by Mankoff, Bob
I met with Matt and encouraged him to start submitting. Unfortunately, his submissions indicated that his potential was still mostly unrealized. But, to give Matt a taste of what success would be like, at the weekly cartoon meeting I asked David Remnick to buy this cartoon. Looking back, Matt would probably agree that it would not make his highlight reel.
Still, as I’ve said, the journey of a thousand cartoons begins with a single one, and this was Matt’s. He didn’t sell another drawing for eight months, but that first taste, plus the moral support, was enough to keep him going. And when he finally got published again, the improvement was obvious, both in the idea, which is not just a twist on a common cartoon cliché, and in the drawing, which also departs from traditional cartoon conventions by creating a fantasy scenario,
depicted through a very realistic drawing style, a style that demonstrates that Matt’s fine arts training was not wasted.
Over the years, Matt has perfected this approach. Here are four of my favorite cartoons of his:
“From the violent nature of the multiple stab wounds, I’d say the victim was probably a consultant.”
“Before we begin this family meeting, how about we go around and say our names and a little something about ourselves.”
By the way, that one of Che wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt has become one of the best-selling cartoons of all time at the Cartoon Bank. I’m sure that years from now, when people complain that New Yorker cartoons are not as good as they used to be, this is one of the ones they will be referring to.
But this one probably won’t:
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a funny cartoon and the first one we published from Alex Gregory, who, when all is said and done and drawn, will go down as a great New Yorker cartoonist. It’s just that this first one wasn’t that great. We published it because we saw the potential.
Alex definitely had the comedy chops. He didn’t need any tutoring in “triplets” or anything else. At the time we published that cartoon, he was writing for The Larry Sanders Show. You don’t get that kind of gig without those chops. And he has gone on to more comedy success in TV and movies. Chops indeed.
“Luckily, none of the people inside appear to be celebrities.”
But as much as I liked his jokes, I felt that his jokes deserved better drawing.
We talked about it, and he told me his biggest hurdle was his neurotic perfectionism. Mistakes—a smudge, an errant line—made him apoplectic. They filled the drawing process with fear and dread. The clouds parted for Alex when he discovered the Wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator.
An electronic paintbrush and an eraser proved to be the perfect match for Alex’s neurotic perfectionism. He could screw up all he wanted to and in the end not screw up at all. Using this tool, his technique rapidly evolved from blah to a brilliant modernistic drawing style that is as incisive as his wit.
“Whoa—way too much information!”
“Try blowing on it.”
“I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it’s just to annoy people.”
“I need someone well versed in the art of torture—do you know PowerPoint?”
Like Alex Gregory, New Yorker cartoonist-to-be Paul Noth had good comedy credentials. A regular guest writer for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, he’d created the cartoon-animation segment “Pale Force,” which featured Conan and stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan.
And as we’d done with Matt and Alex, we gave Paul a break on this, his first, cumbersomely drawn cartoon for The New Yorker, to encourage him:
“How do you respond to critics who claim you’re just trying to scare people?”
This one, too:
“Didn’t I tell you Tom was fun?”
And a few others. Then I threw the book at him, the book being The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. I told him to make it his bible and study the techniques of the masters. He would be the first to say that his cartooning is a work in progress, but meanwhile, he’s progressing very nicely.
“I was against Russo-Disneyland from the start.”
“He’s all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel.”
With this general approach of encouragement, nudging, noodging, coaching, and cajoling, plus a lucky break, I was able to slowly build a new crew to go along with the old crew, and the recent recruits now produce over half the cartoons that appear in the magazine.
The lucky break was Zach Kanin. Every two or three years I get a new cartoon assistant, a young man or woman who filters all the cartoon submissions for me, as well as the caption contest entries, and also traffics the cartoons through the submission, acceptance, and publication process. There is a lot of strictly clerical stuff involved, but I need more than a clerk—or at the very least, a clerk with a very good sense of humor.
In 2004, when my previous assistant’s term was up, David Remnick made the brilliant suggestion that I call The Harvard Lampoon to see if anyone was interested. When I called, it was Zach who picked up the phone, and he was interested. Zach was president of the Lampoon, following in the footsteps of the likes of Conan O’Brien. That was a little hard for Zach, because he’s short and Conan is tall, so the footstep following required some major leaping as well.
Still, as you can see, Zach has a talent that Conan does not: cartooning. In the fourth grade he submitted a cartoon to the then editor, Tina Brown, in which a hunter standing over a dead Donald Duck lying in a pool of blood yells to another hunter, “Hey, Tom, you might want to take a look at this one.” And when asked, for his fifth-grade yearbook, what he wanted to be doing in the year 2010, Zach said he hoped to be a famous cartoonist who has a monkey bodyguard trained in jujitsu.
How naïve that youngster was. Firstly, all monkey bodyguards are trained in tae kwon do, and secondly, even the slightest bit of fame spoils a cartoonist rotten. Look what it did to me.
I hired Zach and by becoming my assistant he, in effect, went to New Yorker Cartoon College. Part of that entailed listening to me babble incessantly about my half-baked, three-quarters baked, and fully baked theories of humor, but much more important for him was reviewing the thousand cartoons that come in to the magazine every week. He saw the work ethic of New Yorker cartoonists firsthand and how high they set the bar for themselves. He immediately bought into the process and started to submit his own batches of cartoons. And he kept at it, week after week. Just like those of Matt and Alex and Paul Noth before him, they showed enough potential to permit a bit of temporary bar lowering to get his first cartoon into the magazine, with this topical mash-up from October 2005:
It wasn’t until five months later that this one appeared:
“Everybody else’s problems are better than mine.”
Funny, in a New Yorker cartoon–ish sort of way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I, of all people, should add, but my hope for Zach was that he would bring something new to the form, develop his own comedic voice and a consistent drawing style to go with it. By 2007, those two elements had gelled.
“Alright, now see what happens when you turn the faucet off.”
“Who let the dining-room set into the liquor cabinet again?”
In the following four years we published, respectively, ten, twenty, thirty-three, and forty-five cartoons by Zach, and he now appears in the magazine almost every week. Zach long ago passed the point where he needs the bar lowered to get into the magazine, and he continues to push himself to go not merely over it, but way over.
“Over, damn you, over!”
When Zach’s time as assistant was over (I usually boot them out after a couple of years, because at that point reviewing all the caption contest entries has put them on the cusp of madness), I doubled down on my luck and reached out to The Harvard Lampoon again. And in came Farley Katz, Zach’s fellow cartoon colleague at the Lampoon. He also got the cartoon college treatment. He remembers that the most significant advice I gave him was on a Post-it note on one of his cartoon batche
s. It read, “Tone it down—your characters all look like they’re on crack.” He did and has been selling cartoons to us ever since. They all still sort of look like they’re on crack,
“Today, class, I’m proud to announce my tenure.”
even this fractalized giraffe:
But in a good way.
Well, I could go on about each wonderful new cartoonist, and how wonderful I was to make them so wonderful (believe me, I could), but at this point I’ll let the new crew speak for themselves in the most appropriate way possible, with some of their best cartoons. Normally, by the power vested in me as cartoon editor, I would pick these, but at this point, I think the master might learn more from the students than the other way around.
“Let’s go, Barney—I guess some people just don’t like dogs.”
“Tell me the truth—have I ever made tea come out of your nose?”
“Et tu, Killbot 9000?”
“If it’s not safe to go in the water and it’s not safe to go in the sun, why did you bring me here?”
“Whoa! That’s a little clingy.”
“For the love of God, is there a doctor in the house?”
“Due to an incident at the Bergen Street station, everything has changed and nothing will ever be the same.”
“Well, the sooner we get all this lead turned into gold, the sooner we can go home.”
“Is it shoot a cold, stab a fever?”
“Slow down, I want to take a peek in Barneys!”
“Seriously, who is it?”
“Hang on, I think I know what we’re doing wrong.”
“I’ll be passing my tape measure over your buttocks, then coming up the inside of your leg. Is that O.K.?”
“It keeps me from looking at my phone every two seconds.”
“Thou shalt not create graven images, Ira. Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. Still looking at you, Ira. Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath. You getting this, Ira?”
“Escher! Get your ass up here.”
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
“You wanted to role-play—I can’t help it if a doctor would be medically obligated to say something about your weight.”
“Put the punster in with the mime.”
“Any clues?”
The fact is that this new generation is showing what it means to be true to the New Yorker cartoon tradition while also changing it, and sometimes even mangling it, but still managing to keep the DNA of the New Yorker cartoon alive and endlessly replicating even as it evolves. When will all of this stop? How about never? Never is good for me.
Acknowledgments
Books don’t get published without publishers, and I’ve been very lucky to have one of the best, Henry Holt and Company. Unfortunately, I never got to meet Mr. Holt, because he passed away in 1926, but, fortunately, a meeting with the successor of his successors, Steve Rubin (and company), resulted in the thumbs-up for this book.
So, many thanks to Steve, his thumb, and the company he keeps, especially editor in chief Gillian Blake, my own personal editor, who deserves a gillion thanks for poring over the cascade of words and images I submitted, helping to turn an inchoate mess into the choate one you’re holding.
Well, that’s all for the thanks part of this—now on to the deep gratitude section. The New Yorker has been my professional home for over half my life. Through it, I’ve met my best friends, done my best work as a cartoonist, and had the privilege of working with the top cartoonists and editors.
First and foremost among the latter is David Remnick, who is able, even with all his very serious responsibilities, to understand and support the very semi-serious business of cartooning. And who, even when we don’t see eye to eye on a cartoon (he’s a galling inch and a quarter taller) will sometimes graciously accede to seeing things my way.
Hey, it doesn’t get much better than that—except, hey, it does, because of my third, best, and, honest to God, last wife, Cory Scott Whittier. Professional homes are all well and good, and there’s none better than The New Yorker, but a real home, to paraphrase Robert Frost, is the place where when you go there, they have to let you in. And Cory always has, even if sometimes requiring ID.
Really, she doesn’t need it. She knows me better than anyone else and, despite that, has always stood by me, out of loyalty and love, but also to be close enough to whack me upside my head, in order to knock sense into it and foolishness out. My “life in cartoons” would just be a joke without her.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Paul Noth/The New Yorker Collection/2012
Sam Gross/The New Yorker Collection/2008
Corey Pandolph/The New Yorker Collection/2012
Victoria Roberts/The New Yorker Collection/2000
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1999
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1990
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1988
Leonard Dove/The New Yorker Collection/1945
Garrett Price/The New Yorker Collection/1956
Warren Miller/The New Yorker Collection/1979
Frank Modell/The New Yorker Collection/1962
Arnie Levin/The New Yorker Collection/1976
Matthew Diffee/The New Yorker Collection/2004
Victoria Roberts/The New Yorker Collection/2001
David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/2000
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1997
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1990
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1991
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/2009
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/2002
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/2005
J. B. Handelsman/The New Yorker Collection/1985
Reprinted with the permission of Syd Hoff Trust
Robert Mankoff/ Unpublished
Robert Mankoff/ Unpublished
Robert Mankoff/ Unpublished
Robert Mankoff/ The Saturday Review of Literature, 1975
Robert Mankoff/ National Lampoon, 1978
The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, originally published in The New Yorker, 1961, Untitled, Ink on paper
Peter Arno/The New Yorker Collection/1940
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1937
John Leech, published in Punch Magazine, 1843
Bernard Partridge, published in Punch Magazine, 1899
Charles Frederick Peters, Life Magazine/1915
Reginald Bathurst Birch, Life Magazine/1918
Gilbert Wilkinson/The New Yorker Collection/1925
Edward Graham/The New Yorker Collection/1927
Carl Rose/The New Yorker Collection/1928
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/2012
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1932
George Price/The New Yorker Collection/1936
Peter Arno/The New Yorker Collection/1941
James Stevenson/The New Yorker Collection/1991
George Booth/The New Yorker Collection/1975
James Stevenson/The New Yorker Collection/1976
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1932
J. B. Handelsman/The New Yorker Collection/1968
Dana Fradon/The New Yorker Collection/1976
William Steig/The New Yorker Collection/1971
The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, originally published in The New Yorker, 1958
The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, originally published in The New Yorker, 1962
The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, originally published in The New Yorker, 1960.
Robert Mankoff/The Saturday Review of Literature, 1976
Robert Mankoff/Elementary: The Cartoonist Did It, Avon Books, 1980
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1933
Robert Mankoff/Urban Bumpkins, St. Martin’s Press, 1984
Robert Mankoff/Urban Bumpkins, St. Martin’s Press, 1984
Robert Mankoff/1984
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1979
Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/1981
George Price/The New Yorker Collection/1939
Charles Saxon/The New Yorker Collection/1969
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1932
James Thurber/The New Yorker Collection/1933
Robert Mankoff/The Saturday Review of Literature, 1975
Robert Mankoff/ The Saturday Review of Literature, 1975