This morning my wife Tammy tried, with subtlety, to convince me not to go in the New Yorker today with the cartoons I just showed her. I worked all night long drawing them, 10 cartoons from a list of about 20 punch-lines I had previously thought up during the week. Some of the jokes like "Costume Designer's Cut" with a movie poster for Die Hard With Petticoats above went over like lead weight. She was just trying to protect me from what she saw was an obviously crash-and-burn scenario.
By the time I got the offices I convinced myself only to show the three I was confidant about ("What Jesus Would Have Done," "Quasimodo's Thought Process" while playing tennis, and a third equally funny (unfunny?) one I can't remember). The first person I ran into was cartoonist Sam Gross who asked to take a look (this would be reason alone to get there early in hopes of running into him for feedback - no one is better). I told me not to show "What Jesus Would Have Done" with the large banana being helicoptered to King Kong – "It's makes no sense...what does Christ have to do with the big monkey?" Well, not much. So I took it out, but realized I couldn't walk in with only three or four cartoons (you're supposed to have ten) so I went in with nine. Bob Mankoff had a long talk with me and said he felt the cartoons looked good and kept all but the aforementioned three I was going to initially show. Go figure.
We traded books and signed each others and now I wait for a phone call that they'll buy one of them hopefully.
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1 comment:
Sam Gross is, without question, a living cartoon legend but that doesn't mean he's up on the latest, coolest happenings in the cartoon world. Obviously he is unaware of the whole Jesus/Monkey genre.
If it's not too late, maybe turn it into a more topical cartoon. Instead of King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building, make it a giant Pope Benedict.
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