DMA #47: Naked Kickstarters & Bypassing the Print-pocalypse with American Bystander's Michael Gerber

DMA#53: Drinking Your Own Bath Water: A Morning with Rich Sparks

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com [https://www.newyorkcartoons.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] There’s a cartoon early in Rich Sparks’s new book of a man my age, alone in a bath, lifting a spoon to his lips. No setup, no crowd, no scene. Just the act, and a title underneath: “Youp.” Where I’m from, that’s a diagnosis. My uncle Greg taught it to me as a child: “Mate, get a load of this bloke. He drinks his own fucken bath water.” (Australian for arrogant.) First cousin to tall poppy syndrome, that great national project of never letting anyone tout their own success. I opened the book to that page first, and decided the next hour of my morning was spoken for. Which is roughly how the whole conversation went. A book with no thread, which is the whole point… The reason for the visit was Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings [https://amzn.to/4vpA5DX], [https://www.amazon.com/Horseshoes-Tardigrades-other-drawings-Sparks/dp/1954158432] Rich’s new collection, put out by our mutual pal Marty over at The Weekly Humorist [https://humorist.shop/collections/books/products/apple-snider-2026-wall-calendar-by-rich-sparks-america-s-little-brother-returns-lazier-louder-more-lovable-than-ever]. A book of single-panel cartoons is one of the hardest things in the world to assemble, and I say that as someone who has tried. There’s no narrative. No theme. No throughline to hide behind. It’s just a brain, decanted onto a few hundred pages, arranged so a stranger will smile no matter where they crack it open. I got my copy in the mail the other day. I had mail to sort- urgent, adult, responsible-immigrant mail. Instead of opening my Jury Duty letter, I sat down with the book instead and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Morris watched me from the floor with the quiet judgment of a dog who knows the difference between work and joy and resents being excluded from the second. Rich works out of Chicago, has been at it for decades, and turns up pretty much anywhere a cartoon can legally be printed- the New Yorker, Air Mail, the lot. The story goes that he got his start redrawing a Ring bell for service sign on the scale in the produce department of a grocery store, then quietly updating it every week until customers started coming by to see what it said. That’s the whole career in miniature, really. Couldn’t not do it. “Getting a dog right doesn’t mean getting a dog funny.” This is the line I came away with, and I suspect it’ll rattle round my skull for months. (it’s around the 40:47 mark). We got talking about reference, because Rich draws his animals from photos. I thought he knew what a dog looked like. Then I spent months -months!— trying to work out the shape a dog makes when it leaps to catch a ball, only to discover that the real anatomy of a jumping dog is so deranged it looks like a printing error. He personally lands, as you do, somewhere between the truth and the lie. I quoted the late James Stevenson, the New Yorker cartoonist, who said that “Until you draw a picture of something, you are apt to be dead wrong about what it looks like.” And that’s the trade, isn’t it? You think you know your own father’s face until you try to put it on paper and realise you’ve been carrying around a rough sketch your whole life. But here’s the bathos (because there’s always bathos). Even after all that fastidious study of the real, Rich’s actual insight is that accuracy isn’t the job. You can chase the truth of a thing for weeks and still have to abandon it at the last second for the funnier pose. There’s a reality inside the panel, and it is not this one. I think about that with caricature. The likeness lives in the asymmetry- the bit of a face that’s slightly wrong is the bit that’s most them. Same with bodies. Rich said he sees the human form in three dimensions, rotating, and that when genuine symmetry turns up it’s so rare it’s almost shocking to look at. The rest of us are gloriously, correctly lopsided. The algorithm would like to convince you otherwise. The algorithm can drink its own bath water. Here’s the bit where I rattle the tin. These recaps take a while. The interview’s the fun part- the writing-up is me, alone, in the studio, doing the cartoonist’s equivalent of drawing the dog’s back leg forty times until it’s both true and funny. It’s a solitary job, as Rich said. If you’ve read this far, you’re my kind of reader, and I’d love you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s a dollar a week. That’s less than a single bad coffee in this city, and considerably less than a good one. It keeps the lights on, the cheap whiskey in the glass, and the bath water in the bath, where it belongs. The men in the cartoons are all his father. This was the moment the whole hour tilted. I’d been banging on about the glasses -Rich draws this specific flat-topped frame, the kind where you can’t see the eyes, and I’d built an entire theory about Scott McCloud [https://amzn.to/4fXab5Y], and how a reader projects themselves onto a face they can’t quite read. Then he said the men in the drawings are his dad. Or versions of his dad. The glasses, the little moustache, the high-waisted trousers, the bit more hair than a man that age has any right to keep. He’s been drawing his father, over and over, for a career. We didn’t dwell. Cartoonists never do. We pivoted immediately to the fact that he draws nearly everything with a Uniball Vision. Because the ink isn’t waterproof, I sometimes cheat a little wash out of it with a water brush- making it look like I hauled a full watercolour kit to the desk when really I just smudged a pen. The deep cuts, the dick jokes, and Vlad the Employer The book is stuffed with what I can only call cartooning deep cuts. There’s a Leonardo da Muncie, a Charlie Brown gag built on the first Peanuts strip ever published. There’s a podcast hosted by a dog that I would, hand on heart, subscribe to over most of the human-hosted ones currently clogging the feed. And then there’s Vlad. Rich has a Vlad the Impaler in the book, and seeing it sent me straight back to my own- a Vlad the Employer I drew years ago, the warlord interviewing a candidate, captioned “You start Monday!” I went to enormous, faintly insane lengths to get the costuming, jewellery and spear historically correct, because the New Yorker employs fact-checkers and I wasn’t about to be caught out on the haberdashery of a fifteenth-century warlord. The joke is stupid. I knew it was stupid. I drew it purely to please myself and threw it into the batch as filler, fully expecting it to make the good ones look better by comparison. It’s the one Bob Mankoff took one look at and said O.K. [https://jasonchatfield.medium.com/part-3-my-last-day-submitting-cartoons-to-bob-mankoff-c28f926ad701] -which, as anyone who’s submitted a batch knows, is never the one you bet on. You send your bangers and your sacrificial throwaway, and the machine reaches past all of it for the daft one you never meant anyone to see. We also fielded a chat question from Cartoons by Collins [https://open.substack.com/pub/dancollinscartoons] about how on earth Facebook hasn’t banned him, given the, ah, anatomical confidence of certain drawings. Rich’s answer was a masterclass in living with the unknowable: he genuinely doesn’t know whether it’s a buggy AI, a phantom moderation team, or simple cosmic luck, and he’s decided that thinking about it is the surest way to summon it. “I feel like I’m always on the verge of getting in trouble,” he said. I told him that’s a wonderful place to live. I should know. I’m subletting there too. Chickening out at Disneyland The detail I can’t shake: Rich has been to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Ohio State (the site of this year’s Reuben awards [https://nationalcartoonists.com/registration-now-open-80th-reuben-awards-ncs-conference/]). It’s the largest cartoon collection on Earth, the actual Disneyland for people like us, originals sitting in flat files like it’s nothing. And while he was there, he spotted the curator Caitlin McGurk behind a door. A social media friend. Someone who’d have been thrilled to meet him. And he got starstruck and couldn’t bring himself to say hello.

DMA #52: The Patron Saint of NYC Comedy Photos, with Mindy Tucker

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com [https://www.newyorkcartoons.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] When I first moved to New York 12 years ago, I did what every terrified transplant does: I asked other comedians for advice… This was a mistake, because comedians are a bag of cats and no two of them agree on anything. One told me to do every open mic in the city. One told me to do none of them. One told me, with great seriousness, to “find my inner hobgoblin,” which is the kind of thing people say when they have no actual information to give you and would like you to leave them alone please. But there was one piece of advice that came back every single time, from every single person, like a liturgical response… “Go get yourself a Mindy [http://withreservation.com].” Stop using Facebook photos for your headshot, you absolute disgrace, and go get a real one done by Mindy Tucker. So I did. That’s how we met. I schlepped to her studio in Brooklyn, helped her haul lighting gear around Williamsburg in search of a wall that wasn’t a condo yet, sweated through a shirt, and carried the gear back up the stairs again. We did things this way because we couldn’t afford a studio, and back then you could still shoot outside before the entire borough turned into guarded glass. That was twelve years ago. This week, Mindy came on Draw Me Anything, and I finally got to tell a few thousand people what the New York comedy scene has known for two decades: she’s the best there is. Draw Me Anything is a livestream & podcast about artists, comedians, writers, and the people who make things. This newsletter costs less than an IPA in this neighbourhood, which, in my experience, is money well spent either way. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to keep it going… Here’s the thing about Mindy that took me years to understand. She doesn’t just take a good photo. She gets something out of you that nobody else can. Comedians are a nightmare to photograph. We’re always on. We’re cracking wise, busting balls, performing, running a bit, because the bit is a shield and the camera is a threat. Point a lens at a comic and watch them deploy their entire personality as a defence mechanism. Mindy disarms all of it. Her trick, which is not really a trick, is time. She found that comedians needed more time, and that if you gave people time they seemed to calm down and stop being nervous. She gives you a job. She has you help her move a light. And somewhere in the puttering and the “oh wait, stay right there,” the armour comes off, and she catches the actual person underneath. When I told her this, she explained where it comes from, and it’s the best origin story: Her dad was a chaplain. Not a desk chaplain, a sports chaplain. He’d pray with the team before the game, sit through the game, and if a player got hurt, he’d be the one riding in the ambulance, relaying what was happening back to the church. And Mindy looked at me and said, with total clarity: “Basically what I’ve done is I’ve taken what my dad has always done, and I’ve added photos.” It was recently Jim Gaffigan, of all people, who first pointed this out to her. Four years into shooting comedy, he told her: “Your dad’s a preacher*, that’s why you get along with performers, you lived with a performer.” He just read her whole life back to her like a palm. She didn’t fully clock it herself until later. The wax-on-wax-on moment; this realisation that she’d been training for the thing her whole life without knowing it.(*Other famous preachers-turned-comedians include the incredible Sam Kinnison and one-time NYC Regular Justin Smith) A million of us. In a box. Now to the actual reason she came on… Mindy’s launched something called Mindy’s Comedy Archives, and you need to understand the scale of it before you understand why it matters: She has, at last count, over one million photographs. A million. And that number was current as of the day she taped her second and third episodes, so it’s already wrong, and wrong in the upward direction, because she keeps adding to it… I went on a bit of a tear about this on the show, so forgive me, but: there is no real history of New York comedy. There are scattered special reviews, the odd opinion piece in the Times, a Chortle write-up here and there. But there is no cohesive, visual, living document of this absurdly specific art form in this absurdly specific city. Except there is. It’s in Mindy’s hard drives. Last week I had Myq Kaplan on, [http://drawmeanything.com] and we talked about the brutal churn of a comedy career: the bright-eyed arrival, the agent, the manager, the late-night spot, the sitcom, the rollercoaster with no terminus. Myq’s point was that once you realise that’s the career, the constant insane flux, that’s the whole thing. What Mindy has is that flux, frozen, frame by frame. One comedian over an entire career, from their very first nervous headshot all the way through shows and festivals and late-night spots, and you watch them change. Their posture, their costume, their face. They age. They evolve. Nobody else has documented this the way Mindy has. She did it by accident, one shoot at a time, for twenty years. The formatis beautifully simple. A comic comes in and gets handed a box of photos. It starts with the very first photo Mindy ever took of them, and they go in chronological order, telling her as much or as little as they want about what was going on in their career and in the New York comedy scene at the time. The first episode, out this week, is with Rosebud Baker, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hsvctVZKfg&t=40s] and Mindy calls it the blueprint. Rosebud starts in a 2014 group photo, a gaggle of comedians, and by the end they’ve done a Netflix special cover and land on her book cover. “That’s why we live here.” The first episode didn’t go perfectly. The blog post wasn’t up on time. The workflow wasn’t sorted. And Mindy’s attitude toward all of it was the thing I keep turning over. She told Rosebud, essentially: it’s not perfect, can you help me get started?

DMA#51: 'Truths Are Just Jokes That Nobody Laughed At' with Myq Kaplan

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com [https://www.newyorkcartoons.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Let me tell you who Myq Kaplan [https://substack.com/profile/5512319-myq-kaplan] is, because if you’re not already a fan, that changes today. He’s been doing comedy for going on twenty-five years. He has a Comedy Central special. He was a finalist on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzGcO-UGSk]Last Comic Standing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzGcO-UGSk]. He’s been on Comedy Bang Bang and Keith and the Girl more times than I can count. He has two specials on YouTube - AKA and Rini [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uf9i_z-Aw&t=932s] - and a new one he’s just recorded. He runs a Substack called Myq Kaplan's Arty Har-Hars [https://open.substack.com/pub/myqkaplan], which you should subscribe to immediately after this. He is one of the most densely packed laughs-per-minute comedians working anywhere in this city, and I say that as someone who has been watching this scene very closely for fifteen years. He is also the reason I once shot IPA out of my nose at a comedy show on Second Avenue. But we’ll get to that. The first thing you need to know about Myq Kaplan is that his name is, by design, a barrier to entry. “I brought it upon myself, obviously, the spelling of my name,” he told me, almost immediately after we started recording. “There’s a little bit of a barrier to entry. But once you get past, then I feel like there’s a lot of reward.” He then, in the same breath, held up a microphone. “That’s a Myq” he said. I say “by design” because everything about Myq’s comedy is by design - the spelling of his name, the precision of his phrasing, the way a simple prop becomes the punchline to a joke that is also, if you look at it properly, a philosophical position about the rewards of paying attention. Nothing is accidental. The commitment to craft runs so deep that it’s become invisible, which is when craft becomes art. The name story is one I’ve been dining out on since 2014. I was a young, fledgling comedian appearing on a certain popular podcast [https://www.jasonchatfield.com/blog/tag/ykwd], and I was doing my plugs at the end of the show. Bob Kelly was hosting. I was reading names off the lineup for an upcoming show - I think it was the Producers Club - and I arrived at Myq’s name, and I said: “and Meek Kaplan.” The room turned on me. Louis J. Gomez. Dan Soder. Joe List. All of them looking at me with the particular expression that New York comics reserve for someone who has just revealed a catastrophic gap in their knowledge. “You f*****g Australians,” somebody said. “How have you never heard of Myq Kaplan?” They laid into me for twenty minutes. About my accent. About my ignorance. About the basic expectation that someone doing comedy in New York should know who Myq Kaplan is, which is, I’ll grant them, a fair point. And then, having absorbed all of this - having been fully educated and corrected and aware - I subsequently introduced Myq on stage that night as “Meek Kaplan.” Again. Myq received this with extraordinary grace. “Your trauma is my treasure,” he said. But the real first time I encountered Myq Kaplan was not that night. It was earlier - 2011, or thereabouts. I was still coming to New York as a tourist then, once a year, for a month at a time, in the way that people who are going to end up living somewhere do before they commit to actually living there. I was going to as many comedy shows as I could, trying to understand the scene, sheepishly introducing myself to people and then overthinking every conversation afterwards on the subway home. The show was called Kabin. It was on Second Avenue, the back room of a bar. Rebecca Trent booked it. It was, by the general consensus of everyone who was there at the time, the best comic hang in the city. Their fifth anniversary show, I think it was, went from six in the afternoon until five in the morning. 11 hours. I was in that room for most of it. I had a beer in my hand. Sean Donnelly was hosting, or someone like Sean Donnelly. Whoever it was said, with the full weight of insider authority: you are going to love this next guy. I took a sip. Myq Kaplan walked on stage and said something. I genuinely do not know what it was. I have never known. What I know is that the beer - an IPA, specifically, which made the whole thing considerably worse - travelled at velocity through my nasal cavity and exited my face in a direction that beer is not supposed to exit. My eyes were streaming from the carbonation. I was making sounds that grown adults should not make in public. Eight minutes later, Myq left the stage, and I was a different person. It is a trauma-memory. The kind that’s vivid, not because it was bad, but because it was so involuntary. The laugh didn’t ask my permission. “That’s very, very kind, very thoughtful for you to share,” Myq said when I told him this story on the podcast. “Better than a spit take. Your trauma is my treasure.” If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber [http://www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe](only $1 per week)

DMA #47: Naked Kickstarters & Bypassing the Print-pocalypse with American Bystander's Michael Gerber

“You cannot write a line of code that replaces the invisible labour, the thousands of terrible rough sketches, and the deeply human derangement required to make a truly great cartoon.” If you try to launch a print humor magazine in the 21st century, most financial advisors will tell you to just set your money on fire instead; it’s faster, it requires less paperwork, and it keeps you warmer in the winter. We live in the era of the digital churn. We live in an ecosystem where corporate media conglomerates are continuously gutting their editorial staff, pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to AI slop, and generally treating the written word and the drawn cartoon as disposable ephemera. The conventional wisdom is that print is dead… But if you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you know I am obsessed with the messy, unglamorous back-end of making a living as an artist. I love pulling back the curtain on the creatives who look at the “churn,” laugh, and figure out how to keep the lights on without selling their souls to the algorithm. This week on Draw Me Anything, I brought in a guy who looked at a sinking ship and decided to build his own lifeboat. I was thrilled to host the brilliant Michael Gerber [https://substack.com/profile/6381031-michael-gerber]. Michael is the publisher, editor, and mastermind behind The American Bystander, a publication that Newsweek literally called “the last great humor magazine.” During the stream, we dug into exactly how you resurrect a print humor magazine in the 21st century without setting mountains of corporate cash on fire. It is a story of grit, absurd luck, and a publishing model that bypasses the corporate overlords entirely. But before we get to the Chinese oligarchs and the naked Kickstarter launch, we have to go back to a very small room in the One World Trade Center. The Everest of Cartooning and the Mouse in the Car My introduction to The American Bystander didn’t happen on a newsstand. It happened in the absolute epicenter of the New York cartooning world. It was late 2014, maybe early 2015. I was a relatively new immigrant to America, still trying to figure out the brutal mechanics of the New York publishing scene. To my brain, the ultimate peak of the industry -the absolute Everest of cartooning- was getting into MAD Magazine and getting into The New Yorker. Those were the twin pillars of the comedy art world. Everything else was just scenery. Related Reading: I was sitting at The New Yorker in the cartoon lounge. Now, let’s be honest about the cartoon lounge at that time: it wasn’t really a “lounge” anymore. It was just a small room off to the side from where cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s office was located. But the physical space didn’t matter, because of who was in it. The legendary Sam Gross was sitting in the room. He was positioned right below a giant framed picture of his absolute classic cartoon—the one with the mouse driving the wind-up car. If you’re a cartoonist, sitting in a room with Sam Gross was like a guitarist sitting in a room with Keith Richards. Sam was holding a copy of a magazine I had never seen before. “Kid, have you heard of this magazine?” he asked me. I looked at the cover. The unmistakable, beautiful line work of Arnie Roth stared back at me. It was Issue Number Six. “I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t heard of it,” I admitted. Sam started explaining what it was, and as he flipped through the pages to show me the cartoons, my jaw hit the floor. I was looking at a murderers’ row of comedy art. “This is everyone I love,” I remember thinking. “These are all my favorite cartoonists in here. What the hell? How long has this thing been around?” Sam saw the absolute shock on my face. “Yeah, right?” he smiled. “You should submit to this.” Naturally, the moment he said that, the impostor syndrome kicked in with the force of a freight train. I looked at the names on the pages. I don’t belong in here, my brain screamed. This is ridiculous. These are giants in here. I don’t belong in here. I was so completely enamored with this magazine, yet I had absolutely no idea it even existed. When I told this story to Michael on the stream, he just laughed. “Well, that’s kind of the story of the business right there,” he said. “Everybody loves it. Very few people know about it. We’re always trying to figure out how to get more people to know about it.” Fast forward to today, and I am deeply proud to not only be a contributor to The Bystander, but to have hosted its “re-founder” to talk about exactly how this impossible publication came to exist. The Trifecta and the Pitch To understand The American Bystander, you have to understand the pedigree of the people who originally conceived it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe [https://www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

DMA#50: Aussies in New York Getting Sandwiches with Ben Gollan

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com [https://www.newyorkcartoons.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] My drawing board is currently covered in a mix of art supplies and aggressively pungent deli meats. I’ve got a puddle of Higgins ink dangerously close to a towering pastrami on rye, and my entire apartment smells of mustard. Outside my window, a sanitation truck is violently reversing down 9th Avenue. The floorboards are vibrating. On my monitor, looking entirely too relaxed for a man navigating the crazy New York City culinary scene, sits Ben Gollan, a fellow Aussie expat making a go of it in the big smoke. If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber [http://www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe](only $1 per week) Ben’s the undisputed Sandwich Tour King of New York. He runs a wildly successful walking tour company called ‘A Man and His Sandwich’, where he guides people through the absolute best, most artery-clogging delis in the five boroughs. But the thing that always short-circuits my brain about Ben isn’t his encyclopaedic knowledge of cured meats. It’s his backstory. It’s always deeply comforting to talk to another expat. We spent a significant portion of the hour just being two Australians with thick accents, complaining loudly about the structural inefficiencies of New York City while simultaneously admitting we’d never live anywhere else. We got into the gritty reality of the New York hustle. If you’re an Aussie expat, you know the exact cultural whiplash we’re talking about. Back home, we have this insidious thing called the tall poppy syndrome. If you try something outside the box, people immediately try to cut you down. Ben mentioned that when he goes back to Australia and tells people he runs sandwich tours, they laugh and ask what his real job is. But here in New York? People look at him and say, “That’s a great idea, I bet you’re the best.” The city runs on that delusional, infectious encouragement. It’s the only place where a hungover, out-of-work chef from South Africa can stare at leftover Indian paratha bread and some banh mi scraps in his fridge, accidentally invent a pulled-pork paratha taco, and suddenly end up running three wildly lucrative storefronts. (That’s the true story of Goa Taco [https://www.thrillist.com/eat/new-york/gao-taco-nyc-paratha-tacos], by the way. A legendary Lower East Side staple born entirely out of desperation and a hangover). As I mentioned, Ben’s a fellow expat Australian. Back in Sydney, he was a crisply dressed corporate lawyer working for the government. He traded the courtroom for the chaotic, unforgiving streets of New York back in 2016, all to support his wife’s career. Somewhere along the line, a single pastrami sandwich at a now-defunct East Village deli completely derailed his professional trajectory. He ate the sandwich, had a culinary epiphany, and decided he was going to dedicate his life to the space between two pieces of bread. There’s something deeply terrifying about abandoning a stable, lucrative law career to yell about sandwiches on a Brooklyn sidewalk. But it’s the kind of unhinged creative pivot I completely admire... During our Draw Me Anything session, I set myself the absurd task of drawing a photorealistic pastrami sandwich while we talked. I quickly realised that drawing bread’s a nightmare. Bread’s just a chaotic sponge. You try to capture the crust with pilot pen, and it just looks like a diseased rock. Ben’s got this incredible, magnetic energy. You can see exactly why his tours are perpetually sold out. The live chat was losing its collective mind over his deli recommendations. You could feel the audience getting hungry through the screen…