February update: Salving the Wound

It’s been tough trying to maintain a reasonable state of mind given the barrage of cruelties and insanity from Trump and his rich and mean friends. When Musk did that Nazi salute I was like, “OK, that was too much.” I felt like I needed to do something to withdraw from the horror of what’s happening in our country. I feel pretty helpless and like there’s not much I can do to fight or change it, so I’ve been thinking perhaps the better solution is to just kind of hunker down. I stepped away from Instagram for a couple days thinking I didn’t want to support that fascist brown-noser Zuckerberg anymore, but after weighing the pros and cons in some discussions with other cartoonists and friends, I decided to get back on it. It functions as an easily accessible portfolio of my work, it’s a fairly successful way of getting my work seen by lots of people who wouldn’t otherwise see it, and it keeps me up-to-date with what all the other cartoonists out there are doing. It may be owned by a dude who kisses the ass of Nazis and fascists, but if I’m trying to be an active and relevant cartoonist it seems like for now it’s the place to be even though it means I’m compromising my values. Is it even possible to live in this sad world without compromising your values? 

No sales to the New Yorker last month, but the wound was salved by having my cartoons in some other places: The Oldie, Woman’s World, Weekly Humorist, and American Legion. I also had one of my cartoons grace the cover of Funny Times, which was pretty awesome, and the Emily Dickinson museum’s Instagram account posted one of my Emily Dickinson cartoons and it got like 9000 likes!

It’s always fun to see my cartoons in print. Some magazines, American Legion for example, mail a complementary copy when they run one of my cartoons, so that’s always fun to get in the mail. Woman’s World doesn’t send a copy, but it’s always fun to try to track it down in the wild at a grocery or drugstore. One time I said to the checkout guy, “I drew this cartoon,” and he looked at me with a completely blank face and just kept checking me out. I got an email that they’re running another one of mine soon, so I’ll be checking the stores over the next couple weeks.

This month’s Antigravity cartoon is a spoof on the New Orleans paper, the Times Picayune. For those who don’t live here, instead of actually helping the unhoused population of New Orleans, the governor forcefully removed them from the area around the Super Bowl to an absurdly expensive “transitional center“ which basically seems like a warehouse from what I can tell. The city spent its money, instead of helping unhoused residents, on installing fancy, colorful LED lights on the bridge to make it look cute for the Super Bowl. 

I submitted maybe 5 or 10 Daily cartoon ideas to the New Yorker last month, and all were rejected. It was kind of a slow month for New Yorker submissions. They had two weeks off where they didn’t take submissions, so instead of the usual 4 batches per month, we only submitted two batches. The nice thing about that is I’m still drawing about a cartoon a day, so I can build up my bank of cartoons for submitting in the future when life gets busy. But when the New Yorker has a week of no submissions, it slows down my submissions to all the other places too, because the rejects from the New Yorker then get submitted to the next magazine and those rejects get submitted to the next magazine and on and on, so if there’s a week off with the New Yorker, then I don’t have enough the next week to submit down the line. I just kind of want to submit as many cartoons to as many places as possible every week, but I need to just be OK with some weeks being a little slower than others.

Last month I talked about working up a batch of cartoons specifically for the caption contest. I submitted those and… crickets. They were rejected. Disappointing, but those are the breaks in this dog eat dog cartooning biz. I guess I need to look at them now and see if I can come up with my own captions for them and resubmit them, or think about if I want to run my own caption contest or something. I’m including one here. Any ideas?