Stray Shots

The camera application which I prefer to use on my iPhone is different than the built-in camera. It’s one in which you touch any part of the screen to take a picture instead of a single “shutter” button. It’s fine, except that it also means that in handling the camera – switching between hands, taking it in and out of my pocket, shoving it in my armpit as I fumble through my bag looking for something – the screen gets touched a lot. I think half of my pictures are of the accidental, oh-crap-I-thought–the-camera-was-off variety. But you know what? Some of them actually look kind of cool, especially when you gallery them. So I’m committing to this. If you need a wedding photographer and you don’t care if the pictures look like arbitrary screenshots from The Bourne Ultimatum, feel free to make me an offer.

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In the Money (issue)

Judging by my reader mail, nobody really has any interest in getting in touch with me. But if they did, I’m guessing they’d want to see another one of those from-the-sketch-to-the-pages-of-the-New-Yorker-magazine things that I did a while back. So here goes.

A while back, while casually caffeinating myself, I was trying to think of silly ideas about carpooling, and I scrawled something down which I could barely read:

The joke wasn’t about saving money on a work commute, which is dumb, but about saving money on a midlife crisis, which is obviously hilarious, because you’re supposed to go all-out on those things, according to the rules of a midlife crisis (which, because of increasing longevity, now happens at around age 75). So I decided it was good enough to submit to the New Yorker, and they liked it.

Notice how the “Jump in, Stan” is unnecessary, and I reworded the caption so that it was less clunky. The car, however, was a definite clunker. You’re not having a midlife crisis in that car. You’re having a takeout Sonic cheeseburger. I had drawn an economy rental vehicle. So I had to sex up the car a bit when I drew it for the magazine so that the joke was actually believable. Here’s the preliminary sketch:

And then I went all woodcut on it, which is the way you see it in this week’s Money Issue:

And once it’s in print, the rest of it, as I wrote in a recent post, goes like this. Peace out.