My Process for Submitting Cartoons to the New Yorker

Then and Now

I often get asked about the process of submitting cartoons to the New Yorker. So, I thought I might write it out for you to enjoy here.

There’s a very slim chance you may have already read my 3-part account of my first time submitting cartoons to the New Yorker, eventually resulting in my first sale in 2017. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Part of this process is in there, but the part I’ll cover today is the very beginning of the process right through to the very end.

When I first wrote this process out below, it was 2020, and the New Yorker was still admitting people into the building to meet with the Cartoon Editor every Tuesday. I would go in person to sit with the editor and get real-time feedback. These days, there is no longer any in-person review of batches, and cartoonists don’t go to the magazine in person, but the bones of my process are largely unchanged. I’ll write more about this in the footnotes.

With that out of the way, here is my very specific 10-step process for submitting cartoons to the New Yorker, originally published in January 2020:

1. The ideas stage.

This is arguably the most important stage of the entire process. (Apart from the part where you get to pay your rent on time.) The ideas stage is an elusive, bizarre process whereby you somehow generate a number of ideas that might make a good cartoon, seemingly out of thin air.

The truth is, much like finding your soulmate, they don’t appear when you’re looking for them. They pop up in the moment between swiping your Metcard and getting to the bottom of the stairs as the F-train is arriving. (And you’d better have a notepad ready when it falls outta your head.) More often, they pop into your head somewhere between the moment you’re washing your hair and rinsing out the conditioner. So, you’d better have some Aquanotes ready when that joke about a praying mantis at a singles bar bubbles up.

I write tags/captions, concepts, draw compositions, facial expressions— whatever the idea needs to get it going and scribble it down with wrinkly fingers. My shower wall often looks like this in the morning.

(Thanks to Anthony LeDonne for the Aquanotes recommendation)

2. The idea-development stage.

This stage varies wildly from cartoonist to cartoonist. I personally like to work on my ideas throughout the week alone, and then if there’s anything I can’t figure out on my own, I bring it to my writing partner, Scott, for a writers’ meeting. He always has great ideas, too, so we mull them over and try and punch them up before pitching them.

We used to just meet at a pub and do this on a Monday night, but one day, Scott had the bright idea of turning the meeting into a podcast. I told him it was a terrible idea. “Nobody wants to listen to the ins and outs of two idiots dissecting the frog for an hour every week. It’s a visual medium!”

I was wrong. Very, very wrong, in fact. The podcast now has thousands of listeners. Needless to say, we walk out of the podcast with a batch of ideas to pitch to the editor and agonise over for the ensuing week.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE

Once I have the ideas in sort of ‘pitchable’ form, I go back and agonise over the wording, the punctuation, the execution and, of course, the drawing.

3. The ‘agonising and crying into your drink’ stage

Once I’ve essentially muddled through a few different executions, I sit at my desk with pencil and coffee scotch, and try to draw up the batch of ideas. It can be excruciating when something isn’t flying off the page, jiving, hitting the mark , working.

4. The pencils stage.

The pencils are done using a regular old pacer-style click pencil that you can pick up at your local CVS (or steal from a co-worker). I’ll often erase a facial expression to get it just right, or sketch out a few poses on a separate sheet of paper to try and get the right position.

Sidenote: Someone whose work I really admire for pose is Will McPhail. He McSucceeds to nail every single pose in his cartoons to illustrate the expressions perfectly.

This particular idea is one Scott pitched on the podcast — in fact if I recall, it was Scott’s OSPOTW* for that week. (*Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-week®, in which, if the idea gets sold and runs, I have to take Scott to Outback Steakhouse for a steak and martini dinner, to my chagrin. (I fucking hate Outback Steakhouse.)

5. The inking stage.

Once the pencils have left me with only a patch of hair on the left side of my scalp, I move on to the ‘inking’ stage.

There are two kinds of inking stages in the life of a cartoon— one is for the ‘rough’ that is pitched to the magazine. And the other is for the ‘final’ or ‘finishes’. The rough is the basic idea of the cartoon, drawn to the execution level that makes it clear what the cartoon would look like. Once in a while, it’s worth just submitting a finish to give as clear an idea as possible. This isn’t always practical, but most cartoons I’ve sold to the New Yorker were from submitting finished gags.

For the inks on this one, I used a Uniball vision fine, along with a Japanese Kuretake Fude Brush Pen in Retail Package, Fudegokochi, Fine Point (LS4-10S). For the chess pieces, I used a super-fine brush pen I found in an art shop in Paris (ooer) called Magasin Sennelier. I have no idea what it’s called.

Depending on the cartoon, I may use a lightbox (pictured above) for the inking stage. For this one I did a combination of re-penciling from a lightbox of the first pencils (oof) and inking over the lightbox the regular way. This mini LED USB-powered lightbox was from the devil Amazon.

6. The erasing pencils, scanning & clean-up stage

Once the inks are pretty much done, I let them dry properly before erasing pencil lines and adding any final details. For this particular one, I wanted to mimic a chess game my friend Ethan and I had just played in Madison Square Park that afternoon, where he whipped the pants off me in under 10 minutes. I changed just a few of the pieces just to screw with him when he sees it in print.

I scan the piece using one of two methods, depending on the level of detail in the cartoon. If it’s pretty basic, I use “Adobe Scan” on my smartphone. If it’s a bit more detailed like this one, I use my glass flatbed scanner unit on my printer and upload it to Photoshop for…

7: Wash and Finishes stage

Depending on the cartoon (and the amount of time I have to turn it in) I will either use a hand-made watercolour wash (below) or a digital wash in Photoshop, using a Wacom tablet. I have pretty much replicated my ‘by hand’ tools in my Photoshop brush presets, which helps keep things looking consistent. (Note: Premium subscribers have access to these brushes when they upgrade to paid)

Stage 7 Addendum: Digital Finishes

For this one, I used the Cintiq Pro 16” (my review here) to do the final washes and touch-ups on the cartoon at 600dpi, while watching Seinfeld in the corner to calm my shaky nerves. Also pictured: Me wearing a glove that stops me sweating all over the screen.

Here are the various stages the cartoon goes through once scanned in:

I add the caption last, which saves me from agonizing over it too much while I’m drawing. I already agonised in Stage 3. Stage 6 is too late for that malarkey.

Then it’s time to print it out, email a PDF of the batch to the cartoon editor, call an Uber and crawl down the FDR to pitch the cartoon in person.

Some days if I’m organised, I take the subway down to the World Trade Center stop and walk through the Oculus to calm my nerves… then I come to remember it’s a shopping mall and my anxiety returns.

The New Yorker moved from 4 Times Square downtown to the new World Trade Center in 2015, along with Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired, and a slew of other Condé Nast mastheads. It’s certainly more pointy.

8. The Pitching to the Cartoon Editor stage

I check in with security at the desk, then get a pass to zip through 38 floors in record time whilst trying to pretend to be comfortable that the numbers are on the outside of the elevator.

This is also the only other time we get to bump into other New Yorker cartoonists and trade anxieties and air our kvechables. We don’t have permanent passes, so we often have to wait at the glass doors for someone to walk past and let us in before we can get to the sign-in list. Sometimes it can take a while. Sometimes smart people like Sofia Warren (above) call someone’s extension which I should totally learn how to do.

We then round the corner to the cartoon department and put our names on the sign-up list. This one is from the last day of the previous cartoon editor. It’s a veritable who’s who of who’s here.

The Cartoon Editor sees cartoonists in the order of the list.

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately some of these cartoonists are no longer with us.

While we wait our turn, the cartoonists sit in the makeshift Cartoon Lounge (whatever board room is free) and talk shop, or avoid eye contact. I make a habit of going and getting coffee to see what books might be available in the kitchen… also, to wake me up before I have to speak to humans.

I miss Sam teaching us all how it’s done. Read about him here.

I always dip into the side office and pick up that week’s issue, flip to the contents page and see if anything of mine ran in that issue (yes, that is how we find out - at the same time as you do) and, if not, enjoy what else made it into those elusive 16 slots for cartoons.

One morning I flipped open to see my name in print, pitching a terrible joke to Gus Van Sant (name drop complete) and making a general tit of myself. Nothing unusual, really.

While I wait, I like to re-order my batch in the vain hope that it’ll make some kind of difference whether I’ll sell something this week. I try to make it like a W-shape, like a comedy set: open strong, dip a bit, hit them in the middle with something big, then dip right before the big closer. I have absolutely no evidence that this does anything at all, but I insist on doing it every week.