by Mankoff, Bob
Danny Shanahan,
and Bruce Eric Kaplan (who signs his drawings “BEK”), all of whom I would gratefully inherit when I became cartoon editor. But I was a long way from being cartoon editor back then and really a long way from being an established New Yorker cartoonist. Still, after I sold that first cartoon, I fantasized that my life would change. I would be a famous cartoonist, entitled to all the rights, privileges, and perquisites so charmingly depicted in this B. Kliban cartoon:
As if. Look, getting a cartoon published in The New Yorker doesn’t make you famous or even give you the right to call yourself a New Yorker cartoonist. To be a real New Yorker cartoonist, to join the ranks of Steig and Steinberg, Addams and Arno, Ziegler and—well, it’s hard to think of any other Z cartoonists—I’d have to get published, when all was said and done and drawn, more than once, more than ten times, maybe more than a thousand times. And I was a long way from that goal. But to paraphrase the ancient Chinese sage Lao-tzu, the journey of a thousand cartoons begins with a single gag. However, by the end of 1977 I was only three more gags along that journey.
Many of the cartoons I did during my first few years at The New Yorker were completely visual—no caption at all.
These and others like them, featuring a primarily visual approach, were published a few years later in an early collection of my work.
I had focused on this type of cartoon for two reasons: (1) I thought of it as the purest kind and (2) that’s the kind The New Yorker was buying.
But I soon realized that by restricting myself to the strictly or primarily visual, I wasn’t being true to my own sense of humor, which had always been highly verbal, quick with a quip, a retort, a rant, or a riff. People are funny not only because of what they do but because of what they say when they’re doing what they do. Silent film comedy is great, but if we’d never progressed to the talkies we wouldn’t have the great films of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, or Woody Allen. By excluding speech from my cartoons, I was restricting the range of things my cartoons could talk about. Evidently, this self-imposed restriction created in me a pent-up demand for words as well as images, because when my first New Yorker cartoon with words was published, it had a hell of a lot of them.
“I think you two may hit it off. Craig, here, is an attractive male academic in his early forties who seeks a warm, vivacious woman delighting in conversation, arts, and nature for an evolving romantic commitment, possibly marriage, while you, Vivian, are a good-looking, intelligent, stimulating woman in her late thirties who seeks an educated, unattached, well-bred man concerned with ideas, culture, and the environment with whom to share your life interests and companionship.”
From then on my approach was eclectic, using words and images in any way I thought would best get the idea across.
“Look, Joel, you’re relatively young, have a relatively nice job and a relatively nice wife. There’s no reason in the world why you shouldn’t be relatively happy.”
Three Out of Four Doctors
In 1978, thirteen of my cartoons were published, and the next year I almost doubled that number, including this full-page cartoon, which prefigured where “my generation” was going:
It also prefigured where I was going as a cartoonist, because you had to be considered an established New Yorker cartoonist to warrant a full page in the publication. But to be officially established as a New Yorker cartoonist, you also had to have the coveted New Yorker cartoonist’s “contract,” which would be the ultimate stamp of endorsement.
The following year, that endorsement became official when the art editor, Lee Lorenz, wrote this letter to the editor, William Shawn:
The “original and distinctive style” Lee refers to was, of course, my dots. No one had ever created cartoons that way, and no one other than myself has done so since, for good reasons, which I’ve alluded to and will say more about a little bit later. But its distinctiveness had caught the eye of not only editors but cartoonists as well. One of them, Jack Ziegler, my good friend by that time, created this fanciful drawing of the Mankoff dotorium in his own distinct and original style.
The New Yorker valued distinctiveness in both ideas and style—as it still does. Ardent fans of New Yorker cartoons don’t need to look at the signature on a cartoon to see who’s done it, and my dots readily identified me—and, frankly, covered up some of my deficiencies as a draftsman.
My friend Sam Gross classifies cartoonists as either “heads” or “hands.” A “head” cartoonist needs a strong idea to have a good cartoon. No idea, no cartoon. It’s not that the drawing doesn’t matter; it does, but it’s a bonus. For a “hand” cartoonist, it’s tilted the other way. The drawing is the main show, the raison d’être. Charles Saxon’s art—for which the term “art” is completely apt—provides a prime example of this.
“It’s good to know about trees. Just remember nobody ever made any big money knowing about trees.”
Although I had a unique style that suited me and my work, I was really a “head” cartoonist. And while there was a lot of inking for all those dots, it was the thinking that really mattered. Basically, these two drawings use the same amount of ink, but it’s the think that makes the second one a cartoon.
My cartoon thinking at the time swung from the abstractly amusing
to the amusingly amusing.
“Now, this over here, this is why you’re going to have to go to jail.”
“And now I’d like to sing a little song written specially for me called ‘I Wanna Be President.’”
But everything I did, whether it was to be obliquely witty or outright funny, was in the New Yorker framework of what I call benign humor, intended to intrigue or amuse but not to offend. It’s heavy on the whimsy,
light on the ridicule,
“I don’t know, Al. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that it’s a make-work, dead-end job, but, on the other hand, it’s also a vice-presidency.”
and the butt of the joke, even when it seems to be the other guy, is usually us.
There’s a lot to be said for this kind of humor, and a good amount that has been said against it. I would have to face up to the pros and cons of soft versus edgy jokes once I became cartoon editor, especially under Tina Brown, who was all edge, all the time. But back in 1980, soft appealed to me, and my version of it garnered me the coveted New Yorker contract. The next step in my education was to learn what a New Yorker contract actually meant.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE CARTOON BANK
Would a contract mean that I would now, à la the Kliban cartoon, be escorted down the street by voluptuous women in Frederick’s of Hollywood–style lingerie, while my henchmen abused blind beggars?
Unfortunately, voluptuous women weren’t in the contract. Fortunately, neither were blind beggars.
The agreement did mean, however, that I’d be paid more then I was getting as a noncontract cartoonist. The payment for each cartoon was determined through a byzantine bonus formula that I still don’t understand. The bonus was based on the quantity of cartoons sold (after every ten you got an incremental raise) and on the size of the drawing as it appeared in the magazine, calculated by the square inch. This led to oddball checks for amounts like $331.89, $437.34, and $325.23, which I never questioned then because I was just so happy to be in The New Yorker, and because I didn’t own either a ruler or a calculator. However, I recently acquired both, and I now think that, over the course of my career, I may have been shortchanged by as much as six dollars.
I wasn’t being paid by the “dot,” and even though I was a pretty fast dotter, drawing cartoons in this style was an excruciatingly slow way to earn money via the bonus system. Which is why no other cartoonist has caught a case of stippling.
The technique just requires too much time to do your “batch.” The batch is the name cartoonists have for the bunch of cartoons they submit every week to the magazine—on the average, about ten. I don’t know why it’s not called the bunch, but
if it were, I guess I’d be wondering why it isn’t called the batch.
Nowadays, on Tuesdays, when new cartoonists come into the magazine’s offices, I tell them to submit at least ten. They ask me, “Why ten?” and I tell them because in cartooning, as in life, nine out of ten things don’t work out.
Anyway, it’s better to have more rather than less in your batch, and you don’t want your style to limit your output.
But by the time I was breaking into magazine cartooning, opportunities to be a magazine cartoonist were starting to vanish. And in the following years, no style—fast, slow, or even slower, like mine—was going to be a good way to earn lots of money or even the modicum needed to make it a full-time job. It wasn’t The New Yorker’s fault. Yes, The New Yorker rejected nine of our ten submissions, even from “contract” cartoonists, but paragraph 3 of the contract let you submit them elsewhere.
The problem was that “elsewhere” kept shrinking. Magazines where New Yorker rejects could turn into accepts, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, and Esquire, had either disappeared or stopped using cartoons altogether.
By 1990, practically all the other major magazine markets were gone. Basically, in terms of earning a living, it was either sell cartoons to The New Yorker or file them away. And even with selling regularly to The New Yorker, the living you earned was kind of paltry. In 1990, I sold thirty-four cartoons to The New Yorker and earned about thirty thousand dollars, roughly the equivalent of fifty grand today. I don’t consider myself crass or materialistic, and certainly not crassly materialistic, but this William Hamilton cartoon resonated:
“Money is life’s report card.”
This seemed especially true in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the stock market started to boom and the Gordon Gekko mantra “Greed is good” was ringing in everyone’s ears. Some of my own New Yorker cartoons of those times reflected the zeitgeist that success should be spelled $uccess.
“As far as I’m concerned, they can do what they want with the minimum wage, just as long as they keep their hands off the maximum wage.”
“Keep up the good work, Bromley.”
“Well, that satisfies our financial requirement.”
But the money I was earning from cartoons was not satisfying my financial requirements.
In an effort to boost my income, I even branched out from The New Yorker mother ship and signed on with the United Features newspaper syndicate to do a daily financial cartoon called Dollars and Nonsense.
Some decent cartoons came out of this
“I don’t know a damn thing about monetary policy, but I know what I like.”
“Long-term, I like bonds; intermediate-term, I like equities; and short-term, I like scotch.”
and two respectable business collections, but
not enough $uccess for me, because there was now more than just me involved. I was a newly married man. Actually, a newly remarried man.
“Oh, I guess I’ll remarry someday. But first I’ve got to demarry.”
Some of my new responsibilities were reflected in my cartoons of the time.
“And on tap I’ve got Enfamil, Isomil, and Gerber Lite.”
I wasn’t traveling solo anymore.
In addition to our daughter, Sarah, who was born in 1991, my new wife, Cory Scott Whittier, also had a young son, David, from a previous marriage. So I had simultaneously become a new husband, a dad, and a stepdad, and since Cory also had a dog, Barkley, a step–dog dad as well. I was determined to make this relationship work because not only had my previous marriage failed, but the one previous to that had also. Getting remarried had almost become the norm, with two being the new one, but getting re-remarried still had the whiff of three strikes and you’re out about it. I was really hoping to avoid whiffing on my final try. My past cartoons on marriage offered some guidance about what to avoid.
“Look, I can’t promise I’ll change, but I can promise I’ll pretend to change.”
“Believe me, Janet, I consider you an important part of our marriage.”
“Brad, we’ve got to talk.”
“Women want more these days, Bill—it’s not enough just to be a jerk anymore.”
In addition to money concerns, I began to nervously imagine a future in which The New Yorker was buying cartoons from a new generation of cartoonists but not from me. I think every cartoonist—indeed, everyone who’s funny for money—fears that either they’ll stop being funny or whoever decides what’s funny will think they have. Little did I know that one day I’d be in the whoever role.
Maybe if I did, I would have had less of an entrepreneurial spirit, but if that spirit hadn’t moved me then, I wouldn’t be where I am now, because I never would have founded the Cartoon Bank, which, in a roundabout way, helped me become cartoon editor.
Let me explain, starting with the Cartoon Bank itself. The basic idea for the Cartoon Bank was quite simple: to do for cartoons what photo stock houses had done for photos—make cartoons available to publishers and the general public for purchase and licensing. My original idea was do that with New Yorker cartoons. But The New Yorker rejected that idea. That really didn’t surprise me. I was just a cartoonist with an idea, and The New Yorker was quite comfortable rejecting ideas from cartoonists—it did just that by the hundreds every week. This experience with rejection gave me an idea for Plan B. The New Yorker was getting many more cartoons than it could possibly use. No matter how funny your batch was, necessity demanded that most of it be deemed not funny enough. Why not create the Cartoon Bank from all the cartoons The New Yorker was rejecting every week? That would amount to thousands every year.
Admittedly, some of those cartoons, mine and others, fell short of great. Hey, when you swing for the fences, sometimes you miss. And sometimes more than sometimes. But, really, most of the cartoons weren’t half bad, a quarter bad, or bad at all.
In fact, most of the cartoons rejected by The New Yorker, then and now, are quite good. This just makes sense when you do the math. Five hundred cartoons are submitted by our cartoonists to The New Yorker each week. But the magazine has room for, on average, only seventeen of them. Did the best cartoonists really produce 483 stinkers? I didn’t think so. The Cartoon Bank would help those cartoonists, distribute their work more widely, make more money for them and, yes, I admit it, even more for me, but eventually quite a bit for The New Yorker as well.
All it would take was someone who knew a lot about cartoons and something about computers, what they could do, and how to make them do it.
That someone turned out to be me.
Computers had intrigued me going way back to when I was a kid, fascinated with toys such as Robbie the Robot, which in a way was a “thinking machine.” Real computers of that era, considered “electronic brains,” were behemoths that took up entire rooms.
“I’ll be damned. It says, ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’”
That’s how computers were thought of as late as 1979, when I did this cartoon:
In 1982 I drew the following cartoon for Saturday Review, conceiving of Facebook-like functions at a time when Facebook itself was inconceivable. (In fact, Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t even been conceived yet.)
“Fine, Al, and how are you, your charming wife, Joni; your two wonderful children, Charles and Lisa, ages thirteen and fifteen; and your delightful German short-haired pointer, Avondale?”
But it was accurate in one respect. Computers had shrunk, and I had one of the first shrunken ones, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III, on my desk.
By the time I drew this cartoon, for The New Yorker, two years later, in 1985,
“All my gadgets are old. I’d like some new gadgets.”
my new gadget was the original Mac.
Amazingly, you could draw on it with this thing called a mouse.
In practice, it wasn’t so amazing—it was like drawing with a bar of soap, and the cartoons didn’t look very good on a dot matrix printer. When I showed them to Lee Lorenz, he wondered what the point wa
s. I had no good answer then, but I liked the Mac so much that I wanted to come up with one.
MacPaint wasn’t good for drawing cartoons, but once you had drawn one, it was good for tinkering with it. Now if only you could draw the cartoon on paper and get it into the computer! Trying to stuff them into the disk drive didn’t work, but I discovered an early handheld scanner that you would drag across what you wanted to scan. It wasn’t wide enough for cartoons; you needed two passes to scan one, and then the software would stitch the image together.
As scanners got better and Macs more powerful, I began storing all my cartoons on the computer. From this it was not much of a leap to think that I could store all my friends’ cartoons, too, and sell them, which is how the idea of the Cartoon Bank was conceived, in 1990—not so coincidentally, at about the same time that my daughter, Sarah, was being conceived.