King Kaption

Early magazine cartoons came in two basic forms: Sight gags, which had no caption, and cartoons which had speech balloons. Sometimes a title would be also be added. The speech balloons had long stems which would lead from the mouth of the speaker to the balloon, which contained the words spoken by that character. There were often many balloons, one or more from each of several characters speaking in the picture. After a while the balloons began to disappear from cartoons. The words in them, maybe having nowhere else to go, drifted down to the bottom of the panel. The multiple conversations began to disappear in favor of only one or two speakers. (It was hard to tell who was saying what without the balloons). Eventually, the second speaker was pretty much eliminated, too, leaving us with the now familiar solo speaker.

This was the case for many years, although some of us still did and still do wordless or titled cartoons and combinations of the two. Every once in a while the balloons show up again, too, but the captioned cartoon is pretty much the mainstay.

At one time the drawing and the caption were done by separate people. There were gag-writers everywhere, sending their stuff out to standup comics, editors, and cartoonists. That began to change, probably in the 60s and 70s. When I started, I fell in with a bunch of artists who, like myself, all wrote our own stuff.

A few years later, along came the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. As we all know it became spectacularly successful. Who knew there were all those frustrated gag-writers out there? In the process it also had a beneficial effect on cartooning in general, bringing more attention to our work and allowing readers to participate in the creative process, while occasionally sparing the cartoonists the arduous task of coming up with captions of their own.

From My Recipe File…

The other day while I was drawing up ideas, I took a break and went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. While I was waiting for the coffee-maker to finish it’s work, I happened to notice an old recipe file there on the counter and began to thumb through it. Here are some of the things I found:

1st OK Stories

Here are some responses to my request for First OK stories, along with some self-portraits. Not surprisingly, the stories have some similarities. I also notice some differences: For instance, in Gahan Wilson’s description, the anteroom at the old New Yorker offices had a different color scheme than it did in my story and the receptionist sat behind a Wisonesque barred window instead of a glass one. Interesting how differently we all see and remember things.

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Peter Mueller

Despite the fact that I had sold lots of cartoons to many papers and magazines over the years, I waited a long time before sending stuff to The New Yorker, prevented, I think, by a peculiar form of cartoonist stage fright. I would sit down, purposefully intent on working up a batch of New Yorker ideas, and then immediately go blank. Eventually, however, I put together what I believed to be a proper group of drawings to submit, but only after after destroying enough paper to re-forest a suburb in Amazonia.

I courageously mailed the envelope to Lee Lorenz, who promptly returned it along with a signed rejection note. Signed! That the note was signed meant that he had actually looked at the drawings, and that was all the encouragement I needed. So I dug in for the long haul and sent another hundred or so batches, first to Lorenz and later to Bob, and in August of 1998 Emily called with my first OK.

That’s when one illness ended and another began. I mean, of course it was an earthshaking, mind-altering life-moment and all that to have a cartoon accepted by The New Yorker, but with it came the unalterable truth that if one CAN sell a cartoon to the New Yorker, one MUST sell ANOTHER. And many long, bitter months went by before I sold a second cartoon, thereby validating my validation. You can see where this all leads.

I believe I have sold another fifty or so to the magazine since my first OK, and for me, as well as many other cartoonists, happiness is usually a fleeting, evanescent thing, like a favorite new sock or a fresh pile of gold bars. I still do the frantic little happy-dance when Farley calls on a Thursday afternoon, though, and I still chase the cats around the house after I’m off the phone with him, but now it takes less time for me to settle down and get back to the business of destroying more paper.

David Sipress:

My first sale to the NYer came in the form of a fax from Emily Vortruba. Needless to say, after twenty-five years of submitting, I was stunned and amazed. After a call to Emily to confirm that it wasn’t a mistake or a dream or a joke, my wife and I went out to celebrate. The next day I went to work on the finish. After several hours of failed attempts to do the perfect drawing, I realized that my original rough was the best I was ever going to do, and I sent it in.

This was in October–October 16, 1997, to be exact. From then on, like an idiot, I opened the magazine expecting to see my cartoon. As the weeks and months went by, I became more and more convinced it had all been a mistake or dream or a joke. Some of my friends began to suspect that I’d made the whole thing up. Then, in July, 1998, my cartoon finally appeared. I was overjoyed. I also realized at that moment that being a New Yorker cartoonist was going to involve an endless, ever-changing series of exquisite tortures.

On the other hand, every time I gaze at my framed, very faded 1997 fax from Emily Vortruba, I remember how great it was to sell that first one, and remind myself that it’s still a thrill every time I get an ok.

Carolita Johnson:

I used to work for a photographer who worked with TNY, and I’d always have to call TNY to try to wangle a higher budget (or at least coffee money for the client). Once you’ve dealt with a magazine at that level, the awe passes, and I wasn’t particularly full of trepidation when I began submitting. I totally and calmly doubted I’d sell, and was just of the opinion that it wouldn’t hurt me to meet a deadline once a week while I got my drawing skills back up to par after years of inactivity.

It was almost too soon for me when they bought a few cartoons — the first six cartoons they bought are in a totally different style.
(They have not run.). It wasn’t till I changed my style that I
started having cartoons run in the magazine. And for that I was
grateful, because I wasn’t happy with my drawing yet at the time. I was afraid I’d be stuck with that style forever. I was actually more thrilled with the first published cartoon than the first sale. Nobody believed me when I told them I sold one, till they saw a published cartoon, anyway!

Erik Hilgerdt:

I came to cartooning late. I remember very clearly coming home around 7 pm, hearing my phone while I fumbled with the key. I’d been submitting weekly for two months, while working as a theatrical set carpenter, and coming in early that Thursday, because of a power failure on the site. I knew about the odds and knew tenacity would be half the battle. The rejections didn’t bother me; I’d already determined I’d submit for a year, before stopping if nothing happened. To avoid being bummed out by camparisons that might lessen my resolve I stopped looking at the magazine a couple of months before submitting a first batch. And I still impose a lot of resolve and discipline on my work habits, although I’m a lot more accepting of my own limitations and my own way of seeing things.

I’m still only an occasional cartoonist in the NY’er, still a ten a week submitter, and still tidkled by that first OK call.

Kim Warp:

I had just started drawing cartoons again after a decade or so of doing other things and had sent a couple batches to the NYer as part of my practice of getting back into the discipline of it all. I was driving to Dairy Queen with the kids and checked my messages from the car and there was a message from Emily V
otruba. She said she was the assistant cartoon editor from the New Yorker and she’d like to talk to me about my cartoons. I thought it was a cartoonist friend of mine playing a joke on me, or if it was really the New Yorker that maybe they wanted to buy a gag for a regular or something. I called the number when I got home and Emily told me that they wanted to buy TWO of my cartoons. I actually called my friend after we hung up to make sure it wasn’t a cruel cruel joke, even though I knew that only the New Yorker knew which cartoons I had sent in. The paranoia has not lessened since.

Tom Cheney:

My first contact at the NYer took place in 1976. One of my roughs was purchased solely for its idea which was then given to Charles Addams to produce as a finish for publication. After that, several more of my roughs were purchased for Charles Addams over the next couple of years. Finally, in 1978, an envelope bearing the NYer logo appeared in my mailbox, and in it was a request for a finished drawing. I had done it. I had become a New Yorker cartoonist. It was like getting my MBA in cartooning. Wisely, Lee had selected a drawing that he was sure I could handle with my fledgling drawing style. It depicted a multi-segmented Caterpillar climbing up a steep hill, with a thought balloon over his head showing him as being only one segment long. Strangely, the idea arrived while I was changing the oil in my car. I still haven’t found that six degrees of separation between caterpillars and oil filter wrenches.

Liza Donnelly

In 1979, I had been submitting to the magazine for about a year. Back then, us newcomers who lived in town would bring our precious manila envelope to the 20th floor of the old funky building and hand it over to the barely-alive receptionist through the little glass slot in the window.of her cubicle (it was always a woman, I think I remember). She would hand back your envelope from the previous week. Inside, there would be one of those form rejection slips. SOMETIMES, Lee Lorenz would write a little scrawled “Holding 1″ on a pink slip of paper, clipped to the drawings, which meant, literally, they were holding a cartoon another week for consideration. My heart was always pounding when I entered the building each Wednesday morning. A slip like that made it race.

This one time in 1979–I think it was in the fall–I went to receive my envelope, and the receptionist couldn’t find it. She made a call
back to the office, and reported that Lee wanted to see me. My heart lept into my throat. I went in, and immediately made a right turn into the Ladies’ room to compose myself, brush my hair, calm my nerves (an impossible task). I finally went back to the office. Lee greeted me and asked where I had been. I mumbled something about the bathroom. He said they wanted to buy one and showed it to me. I think I asked him some questions about when and what style I should use, who knows. It was a strange captionless drawing that involved Cezanne’s three elements–the cone the sphere and the cube. He said “Isn’t it the cone, the ball and the cube?” I said I didn’t think so, but I would check. Turns out I was right, and had to tell him he was wrong later, over the phone. I didn’t sell for another year or so. And this particular drawing didn’t run for a few years. My second sale, a sequential, ran first–in 1982. I felt I had arrived as a cartoonist, but it was an excruciating two years of waiting for my work to appear.

Gahan Wilson:

I date back to the days of the original building where cartoonists who had
not sold any cartoons to the magazine never got further into the premises than a bleak reception room which was painted a dismal green and contained only a wooden bench and a couple of unpadded chairs. There was also a never-opened door painted with the same paint and a small, barred window looking in on a tiny roomcontaining the receptionist. You would enter the room, cross over to the window in order to pass your cartoon roughs through to the receptionist and you would leave and a few days later you would get your cartoons back with a rejection slip.

After a long time of going through all of this over and over I got the usual
reception slip but it had a little note at the bottom asking me to call and
make an appointment which I did and when I arrived I saw the door open for the very first time and none other than Frank Modell ushered me down a narrow, dark corridor to his small office and he very gently gave me instructions on how to do the finish on a pirate cartoon I had drawn. The joke is I cannot remember what the pirate gag was which may indicate it wasn’t really all that strong a cartoon. Anyhow that was how it all went.

Peter Steiner:

I started sending cartoons to the New Yorker in 1978 or thereabouts. The New Yorker bought the very first cartoon I submitted and then every single cartoon I ever sent in after that. In fact, I couldn’t come up with enough ideas, so they eventually paid Charles Addams to come up with ideas for me. It was Charles Addams who actually came up with the internet dogs idea. “I hope this works, sir,” I remember him saying. I could never get him to stop calling me sir.

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If you’re a cartoonist and have a story about your first sale at the New Yorker, send it along with a self-caricature to mick@mickstevens.com and I’ll include it here.

Wheels Within Wheels

Many years ago there was a decidedly low-tech device, invented, I think, by a cartoonist and entrepreneur named Lo Linkert. It was in the form of a series of laminated cardboard disks of decreasing size pinned together on top of one another with a rivet through their centers. On each disk were colorful, piece-of-pie-shaped segments printed with the names of objects, people, animals, and possible cartoon situations. The disks were designed to be spun around one another so that the words and phrases would end up aligned in chance juxtapositions. The result after a spin might have been, say, two nuns and a banana on a desert island. Then, of course, you merely added a caption. (The last step not unlike the NYer caption contest. Those of you so inclined might even give this one a try).

To a degree, of course, the wheel imitates the mental process some of us go through every time we sit down to work out ideas. We all probably have a version of the joke-wheel up there in our cartoonist’s brains. One wonders what James Thurber or Saul Steinberg’s wheels were like. They were probably very sophisticated machines compared to those of some us who have come after them. Many of our wheels have segments which bear descriptions of those handy standard clichés like the office, the playground sandbox, or the ubiquitous desert island. As our disks continue to spin around one another, it’s amazing how inexhaustible the supply of new ideas based on those old situations seems to be.

Every once in a while someone redesigns the wheel. For instance, take the cartoons of Jack Ziegler and Roz Chast, the subjects of which have created new segments for all our mental joke-wheels. There were no toasters or strip malls on the original joke wheel as I recall, not to mention ice-cream cones or small grand pianos falling from the sky. No segments with labels like “Anxiety about Appliances” or “Existentialistical Funnies”.

So what is the future of the joke-wheel? Will the newer cartoonists begin to add or subtract segments or will they just ignore the wheel and, like Erik Hilgert, draw amorphous figures who speak or dream in stream-of-consciousness prose? Will there come a day when cartoon businessmen stop wearing suits and ties, kids leap from their sandboxes, and desert islands sink permanently from view?

We’ll need to consult the Big Cosmic Joke-Wheel to find that out.