Two of my recent New Yorker cartoons, start to finish, in GIF form. Separated by pictures of otters, so it’s not so visually confusing.
Two of my recent New Yorker cartoons, start to finish, in GIF form. Separated by pictures of otters, so it’s not so visually confusing.
Filed under Cartoons
If you’ve never visited Incidental Comics, the blog from cartoonist Grant Snider (who is frequently featured in the NY Times Book Review), you should. His short-form narrative comics are among the most satisfying I’ve ever read. They are frequently very meta: comics about comics, or about the process of writing, or drawing, or creativity in general. His drawings are effectively simple and I love his use of color, which is artful and often symbolic. And the comics themselves are playful, insightful, and read like poetry. Since I’m working on a picture book of my own, I thought it would be a good time to repost one of my favorites from his site here. Point taken, Grant!
Filed under Art, Cartoons, Children's book
Cash For Your Warhol and I thought this sign needed a little rearranging. Just a little. A car load? Detergent? Get it?
Filed under Found objects, street art, Uncategorized
I went to Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time last week. It was definitely fun to get an eyeful of the Warhols and Picassos that you’ll probably never see otherwise, because they’re essentially moving from one private collection to another. But, since I’m not really in the market to buy a $20M Jeff Koons, I was less interested in that big convention center hoopla (I did an “intentionally poorly taken iPhone photo” review of that exhibit over at Curator Magazine). Luckily, there are tons of other things going on during Basel, and there’s something for everybody, even in loo options, as evidenced by these:
Also during Basel week there are incredible art fairs showcasing lots of other up-and-coming artists, one-off installations like FAILE & Bast’s vintage video game arcade, memorable parties like this one, and the orgy of street art going on in the Wynwood area.
I’m guessing that Wynwood has the highest concentration of street art in the country – even more than Brooklyn – and click here to continue
Filed under Art, events, street art
You might think my cartoon in this week‘s New Yorker is a copyediting joke to appeal to the punctuation police, the nerds who are always getting upset about these things. That view is dangerous, because it overlooks the fact that punctuation can be objectively bad. They get away with it, because most of the time they’re so small that we don’t notice what they’re really doing. But if you are able to zoom in on your screen or with a pair of magnifying glasse’s ( <see what I mean? Stupid apostrophe inserted himself in there when i wasn’t looking) you will often be shocked at how horrible apostrophes really are:
And it’s not just apostrophes. Quotation marks can be just as repellent:
Or, as T.S. Eliot wrote:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a misplaced semicolon;
Filed under Cartoons
The last decade has not been a kind one for illustrators who prefer hand drawing. With the obvious exception of New Yorker covers, illustrations in print and digital media have often been pushed out in favor of infographics, photographs, or various things you could just put under the category of Things That Are Not Illustrations.
The world of criminal justice still needs artists, though. We’ve still got to have people who can quickly render a mugshot of a suspect or sketch out a courtroom scene. This has always been fascinating to me: artists doing the work of the law. I don’t imagine the 21st century artistic temperament being a great fit for this field. I mean, who are the people who are drawn to doing this kind of art for a living? (I used to draw on gravestones for a living, so I can ask these questions.) I look forward to news coverage of courtroom events because it’s the one time when we get to see real live art, and it’s not always pretty. Have you ever looked at courtroom art? There is a good sampling here. Some is great and some is outright terrible. A lot of it is what I’d call “fittingly uncomfortable.”
Once, in my college newspaper, I used a real police sketch in a cartoon. The face of this breaker-and-enterer was photocopied and plastered all over campus, so it was instantly recognizable to everybody. I had him breaking and entering into my cartoon panel. I probably didn’t have any other good ideas that week. >
I’ve tried a few times to publish a cartoon that captures the awkwardness and/or absurdity of an artist in the courtroom. There’s this one from a few years ago, which is kinda stupid (and is too similar to this one which I already had published and which I like a whole lot better):
And more recently this, which misses the mark:
But in the cartoon for for this week’s issue I was more on target, although you can see that my original caption was different. The Zimmerman verdict had been handed down the week that I was drawing this, and the experience of people trying to make sense of the trial helped give me the language for the caption that seemed more appropriate.
So this is the one that finally made the cut. And in case you’re wondering, yes: the pineapple is currently in the witness protection program.
Filed under Cartoons, Graphic storytelling, New yorker
My friend recently told me I had too many apps on my phone. Maybe, I said, but no harm in that. If you use it, even just once or twice, you might as well keep an application on there, right?
But there’s a word for it, he said, which is “overapplicated.” It means you’ve got too many for your own good. I disputed this fact, but he doubled down on me, saying that no, I was pretty much a textbook version of it. “You’re so effing overapplicated it’s not even funny,” were his exact words.
Then I started to read the icons on my phone and I said whaddya know? Guilty as charged, man, Guilty. As. Charged.
Filed under Found objects, Photos