by Mankoff, Bob
was time not spent doing something else. Time in which I could meditate, cogitate, and create until I came up with another idea.
Sometimes I would stare at a small section of the drawing and the dots would seem to dance and shimmer.
I would space out into a kind of focused trance where my hand was doing one thing on the drawing board and my mind was busy conceptualizing, dreaming up cartoons that, I hoped, would be as intellectually ambitious in their own way as Steinberg’s were in his.
Certainly they were intellectual. I may be the only cartoonist ever to make a joke about Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems of mathematics.
“The arithmetic seems correct yet I find myself haunted by the idea that the basic axioms on which the arithmetic is based might give rise to contradictions which would then invalidate these computations.”
Looking back, I think I was trying to prove to my parents, and also myself, that even though I hadn’t made it through graduate school in experimental psychology, I was now doing postdoc work as an experimental cartoonist.
I was systematically, if not consciously, experimenting with the parameters of the cartoon format, sometimes using no words and being silly
and sometimes using lots of them to make an ironic point.
“O.K. guys, let’s have a good clean fight. No racial epithets, ethnic slurs, or disparaging remarks about place of national origin. No derogation of religious persuasion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. In case of a knockdown go immediately to a neutral corner and refrain from any taunts, jeers, or gibes about pugilistic ability.”
But whether being brainy
Tomb of the Unknown Quantity.
or zany,
Macho Vegetarian
I was at the drawing board for hours, developing the technique of looking at an idea from many different angles, which would then reveal even more angles.
Each idea would spawn variations on a theme that I would exhaust until it exhausted me. And whenever I became obsessed with something besides cartooning, the two forces would combine. In the early 1970s, after Bobby Fischer became world champion, my obsession with chess combined with my cartoon obsession to produce this obsessive cartoon chess riff:
White resigns
Which I probably would have been better off submitting to a chess magazine than to The New Yorker, although The New Yorker did publish the cartoon below at the time of Fischer’s triumph over the Russian Boris Spassky, when for a brief moment chess became a spectator sport.
I finally did get a chess cartoon in The New Yorker in 1997, when the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
“No, I don’t want to play chess. I just want you to reheat the lasagna.”
Compared to my attempts of decades earlier, I guess it had the advantage of actually being funny.
So varying the variations became my modus operandi, and I used the method to operate on themes as varied as logic and hand shadows.
Sometimes, the variations between cartoons would be relatively minor, as with these two explorations on man-and-machine interactions using an old-fashioned printing press.
Not that much difference between the two, right? But whatever the difference was, it was difference enough, because after two thousand submissions, The New Yorker bought the second one.
And then this rejection slip
magically changed to this:
Okay, that’s not what really happened. There is a New Yorker rejection slip, but there’s no acceptance slip. And if there were one, that certainly wouldn’t be it.
CHAPTER SIX
MY GENERATION
The way I actually found out that I had finally sold a cartoon to The New Yorker was by the appearance of an inconspicuous little “o” scribbled in pencil on the back of that drawing by the art editor, Lee Lorenz. When I called the office to find out what this meant I was told by his assistant, Anne Hall, that the “o” stood for “O.K.” and that they would now like me to do a “finish” on the drawing. This confused me. I said it was already finished, that’s why I’d handed it in—it was done. But Anne explained to me that what cartoonists handed in for consideration were called “roughs,” which, if bought, then were redrawn and called “finishes.” Clearly, if cartooning is ever to get the respect it deserves, it’s going to need fancier jargon. Anyway, it turns out that all they wanted was for me to remove the background, which, with the miracle of Wite-Out, I did, and—voilà!—to my delight and my parents’ astonishment, on June 20, 1977, that cartoon appeared in The New Yorker.
I was part of the new crew of young—or at least youngish—cartoonists that Lee Lorenz, my predecessor as cartoon editor, brought into the magazine in the 1970s. Having arrived before me was Jack Ziegler, and quickly following were Mick Stevens, Michael Maslin, and Roz Chast. We’re the old—or at least oldish—guard now, but our memories of that first cartoon sale are still fresh. Before I continue my memoiring, it might be nice to take a break and include their memories of that delicious moment when they sold their first cartoon.
MICK STEVENS:
In San Francisco, where I lived back in the seventies before getting a foothold at The New Yorker, I would sit for hours at the drawing board waiting for inspiration in front of that “blazing white island”—which the cartoonist Bill Woodman once called the blank pieces of paper we eventually draw on. (He was quoting James Dickey, I think.)
I was a fan of country-and-western music at the time, but I was living with a woman who played the classical violin. She had introduced me to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, and now I was whistling “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” around the house instead of “Honky Tonk Blues.” I had a tape recording of the Mozart piece, which for a while was always playing on my old cassette player behind me as I drew my weekly batch of ideas. One day while I was listening and doodling as usual, I found myself drawing an empty frame, then a horizon line within it. I added a few forlorn-looking clouds above the horizon, then some random objects in the foreground: an old tire, a tin can, an empty bottle, a pencil, and assorted debris. I stared at this melancholy scene for a while, then added a box at the top for a potential title. I was stuck there for a while and was about to give up on that particular germ of an idea. Then, a few minutes later, I heard “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” suddenly stop playing behind me, followed by the sad, crunching sound those old tapes made as they died, eaten by the cassette player’s hungry mechanism. It was suddenly very quiet in the room. The tape had obviously reached the end of its life.
This event provided me with the title I had been looking for. As it turned out, “Life Without Mozart” became my first O.K. at The New Yorker.
JACK ZIEGLER:
Shortly before Christmas of 1973, on my regular stop at The New Yorker to drop off new material and pick up last week’s returns and rejection slips, I was surprised to find an almost illegible note clipped to my sheaf of that week’s losers: “Dear Mr. Ziegler, would you mind stopping back to discuss one of your ideas with me? Thank you.”
It was unsigned, but I knew it was from Lee Lorenz, the art editor. After having the note verified by Natasha, the dark, smoldering vixen who was moonlighting as a receptionist, I was let in.
It had been below freezing that morning when I’d left my apartment, so I had on a heavy sweater, topped by a wool sport jacket. By noon, however, the temperature had soared, and perspiration was now dripping off me. I nervously took my seat in the anteroom alongside several other gentlemen: “real” cartoonists (as opposed to me, the neophyte)—all easygoing guys who, unlike me, were quite comfortable hanging out there.
When Lee invited me into his office, he made no mention of my addled appearance; nor did he inquire after my apparently questionable state of health. I sat in the chair opposite him as he pulled my drawing from a fat pile of other people’s work on his desk. It was a cartoon that had made me happy when I came up with the idea. Lee asked if I wouldn’t mind if they bought it for the magazine and if I’d be amenable to conside
ring a few changes. That was my first exposure to the extremely polite ways of The New Yorker in conducting business with its contributors.
The caption and layout were fine, he said, but some adjustments would be required in the body of the drawing. Could I perhaps make the fellow on the phone older and a tad more biblical? And the inner workings of the conveyor belt seemed, well, not quite mechanical enough. Just a few lines added to the finished drawing should do it.
“Hello? Beasts of the Field? This is Lou, over in Birds of the Air. Anything funny going on over at your end?”
Two weeks later I received a check for $305, the largest payment and oddest amount I had yet received for any cartoon sale. One month later, when I was paid for a second drawing the magazine had bought, I was shocked to find that my “regular” fee had been reduced to $215.
“Surely there must be some mistake,” I sobbed to Lee over the phone the next day. After a minute or two, he figured out my problem and told me about “the formula.” The New Yorker, I learned, paid strictly by the square inch—i.e., the amount of space a drawing would take up when it got published in the magazine. (P.S. The formula by which the payment for cartoons is determined has since been changed but cannot be revealed, as it is considered a proprietary trade secret. When I became cartoon editor, I suggested that it be by the dot. Suffice to say that this suggestion was not taken.—R. M.)
MICHAEL MASLIN:
On the Ides of March 1978, I brought in yet another batch of cartoons to the magazine. I’d been submitting for seven years (since I was sixteen years old) with no success, although I’d sold an idea to The New Yorker a year earlier—an idea eventually executed by Whitney Darrow Jr. Here’s the drawing I submitted:
And here is the published version, drawn by Darrow:
“Nothing will ever happen to you.”
I produced the panel in a style in which you rapidly sketch a subject without ever looking down at your drawing pad, which accounts for the fact that it looks as though I never looked down at my drawing pad.
Whitney Darrow’s version showed that he clearly did. Good for him, although I sort of felt that was cheating.
Nevertheless, I was proud that my idea had at least gotten into The New Yorker. My goal, however, was not to supply established cartoonists with ideas but to see my own drawings published.
That March, I’d gone uptown to the magazine’s offices, then located at 25 West 43rd Street, dropped off a new batch of cartoons, and retrieved last week’s rejected submissions. Back home in my apartment, I looked through the envelope of rejected work and discovered that one cartoon was missing—this one:
“I’ll have a quarter pound of your most reliable cheese.”
I didn’t think it was the strongest drawing in the batch. As there was no note explaining its absence, and thinking perhaps it had fallen behind a filing cabinet or something, I decided to call the magazine.
Anne Hall, the assistant to Lee Lorenz, the art editor, told me that the drawing probably was misplaced, and … well, would I hold while she looked into it? When Anne came back on the line, she said, “Mr. Maslin, I’m sorry, the drawing wasn’t misplaced—they bought it.”
I said, “They bought it? The whole thing?” (“The whole thing?” was in reference to the previous purchase—you know, when they just bought the idea.)
Anne replied, “Yes, the whole thing.”
ROZ CHAST:
I remember the first time I sold a cartoon to The New Yorker very clearly. It happened in April 1978. I had graduated from college in May 1977, and in the months in between those two dates, I was taking an illustration portfolio around to various magazines. I had been doing cartoons on and off since I was a kid, but I didn’t think anyone would like them, because they were very personal and peculiar. I thought I would have better luck with illustration. I sold a couple of illustrations, but at a certain point, I thought: This isn’t really so great, so I might as well try doing what I want to do—which was cartoons. My parents were longtime subscribers to The New Yorker, so I knew that they used cartoons. I didn’t know anything else, like names of editors, how one submitted cartoons, or how many to submit. I called up the offices to find out when their drop-off day was. It was Wednesday. I got together a large number of cartoons—I’m guessing around fifty or sixty—and put them in one of those brown envelopes, the kind with the elastic band around it. I didn’t have any expectations whatsoever of selling a cartoon. I dropped my cartoons off at the transom. When I came back for my portfolio the next week, there was a note inside that I couldn’t read. I asked the somewhat alarming red-haired lady who sat at the transom desk to translate. It said, “Please see me. Lee.” I asked who Lee was. She said he was Lee Lorenz, the art editor, and buzzed me in. I walked down a hallway to his office, where I have a vague memory of a lot of old guys standing around. I was very, very, very, very anxious. I went in to see Lee, and he told me that they were buying a cartoon. I was pretty flabbergasted. It was, in many ways, the most peculiar and personal of the lot: Little Things.
I think I was too shocked to show any emotions on the surface. Lee asked me if I was glad, and I said yes. We talked a little while, I can’t remember about what. Here’s a horrible memory: after they bought this one, I actually asked him if he would like to take another look at the huge pile of cartoons I’d submitted, if perhaps there was another one in there that he had missed. Cringe-o-rama. He kind of laughed. He told me to keep coming back every week and explained a little about how it worked. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since, more or less.
Let’s look at these “firsts” as a group:
“I’ll have a quarter pound of your most reliable cheese.”
“Hello? Beasts of the Field? This is Lou, over in Birds of the Air. Anything funny going on at your end?”
They are all sort of strange, with Roz’s being so strange as to make the others look normal. And, except for Ziegler’s, they are as likely to produce puzzlement as amusement. Certainly my early efforts seemed more like whimsical puzzles than jokes. Probably, each one of us wondered why this one was picked rather than all the others, and why this one opened the gates to the promised land.
I think the answer lies with what Lee Lorenz, who in 1973 had become art editor (it wasn’t called cartoon editor then), was looking for. What he wasn’t looking for was what he already had, although what he had was plenty good: an established crew of cartoonists he had inherited from the previous art editor, James Geraghty.
However, if Lorenz was going to have a legacy other than Geraghty’s, he was going to have to develop his own crew. And the members of that crew couldn’t just be replacements for the old guard, turning out their imitations of cartoons that the old guard was already doing.
Lee also needed something else, because the way cartoons were being created was changing. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, it was common for gag writers to supply the ideas for cartoons. In fact, Geraghty broke into the magazine supplying ideas for Peter Arno, and even after he became editor he continued to do so. The writer James Reid Parker was the caption collaborator for virtually all the lines of Helen Hokinson’s stout matrons.
“I hope this isn’t going to emphasize anything.”
“When were you built?”
And none of George Price’s snappy comebacks came from him.
“Just spending another evening in the bosom of my family. What are you doing?”
Even as late as the late 1970s, as Michael Maslin’s story indicates, The New Yorker would buy cartoon ideas from cartoonists and have them redrawn by the established stars, like Whitney Darrow or Charles Addams. This is also how Mick Stevens got his foot in the door, before squeezing the rest of himself through.
There’s no doubt that this way of doing things produced some very fine cartoons. By separating the drawing part from the idea part, you got a high level of both. In terms of pure draftmanship, the work of cartoonists like George Price and Peter Arno is unmatched.
Nevertheless, peopl
e are often at least a little disappointed, and sometimes more than a little, when they find out that a cartoonist did not come up with an idea but only executed it, no matter how beautifully. It’s a question of authenticity, and by the 1970s authenticity had become an important cultural value. You wanted invention and execution in one individual, and if you could have the invention by sacrificing a bit on the execution, that was an acceptable trade-off. Yet if the drawing could not depend on a bravura performance to wow you, it had to have other qualities. Sometimes the gag was so great that it compensated for any artistic awkwardness, but more often those technical limitations helped highlight the peculiar voice and personality of the cartoonist, so that ideas became less generic and more idiosyncratic. Bob Dylan might not have the best voice, but you’d rather hear him sing “Positively 4th Street” than Sinatra.
Gradually, and then almost completely, The New Yorker sought this all-in-one singer-songwriter model for its cartoons. There was a practical side to this preference as well, because the editor no longer had to be a matchmaker. However, I don’t think the practicality was what motivated Lee. He really wanted not only new cartoonists but also new cartoonists with new outlooks. Those first cartoons by me, Michael, Jack, Mick, and Roz provided both. Later in Lee’s tenure he would add the distinctive voices of Michael Crawford,