Brown gag built on the first Peanuts strip ever published. There’s a podcast hosted by a dog that I would, hand on heart, subscribe to over most of the human-hosted ones currently clogging the feed.

And then there’s Vlad.

Rich has a Vlad the Impaler in the book, and seeing it sent me straight back to my own- a Vlad the Employer I drew years ago, the warlord interviewing a candidate, captioned “You start Monday!” I went to enormous, faintly insane lengths to get the costuming, jewellery and spear historically correct, because the New Yorker employs fact-checkers and I wasn’t about to be caught out on the haberdashery of a fifteenth-century warlord.

The joke is stupid. I knew it was stupid. I drew it purely to please myself and threw it into the batch as filler, fully expecting it to make the good ones look better by comparison. It’s the one Bob Mankoff took one look at and said O.K. -which, as anyone who’s submitted a batch knows, is never the one you bet on. You send your bangers and your sacrificial throwaway, and the machine reaches past all of it for the daft one you never meant anyone to see.

We also fielded a chat question from about how on earth Facebook hasn’t banned him, given the, ah, anatomical confidence of certain drawings. Rich’s answer was a masterclass in living with the unknowable: he genuinely doesn’t know whether it’s a buggy AI, a phantom moderation team, or simple cosmic luck, and he’s decided that thinking about it is the surest way to summon it. “I feel like I’m always on the verge of getting in trouble,” he said. I told him that’s a wonderful place to live. I should know. I’m subletting there too.

Chickening out at Disneyland

The detail I can’t shake: Rich has been to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Ohio State (the site of this year’s Reuben awards). It’s the largest cartoon collection on Earth, the actual Disneyland for people like us, originals sitting in flat files like it’s nothing. And while he was there, he spotted the curator Caitlin McGurk behind a door. A social media friend. Someone who’d have been thrilled to meet him. And he got starstruck and couldn’t bring himself to say hello.

I found this unbearably endearing. Here’s a man whose work I’d cross a city to see, who’s published everywhere a cartoon can be published, standing in the cathedral of his own art form, chickening out of introducing himself to a fan of his.

We are all, every one of us, the admirer standing outside the door. Even the ones on the other side of it.

At the end, I told Rich the cruellest thing he could have done was turn out to be a disappointment, and he’d let me down by being decent company. He insisted he’s an asshole. “Trust me.” I don’t believe him. I think he’s a pure cartoonist- a man with my same derangement of the brain that lets us have an idea, put it on a page, and make a stranger on the far side of the planet laugh out loud at a man drinking his own bath water.

That’s a rare thing. It’s a hard thing to do well. And it takes time.

Rich Sparks’s Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings is available now in the book section at Weekly Humorist, alongside his Apple Snyder calendar, starring a man who sleeps on his sister’s couch. Follow Rich on Instagram and Facebook, and find his band, The Last Afternoons -ten years old this year, power pop bordering on indie pop -over on Bandcamp.

Next on Draw Me Anything: Austin Kleon, with his new book Don’t Call It Art. That’ll be on Thursday, June 11th.

‘til then!
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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