If It’s Tuesday, “The Batch” Is In
First, let’s define “batch.” A batch, in The New Yorker cartoonist world, is the group of drawings cartoonists send in for consideration by the magazine’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen.* A batch of drawings can be any number of drawings; the drawings can be finished or in rough form. If Ms. Allen finds something (or somethings) she likes in your batch, she’ll include it in the group of drawings shown to David Remnick, who has final say — a yay or nay. A yay results in the drawing being “OKed.”
Tuesday noon is the deadline for contributors to get their work in. Since the pandemic, and office visits ceased, meeting the deadline is through email (hopefully, in-person visits will continue someday).
I’ve always liked the idea of a Tuesday deadline. There’s the Monday breathing room to gather yourself, your work, following the weekend. And…perhaps the best part: you only have to wait three days to know the fate of your submitted work.
By Friday, the contributing cartoonist’s “in box” will either light up with an “OK” email from Ms. Allen, or it won’t. There is no in-between, there is no other course of action. You’ve sold something, or you haven’t. I’ve heard it asked many many times, if there’s ever a reason given for one’s work being rejected. Consider for a moment that there are likely thousands of submissions every week. Multiply the number of rejected ideas by the time (and energy) it would take for the editor to discuss why a certain cartoon didn’t make it through. Sometimes a rejected cartoon can be “fixed” but the fixin’ has to be figured out by the cartoonist. There are plenty of instances of rejected drawings being resubmitted and OKed — what doesn’t work one week, just may work another week. It’s a strange world, this world of cartoons.
By Friday, no matter what the news (an email, or silence) from The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Department, this cartoonist has already moved on to the following week’s deadline, adding new work to the pile of work not yet submitted. It’s always been this way, using Tuesday’s deadline as a springboard to the next week’s batch. Hope must spring eternal.
One more thing about the act of submitting one’s batch. I find it fascinating how many cartoonists have some “magic number” for their batch. Some cartoonists feel they need 6 or 8 or 15 or whatever. Others don’t care (I don’t care — it’s whatever number feels right as I scan drawings for the deadline).
In recent years, a myth developed that cartoonists had to submit 10 cartoons a week. While a few newbies were encouraged to do so by the cartoon editor previous to Ms. Allen, for the majority of cartoonists in the magazine’s history there has never been a quota to fill. Having a quota would run counter to the freedom we cartoonists enjoy. That freedom encompasses drawing what we want to draw, when, and how we want to draw it. And it certainly includes how many cartoons we submit in any given week.
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*I realize there is an alternate submission for unsolicited work. That’s a whole other thing.
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Late notice…and I apologize.
The Spill had “issues” today, making it difficult (impossible, really) to post til much much later in the day. Here’s a link to a virtual event with cartoonist Tom Toro (this came in late today) who’ll be talking tomorrow about New Yorker cartoons, and “timeless political tropes.”