Drawing For The New Yorker

The strange creativity of a cartoonist

Drawing cartoons is an odd profession, I must admit. But someone has to do it.

The New Yorker magazine has run cartoons— or drawings, as they like to call them— since its inception 100 years ago. The editors knew how popular satirical art was, and considered it a crucial part of the nascent publication. Not just decoration; far from it. The art was more successful than the writing in that first year!

A lot of the process of creating a drawing of this type involves doodling, a lot of observing, a lot of thinking, a lot of mistake-making, and a lot of bad cartoons.

The process of submitting is this: if you want to your work to be considered, you send in a “batch” of drawings into your editor every week, and they either buy one or they do not. It’s a lottery, and, as a community of over 100 artists, we are competing with each other every week! And that’s not counting the new people who are submitting in hopes of getting their first drawing accepted.

But I always say that even though this process involves a ton of rejection, it also involves a lot of drawing and experimenting, too. So there is an up-side. New Yorker cartoons are not always just about a joke, they are often about a point of view, a world, an artist’s brain and experience and emotion. And to get at that, get at your voice, you have to put out a lot of material.

Here is one of my idea books.

If, after you submit your batch of ideas, you get an email from your editor and she says they want to buy one of your sketches, you are thrilled. Then, for most of us, the process leads to a series of days trying to draw the cartoon better than you know how. Sometimes, the sketch you sent in is better than anything you can redraw, because it is so loose. I often end up drawing several versions of a finished drawing until I get it right; and even then, I’m not always satisfied.

The documentary I am directing and producing is about the process. My original idea for the film was that I wanted to sit down with a few cartoonists and ask them how they work, how they think. And I thought it would be fun and unique if we drew together as we talked. The creative process is so mysterious, even to those of us who practice it for a living. It involves a lot of trial and error, going out on a limb and drawing silly, crazy, non-sequiter stuff. That often leads to really interesting drawings (often it doesn’t, too).

When Roz Chast and I sat across from each other as I interviewed her for this film, we talked and drew and laughed. There was a huge piece of paper between the two of us, and lots of supplies. Here is what we drew over the course of an hour or so, facing each other. About midway, we turned the paper around, so I drew around her sketches and she around mine..

At another shoot, a group of ten of us drew on individual pieces of paper as we talked around a round table. Here are some of the drawings produced that day, from just a few of the artists present, just drawing and talking and laughing.

Arantza Pena Popo

Bishakh Som

Victoria Roberts

Liana Finck

Emily Flake

Emily Hopkins

Roz Chast

As far as I know, the process of submission has not changed over the course of the last century. And I can imagine the creative process has not changed much either.

That’s it for today, just a little journey into the strange world of New Yorker cartoonists!

If you want to help us finish the film, called Women Laughing—which goes into a lot of what I just described—we are doing a post-production kickstarter, here is the link. One of the rewards is a signed print of Roz’s drawing above! We value your support and would love to have you become a part of helping us tell these women’s stories!

Thanks for being here, see you tomorrow. You guys are the best!