428. Official NYC Book Launch Announced, Bezos Kills Editorial Freedom (Again) & A Sketchy Assignment with a Twist!

+ Liana Finck on Broadway, Pruning your darlings & Morris discovers his new favourite book

…coming to you from my phone, in the green room of a comedy club on the Upper West Side, welcome to Issue #428 of New York Cartoons!

Before I say anything else, I’m excited to tell you that the official in-person launch event of the book Scott and I have been working on for the past 2 years will take place in New York City at a VERY iconic mystery institution on Friday, May 2nd. Mark your calendars, and please sign up here so I can send you and your pup(s) all the details about the location! I’ll share more information in the coming weeks. In the meantime…

Just for you, here are a few cheeky sneak peeks from the pages therein… (click to enlarge)

To see more, preorder your copy from wherever it is you (hopefully still) buy books!

As always, thank you for subscribing, and I’ll…

This week’s Sketchbook is from my up-coming post on Process Junkie about a very unique commission I finished last week for a dinner party of New York authors, critics and journalists. (Subscribe to see it when it publishes this Friday.)

Finck on Broadway!

I stopped past one of my favourite New York stores this past week to see that they had a special

Liana Finck

display in the window. It isn’t often you get to see cartoonists being celebrated front-and-center in major storefronts on Broadway, but Fishs Eddy has done a great job of elevating the art of cartooning to New Yorkers everywhere. Kudos to the team for the excellent collection they’ve put together with Liana.

You can visit the store on Bway/19th or order things by calling (212) 420-9020. —And be sure to subscribe to Liana’s Substack below:

Fishs Eddy

This week on Process Junkie, I discuss the notion of pruning your ideas:

…it’s important not to be precious about ideas that seem great but don’t really serve your big-picture goals as a creator. (You have to work those out on your own.) To that end, you need to give up being precious about those ideas and be able to simply let them go —or better yet— share them with a friend or collaborator for whom you think it would be a better fit.¹

“A life left unpruned can become a twisted knot of ideas, tasks, and projects competing for your limited time and resources. If you don’t prune some of the branches from your life, the important ones will never flourish.”

~ Gardener and writer Elizabeth Roth

²We’re all here for a fleeting blip of time; You’ll never read all the books, blog posts or loyally commit to all the ideas you have in your lifetime. You may as well share good ideas with interesting, talented people instead of letting them slip back into the ether to land on someone else’s ever-growing To-Do list.

Capturing ideas you have is important. Curating them is essential.

Continue reading below:

When is it ok to say NO to good ideas?

A top political columnist for The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, resigned yesterday, accusing Post chief executive and publisher Will Lewis of killing her column that criticized owner Jeff Bezos's drive to overhaul the opinion pages to focus on his libertarian priorities.

"Will Lewis' decision to not …run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff's edict - something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing - underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded."

You’ll recall this also happened to my friend and fellow cartoonist,

Ann Telnaes

earlier this year. You can read about that in my post from January here:

When I raised it on Notes, Ann’s response was:

(That’s right, I am not above using my pup to shill my nifty wares.)