The Faux Commandment: “Thou Shall Submit 10 Cartoons A Week”
The New Yorker’s cartoon department has never had its own Ten Commandments, let alone One Commandment — that’s one of the cornerstones, if not the cornerstone of its success. For the entirety of the magazine’s history, right up through today, the number of drawings the magazine’s contributing cartoonists submit each week has been their choice. We are not bound by a quota. Nor are we instructed as to what to draw, or how to draw, or when to draw. We do not have to send in ten drawings a week — we don’t have to send in any drawings a week. We’re on our own. That’s the beauty of what we do.
A faux commandment of having to submit ten cartoons a week has been popping-up in interviews for some time, so much so that it seemed to have become (sorry) a gospel truth. Listening to the latest Cartoon Caption Contest Podcast, I was reminded of it once again.
We perhaps can trace the genesis (sorry!) of the faux commandment to a Bob Mankoffism (Mankoff was the cartoon editor previous to the current cartoon editor, Emma Allen). We hear on the podcast that Mr. Mankoff suggested, in 1999, to Matt Diffee, a then-not-yet-published-in-The New Yorker cartoonist (who had brought in three roughs for consideration) that “Everyone else is doing ten a week.”
I have to think that there was a misreading, or misunderstanding, or miscommunication, or mis-something-or-other back in 1999 of the “everyone else is doing ten a week.” It was not uncommon back then, and even further back (and it’s not uncommon now) that most — but not all — aspiring cartoonists would submit a good number of drawings before selling their first drawing. Ten a week was undoubtedly suggested to Mr. Diffee — and possibly other aspiring cartoonists — but it was not a quota for all cartoonists; it was not a quota for those already contributing. “Everyone else” was not doing ten a week. Somehow — perhaps transmitted through a cartoonist grapevine, or megaphone — a suggestion to one, or a few, became a faux commandment: “Thou shall submit 10 cartoons a week.”
Now this may seem a weedsy thing to focus on: whether we are left on our own to decide how many drawings to submit, or are instructed as to how many to submit. And yes, it is weedsy, but it’s an important weed.