Fridays for New Yorker cartoonists is usually the day we hear that we sold a cartoon or didn’t (out of a batch submitted the previous Tuesday). If you’ve submitted a batch, chances are you’ve spent some time on Fridays glancing at your inbox, hoping for an email from the magazine’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen. By day’s end, no news is bad news. No news means you did not sell (The New Yorker doesn’t email you when you did not sell. Silence is the notification).
This being an off-week between holidays, with no Art Meeting, there’ll be no notification, and there’ll be no silence from The New Yorker. On these off-weeks, I miss the pleasing anxiety of the usual Friday wait-and-see.
The extra time I have today (due to not glancing at my inbox more than usual) has left me sentimental about the whole Friday experience (in truth, once upon a time, pre-personal computers, Fridays were Thursdays).
The weekly Art Meeting structure that The New Yorker put in place god only knows how long ago (most likely 98 years ago with its first week of publication) is addictive. Part of the “fun” of working is the weekly toss of the dice — the near immediate thumbs up or down; you do your work, send it in, and in just a few days you are either mentally popping champagne, or possibly (literally) slumped over your drawing table in tears. All that work paid off or it didn’t. And here’s where I spotlight the glass half full. I’ve always felt that “all that work” leading up to Friday makes the cartoonist a better cartoonist, no matter if you sold or didn’t sell (it took me seven years of rejection before selling my first cartoon to the magazine). If you’re in this for the long haul you can only improve by working as if each week’s batch is the best you can do, and hanging on to that belief while you’re assembling next week’s batch. I know many of my colleagues look over their rejected batch, wondering why certain drawings didn’t sell, perhaps trying to improve the drawing for another go at the editors in a few months time. I don’t look back. On Fridays, my rejected drawings are tossed in a pile of other rejects; every week is a fresh start.
For me, now entering my 47th year of contributing to the magazine, the rhythm of the work week is as natural as (forgive this weak poetic moment) the sun coming up. Fridays are almost always the day of anticipation. On this dreary overcast late December off-week Friday morning, it’s a little funny to me that anticipation has been replaced by thoughts of this Charles Addams classic cartoon.
And now, with yet another classic drawing in mind, it’s back to my old drawing board (US Sketching Board Model 1913 No. 378).
