June Update: Being Decent

School is over! But I start my art summer camp job today. 

Thursday was my last day at my high school job, so I had last Friday off, and I was joking to myself that I had a one day summer break. And you know what I did with about six hours of it? Yardwork. My yard was a jungle, and it no longer is. This is what grownups do with their “free” time. 

Last week I celebrated six years of sobriety. 

I started drawing comics when I first was trying to get sober. It was weird because I was drawing autobiographical comics about my life, but I almost never talked about the drinking or the trying-to-quit-drinking going on in my life. I was ashamed and embarrassed and afraid. 

While I wouldn’t say it was a direct correlation, I do think that finally getting sober and staying sober and learning a lot about cleaning up my emotional and mental and spiritual chaos opened up my life in ways that allowed me, with a clear head and heart, to make the decision to fully dive in and try my hand at this gag cartooning thing and set my sights on such a seemingly impossible goal as getting my cartoons in The New Yorker. I got sober, I found something I loved, I buckled down and did it, and I achieved that goal and more. To be honest, if I hadn’t figured this out, if I had just kept drinking, I don’t think I would be around today to be making cartoons. It was getting that bleak. 

I am so incredibly grateful to be sober. I have a program and a community that help me continue to work my recovery and keep myself in check, which allows me to be a decent parent and husband and teacher and cartoonist.

I recently applied to two zine/comic fests I’ve never been to before. Both of them are fairly new. One is called Book//Zine in Atlanta and the other is called Pretty Good Fest in Chicago.

I have yet to hear back if I got accepted to either, but I’m trying to do more of these kinds of festivals. Looked at solely through a financial lens, they are not worth it, I pretty much always spend more than I make, but looked at for the sake of meeting other creative people, getting out of my routine and seeing what other people are up to, visiting other cities, finding new sources of inspiration and excitement, these kind of events are priceless. I always leave feeling so great and having had a blast. Some people take vacation to Disney World or the beach; I’d rather take mine to a comic or zine festival. 

I was excited this past month to start resubmitting to The Times Luxury again. The Times of London’s Luxury section runs a gag cartoon once a week. I guess they had bought a backlog of enough cartoons to last them a while so they had about a six month hiatus on buying cartoons. I love The Times Luxury not only because they have bought a pretty good number of my cartoons, but they also sometimes buy ones that can be a bit darker or more edgy. For example:

They pay pretty well too. They are the third highest paying of the dozen or so magazines I regularly submit to. I realized when I was tallying up my cartoon income from last year for my taxes that I made more money from British magazines than from US magazines. The Times Luxury, Private Eye, and The Oldie buy a pretty good amount of my stuff, but also they all pay decently. I don’t know what it is about my humor that appeals to the Brits. Maybe I should watch more British comedies to try to figure it out.

I subscribe to Michael Maslin’s Inkspill Substack @michaelmaslinsinkspill and he always posts such interesting and insightful things about cartoons and the history of cartoons. In April he wrote about how over the course of his career he has sold seven different cartoons to The New Yorker with the same exact caption: “It’s for you,” and all with the same set up: someone opening a door and the thing at the door humorously connects to the other character in the room. I find this pretty incredible. We talk a lot about recurring tropes in gag cartoons, but those are more about the subject: a Grim Reaper, a desert island, a therapist, but you don’t hear as much about recurring captions. In fact, I would think that in many cases the idea of repeating a caption would even be frowned upon. But why? The same line in different contexts can take on different meanings getting at different jokes from different angles. In Maslin’s case I think it’s an example of his mastery of the form, that he can return to it again and again, each time breathing new life into it. 

I found this so interesting that I decided to use it as an assignment in my Comics class. I had my students create their own gag cartoons using Maslin’s same set up and caption. A few of them had some pretty good results: an army guy with a bomb at the door, a mailman with another mailman at the door handing him a letter, a vampire with a head of garlic and a wooden steak flying at him through the door.

To wrap things up here are a few toons I had published last month. Thanks everybody!